On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time.

Homeschool history tells of more than two centuries of home-teaching influence on American education, although it has been largely obscured by the drawn curtains of conventional bias.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.

Teach the child, not just the curriculum.

The book of Jonah becomes an embarrassing and public reading of your family business. (page iii).

I'm not saying homeschooling will be easy. I am saying it will be worth it.

For those of you who think that I have my life altogether, I definitely do not. Every season brings new challenges. For example, since I had my fifth child, I am notoriously 5-10 minutes late everywhere no matter how hard I try to be on time. I would like to say that I am 'fashionably' late, but that isn't the truth either. Running in a mad dash in a parking lot (all holding hands of course) to make it somewhere 5 minutes late (instead of 6 minutes cause that makes a big difference) while one child is missing shoes and my hair is going in every direction. Yep, that is my family.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.

Dear Homeschool Mom, You've got this! God called you to it, and He will see you through it. Inhale Grace. Exhale Doubt.