Homeschooled Girl Makes Good On Her First In-School Quiz

That was actually the headline here in the Durham household a few weeks back. You see, for the first time in five years our kids, Maya and Sage, are attending the local primary school. Previously, we’d been homeschooling them. We enjoyed it very much, were challenged by it, always said we’d only do it so long as it worked for us all. This fall Gudrun and I decided that we couldn’t put as much time into it as we should, so we proposed that the kids go back to school.

They agreed, and a couple months in things are going wonderfully. The adjustment has been fairly seamless, as we figured it would be. Just so you know, homeschooling doesn’t need to mean that the kids are locked in a cabin in the woods getting only their parents’ warped interpretation of the world. In fact, we’d always been very social with the way we homeschooled, with lots of outside classes, music and martial arts, nature studies and writing and gymnastics and lots of friends in a large network of other homeschooling families. The kids had always been socialized, so going to school wasn’t a shock. It’s just different.

Including the fact that it includes quizzes! Maya, our sixth grader, had her first quiz a couple weeks ago. It was a combination quiz. One part was about identifying key cities/places on a blank map of Ancient Greece. The second part, should they accept the challenge, was to also make it a spelling test, wherein they located the sites presented to them verbally, so that they had to get the spelling correct as well.

The result? Perfection. Maya got 20 out of 20, all identified and spelled correctly.

That’s not a C on the paper. It’s a check mark! How did she study for it? Oh, with a little bit of home school cut and pasting and improvisation I’m glad to say...

She's also making a name for herself as a manga artist. Apparently, she does personalized drawings for 25 cents a pop. Stuff like this:

I'm thinking she needs to up her asking price.