“My sister said when we started this, ‘You’re going to turn your kids into freaks! They won’t know how to behave!’” Dean said.
“But while socialization is a big problem in homeschooling, it’s the opposite of what you might think: There’s too much of it,” she said, as Teddy took a break from a history lesson to play in the classroom-basement of the family home with two friends.
“The kids are always together; the problem is finding time to do the book work,” Dean said.
Bitsy and Teddy share their homeschooling credentials with the likes of the second-place finisher in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, 12-year-old Tim Ruiter, and US Olympic and World Cup skier Bode Miller, who was homeschooled during part of his elementary education years.
According to Teri Ann Berg Olsen, creator of the Knowledge House Web site, poet Robert Frost was homeschooled, and flight pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright were often “allowed to stay home from school to work on their own projects.”
After rolling around on two large exercise balls with his friends, Teddy sat down at the desk he shares with Bitsy in the basement and began sounding out spelling words.
Bitsy tucked into some online geometry, using headphones to block out the sounds of Teddy’s lesson.
It had just gone noon, and the school day — which had begun four hours earlier over a bowl of oatmeal and an Edgar Allen Poe story — was moving on.
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