Homeschooling in High School: Subjects You’re Not Qualified to Teach
While I firmly believe that with the assistance of a solid curriculum, any parent can teach all of the basics of elementary and middle school, there will likely come a time when your student needs to start encountering subjects that require more expertise than you have. Whether they want to study a language you don’t know or need to take lab sciences with equipment you don’t have or have moved far enough in literature or math that you feel you need someone more conversant in the material to be teaching them, it’s useful to start outsourcing instruction to master teachers.
Why not just put them in public or private school at this point? You certainly can, but you will be giving up control of your child’s schedule and losing the time together when all of your hard work in building relationships and raising an interesting, helpful human is starting to pay off! When we moved the summer before one of our children started high school, we thought it might be the perfect time to put her into a local classical school that came highly recommended. She and I both quickly became frustrated with the busy work, rigid class schedule, and negative social environment (bullying, foul language, and cliquey behavior). When I went into public school for high school, it was big enough that I was able to set up a schedule of courses that matched me level of achievement at home, but my daughter’s school was small enough that there was no wiggle room. Already studied US history? Too bad, you get to repeat it. Used a different Latin curriculum for the past five years? Too bad, you have to jump into the third year of a totally different curriculum, spend most of the year playing catch-up on vocabulary and grammar concepts taught in a different order. Unsurprisingly, her love of learning and interest in those subjects took a nose dive. If you do plan to put your kid back into school after homeschooling, you’ll need to ask a lot of questions about how their offerings match what you’ve already done at home. In our experience, a small private school is much harder to break into than a large public school.
If you want to keep enjoying time with your student at home, it is easier now than ever before! This is the time when our family finds homeschool co-ops to be the most beneficial. Our son learned Greek and Church History from a local homeschool dad who invited friends to join his own sons in classes he was already teaching. Another homeschool dad with a PhD in medieval history offers amazing high school history classes at a once-a-week co-op hosted by a local church, and our son and his friends were reading and discussing texts that I didn’t even study until I was in upper level college history classes. At the same co-op, my daughter’s high school French class was so excellent that she earned high distinction on the National French exam. Twenty-five years ago, in a different state, I had a similarly brilliant French class from a homeschool mom with a PhD in French. We’ve seen lab science classes taught by retired science professors and literature and theater classes taught by enthusiastic master teachers at these co-ops. The beauty of the model is that I as the homeschool mom still get to pick and choose which courses which child is going to take which years, and while they may have one in-person class day a week, they have the flexibility to complete their homework in our homeschool room the rest of the week.
We also have taken advantage of master teachers in online courses throughout high school. These aren’t the lame online public school zoom classes that everyone endured during covid lockdowns, but rather highly organized live online courses that utilize Zoom or Blackboard along with well-planned homework and exam opportunities. My son fell in love with math with his Well-Trained Mind Academy online teachers; my children have made life-long friends from Well-Trained Mind Academy expository writing classes. We can’t speak highly enough of Escondido Tutorials' Great Books, Euclid, Greek, and Shakespeare classes, or of Lukeion Latin’s rigorous high school Latin courses. Even in subjects like Shakespeare that I would be qualified to teach, my kids have built a community of classmates around the world. My daughters love their The Habit online writing community so much that we’ve driven across the country for in-person reunions. Not all online courses are created equal, and we try to moderate how much time our teenagers spend on screens, but for every subject a parent doesn’t think she can do justice to teaching, there are many excellent online options that cost significantly less than private school tuition.
If cost is a factor, every state we’ve lived in provides some sort of free dual enrollment coursework if high school students take classes at local community colleges. We know many homeschool students who have earned their Associates’ degree this way by the time they graduate from high school. A local private college offers significantly discounted tuition to high school juniors and seniors enrolling in approved classes, so we’ve been able to knock out lab sciences and college math requirements in high school for just $100 a credit hour. Our junior high and high school daughters also play in their symphony orchestra for free. Unlike the local student orchestra, where many students have a bad attitude and are forced to participate by overzealous parents, our girls love playing with the university orchestra because the college students and community participants actually want to be there. Because they’re not full-time students, we’re able to pick and choose which college courses our 16-18 year olds are ready to handle, and I’ve made sure to get professor recommendations so that my kids are studying with master teachers, not just a mediocre adjunct.
We also have found remarkable private tutors by reaching out to local colleges and universities. Most of our children’s piano and strings instructors have been music professors who also allow younger students into their studios, and the quality of instruction is excellent. When my son moved away from the homeschool dad teaching his own sons Greek, we found a retired religion professor in our new town who finished taking him through a seminary-level Greek textbook and then spent his senior year meeting with him once a week to do New Testament exegesis.
By my oldest child’s senior year, the only class I officially oversaw with him was a philosophy of science reading-based course that we did with his sister. He and I hand-selected all of his high school courses, but he was taught the rest of them by other master teachers, for a fraction of the cost of private school education. Between attending classes and tutoring sessions and doing homework, he was able to work part-time, assist with some of his disabled little sister’s therapy, and spend plenty of time playing flag football and board games with his local group of homeschool friends.
If there aren’t already local high school co-op or tutoring or dual credit options or extracurricular, don’t be afraid to seek something out yourself. After pulling our daughter from private school after her disaster of a freshman year, she was sad about missing the opportunity to continue on with her school mock trial team. I looked into state mock trial policy and discovered that homeschooled students can join a school mock trial team. Her coach and the principal happily agreed to have her continue to compete with her team, and with her as their key witness, they won the regional competition her sophomore year! When my girls bemoaned the fact that our family wasn’t big enough to put on a play ourselves, we invited other families to join us for a weekly drama club in which my daughter adapted and directed a fabulous production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” in which all four of our older children performed. This brought back happy memories of my own teenage role in a wild west melodrama directed by a homeschool mom whose high schoolers loved theater and wanted to give homeschoolers in our town the opportunity to act in quality productions with their friends.
In my own experience, homeschooling high school has been the most richly rewarding time with my kids, even if I am not the one teaching them every subject!
