This article was written by Avery Rusel and published by Olivia Renze because of technical difficulties. Full credit to Avery.
As many people who know me know, I was homeschooled before I came to Bethany in 6th grade. And although in normal times there are some big differences in the two, I was thinking about the both of them and realized that since we’ve gone to a hybrid mode at Bethany, homeschooling and Bethany don’t feel very different anymore.
When I was homeschooled, I normally just did school at home. But two days a week we would get together with a homeschool co-op, a place where a bunch of other homeschool families would meet and learn together. And although it focused on teaching us different things, we’re doing a lot of similar things now at Bethany.
Let’s look at what happened on a normal day when I was homeschooled. We used a curriculum that told us what to do for that day. I would normally be able to get my work done by 1pm if not sooner, and then I would have the rest of the day to have fun and play with my brother, Gavin. But on those two days that we had homeschool co-op, we would start at around 8am and go until about 3:30pm.
Now if we take a look at what Bethany is currently doing, we can see some things that are different. For example, at Bethany we are heavily reliant on technology to help keep us connected and to help us students know what we need to do. When it came to our homeschooling, we never really did anything with technology. We used a physical copy of our curriculum, and since we were at home, there was no one we had to communicate with using technology because everyone we were working with was already with us.
Another difference that Teresa Richer, a former homeschooler who is now a senior at Bethany, said was “There is a lot more freedom with homeschooling to get your work done at your own pace and when you have time; while the hybrid schedule is already planned out for you and there are deadlines set for each assignment.”
Tinsly Yoder, a current senior at Bethany, said “ A big difference is that you are getting graded on stuff and the way we were homeschooled we never got grades. Also, you can’t choose what you want to work on with hybrid; [with homeschooling] we could always go more in depth on what interested us.”
There are some things that we can look at that would be more similar, too. While we don’t call our teachers our curriculum, they are a lot like a curriculum. They tell us what we need to do each day, and help us learn what we need to in order to be successful in a certain topic. We can also look at the times that we are meeting, the way that Bethany is doing the hybrid schedule means that we are starting at the same time that the homeschool co-op was starting.
“Hybrid has felt a lot like homeschooling because you can take breaks. Once in the middle of the day I went for a bike ride, so that was kinda cool to just leave school and go do something completely different.” Alina Bergstresser, a current freshman at Bethany who was also homeschooled before coming to Bethany, noticed.
Taking into consideration everything that I have just talked about, I think that in a lot of ways, being homeschooled has really helped me to be able to manage my time and get my work done without as much structure due to COVID-19.