My Kids Are Smarter Than Me

This is the first year my wife and I tried home schooling. Our number one goal as our children entered the education system was to give them a quality Catholic education. When the cost of Catholic schools grew to more than we could afford, we decided to give home schooling a try.

At first I was concerned. We didn't know how you created a curriculum and I was very concerned about the social education children require that may be more of a challenge when home schooled.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a large number of high quality Catholic home schooling associations out there with approved and accredited curriculum available. Secondly, there are a large number of classes that can be taken through the city for home schoolers, including physical education, which gave the kids a chance to get out of the house and interact with a lot of other children on a weekly, regular basis.

Third, we are very blessed to have a number of great families in our parish that are also home schooling, so there were plenty of social opportunities for our children to interact with 20 - 30 kids on a consistent basis. Plus, those families are a great support group as, they too, are facing the same challenges that we have.

Fourth, instead of spending four hours a night doing homework when they went to private school, they instead complete the entire school day in five hours when home schooled. All training in a class setting is set at the slowest child's pace. When home schooling, you can teach at your child's pace and they grow as their abilities allow. This extra time also allowed us to add more classes, such as Spanish, Piano and Science Through Cooking with tutors and they took a lot of educational field trips as well.

All this aside, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. At the end of the school year our kids had to take a CAT 5 (California Aptitude Test) within very strict time limits in order to evaluate where they are in comparison to the rest of the nation. The CAT5 covers Reading, Spelling, Language, Mathematics, Study Skills, Science and Social Studies. Those two days when the tests were taken were pretty intense at the homestead. Our children joined other home school kids in taking the tests while the parents walked around the room, like our teachers did when we were growing up.

Well, we got our test results yesterday and were very surprised at the results. My son, entering fourth grade, is at sixth grade level in almost every subject. In language expression section he was equivalent to an eleventh grader.

My daughter, entering eight grade and who last year tested on par with her grade level, tested at 12th grade level or above for every subject. Part of this is the one on one interaction during class, but a bigger part for her was that we worked with her on calming herself when taking a test. She would get so worked up that she rarely finished the tests in private school. It took all year to train her on how to manage her emotions and focus on the questions. It finally paid off when taking the time limit CAT5 tests.

My wife and kids were very excited to see the results and know that all of their hard work this year has paid off.

I'm very proud of them.