When Norman and David Kalen first learned to count to 100, their mom took them to the tower on route 1 and wouldn’t let them see the view at the top until they counted all the steps. When they learned to count in pairs, all the shoes in their house were placed in a winding trail throughout the home. The Kalen brothers had to count them all.As young children, this was how the Kalens learned, and being homeschooled, the Kalens say, has allowed them to learn in different and more experiential ways than their public school peers.
Patricia Kalen, their mother, said she enjoys the freedom to make her children’s educations the way she believes schools should.
Throughout the nation, according to the National Homeschooling Education Research Institute, there are over 2 million children who are homeschooled, which the institute says represents an estimated $16 billion in savings for taxpayers.
For the Kalens and others, homeschooling has taught many lessons outside of the normal curriculum.
“I’m probably a lot more independent than most people in public schools,” Norman says, “because I have a lot more responsibilities to give myself a good education.”
Norman also plays for the SKHS boys’ varsity soccer team which he said, “helped [him] to establish great friendships with people [he] probably wouldn’t have met.”
His brother, David Kalen, who was homeschooled as well, is now majoring in mathematics at URI as a 17 year old junior.
Without being homeschooled, David says he wouldn’t be where he is today.
“Obviously without homeschooling, I wouldn’t be able to have been in college right now.”
His mother always told him, “If you can prove to me you know what I’m teaching, you can skip it.”
David took advantage of his mother’s advice and graduated from high school at age 15.
SKHS freshman twins Britney and Stephanie Laraway were also homeschooled, alongside their brother, Nick, who graduated last June.
Her sister, Stephanie, agrees whole heartedly.
Stephanie says that the hardest thing for her when she was homeschooled was that if she didn’t finish her work for the day, she had more work to do the next day.
Because the work is more regulated and she gets to see her friends every day, Stephanie says, “I like public school better.”
Homeschooling is not only time consuming, but families who choose to homeschool must often face a lot of criticism.
“My parents were criticized for not letting us choose if we wanted to go to school or not,” Norman said.
According to www.homeschool-curriculum.org, many homeschooling families must face criticisms from their extended families, their friends and complete strangers.
“If you are unable to live ‘outside of the box,’” FamilyEducation.com warns, “then homeschooling is not for you.”
There are other challenges that homeschooling families face as well. “We have been secluded from certain things because we are homeschoolers,” Norman added. “For example there were particular academic competitions we wanted to participate in but it required more wok for homeschoolers to register for them.”
Grant Gulla is another local homeschooled student who went to Broad Rock Middle School and began homeschooling as a sophomore, despite the risk of criticisms.
Unlike the Kalens, Gulla’s parents pulled him out of public school because he wasn’t performing as well as his parents had hoped. Although Gulla had done well in middle school, he began to fall short in high school.
The switch to homeschooling, Gulla says, wasn’t easy.
“At first, it was really hard to manage my time because I had all this freedom,” Gulla said. “Then I realized I needed to actually get my work done.”
For Gulla, the best thing about homeschooling was the lessons in time management. Presently, Gulla is taking classes at CCRI to finish up his senior year and says homeschooling “helped him not to have a bad attitude toward learning.”
Though the transition from public school to homeschool was difficult for Gulla, the transition from being a homeschooled student to a college student wasn’t difficult, says David.
“I started taking classes at URI before graduation and enrolled as a sophomore,” he said. “That made it much easier to transition.”
David says it was easy to transition to a college classroom environment because he and Norman sometimes took classes with other homeschoolers taught by experts on the subject.
For the Kalens, there was no official decision to start homeschooling. They both started reading before the age of four and were learning from their parents as soon as they were born.
When they were five, and at the age to start kindergarten, their parents filled out the paperwork needed to keep their children out of school, and became their children’s official teachers.
Looking back, their mother Patricia said, “We weren’t going to lose what we already had, our children were reading at the level of a sixth grader.”
There are many different ways of learning, but as Patricia Kalen said, “Education doesn’t stop.”
Christmas time is here and every one who celebrates the holiday are out early snatching up the trees for their home. Although, for the late comers their are special deals they can benefit from.
“I was waiting for my bus alone and had a cigarette when Mr. Cronin came out of nowhere and told me to put it out and that I had ISR on Monday morning for smoking on school grounds,” said SKHS senior Westley Sprague.
Halloween is fast approaching and the SKHS students are all preparing clever costumes for Monday, when students can dress up as their favorite fictional character or wear black and orange.
In the next few weeks juniors will take time out in their classes to