When your home schooled one of many things you never learn is what is or isn’t socially acceptable. Apparently being in a home school band is not something you should be proud of doing in middle school AND high school. I was very proud of my long term commitment and my bands success.
No one makes fun of you when your home schooled. Come on….. who is going to make fun of you, your mom, well that’s just sad on a whole different level if that happens.
So this home school band was pretty serious. We were very confident kids, all very proud of our flutes, trombones, French horns, and baritones. For some reason being in the band was ‘cool’ in our home school circles. (The definition of cool is completely different when you’re taught at home.) Now that I look back I see that if our parents told us it was great, I guess we just believed them. We didn’t exactly have much to compare it to.
As a home schooled kid you are free to define what is socially acceptable because you’re only competing with your siblings and chances are they are just as socially challenged as you are.
So the band….. my brother, Darin, and I were in the band. The band was full of kids who stayed at home with thier moms all day and everyone was equally awesome. I must say that is one good thing about not going to school…… you do get an incredible sense of self-confidence.
My self-confidence was built partly from being in the band. I later met people who lost all self confidence because they were in band. Too bad.
We wore matching blue golf shirts that said ‘Tri-state home school and community band’ and we were proud of that. Band concerts were a huge deal. I wonder if it was just because we got to hang out with other human beings that didn’t have our same last name. Whatever the reason, concerts brought those home school vans and buses together. There is some kind of agreement that if your home schooled you have to have a minimum of four children. That’s right, most of us learned how to drive in a mini van or if a twelve man van was all your family had, well that’s what you learned on.
During the concerts all the fans would rock out in the front row. My older sister knew most of the songs because she was a huge fan and had to listen to the band songs being practiced daily by a flute and a trombone.
Parents must have invented ear plugs.
After each concert we had a little social hour. This might have been created to assist in social exposure.
Honestly I didn’t learn what society and Allure magazine thought was a “YES” or a ‘NO” until I was about sixteen or seventeen. I had all those years to decide for myself what was cool. Apparently matching your clothes is important…….I’m kidding I did learn that at some point before I was sixteen, maybe I was fifteen when I mastered that. Well mastering is probably not the word I should use, thats too strong.
One of the reasons I think my parents wanted to home school the four of us is to allow us to become who we really were meant to be without outside sources telling us what we should or shouldn’t become or like or do. I would say that goal was accomplished. Yes, accomplished by sacrificing many other things, but accomplished.
I wonder who I would have become had I been sent to school. I had a rock shining kit so I can’t imagine I’d be the home coming queen. Maybe I would have joined the science club and at that point would have learned I shouldn’t have done that, for social reasons of course.
I wore a bathing suit I homemade so I might not have been the trend setter for the school and I would have probably learned it is best of buy bathing suits and that sort of thing. It’s really not any home school kids’ faults for wearing bonnets. Laura Ingles Wilder did and if you’re studying about her in your living room, why not try and dress like her. Generally in the twenty-first century bonnets are worn only by babies, not ten and eleven year olds. Again, no one tells you if its not okay. Your friends are studying Davy Crocket and probably just homemade their fur hats and you all wear them to the home school band concert. It just makes sense in the home school world.
Being whoever you want to be and having the freedom to figure it out without anyone telling you how they think you should be is probably the very best thing a person can get out of home school life. The list of things a kid “misses” out on is really endless but I do think that missing out on getting made fun of is great. I am now in my twenties and if someone doesn’t like me or thinks I’m annoying or just doesn’t want to be my friend my life is not shattered.
I remember the first time someone told me that someone didn’t like me. I’m sure people in the past someone didn’t like me but somehow I never actually knew someone to not like me until I was twenty-four and one of my very best friends, also a home schooled kid, told me her husband’s cousin didn’t like me. It shook my world a little bit because I didn’t know why you just choose to not like someone.
If there was one thing I could change about school, being a teacher now and all and seeing what kids do to each other, I would want to change the respect level. I don’t know when kids learn that it’s ok to make fun of someone just because they aren’t like you. Or they make fun of each other for being like them, a poser.
It is such a sad sad thing.
My apartment is one of my favorite places to be. For most of my life I’ve been trying to be some other place then where I actually am.
