As the days until the new school year dwindle, I begin panicking. My counselor tells me I have little chance of getting any meaningful extension of my homebound instruction. I have failed at all attempts to find a homeschooling solution that I can afford and that would work for me, and I begin to accept that I will have to suffer two more years in awful anxiety. I talk to my friends about it, and one of them mentions that their girlfriend is being homeschooled this year. When I ask about the specifics, he mentions Penn Foster. I had never heard of this school before, so I go to read more about it… Ever since the 8th grade, I’ve had nigh-incapacitating anxiety. I’d spend nights staring at the ceiling wishing it would stay night forever, anything
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I didn’t have to worry so intensely any longer, I didn’t have that dread consuming every inch of my life any longer. My grades restabilized and I started to enjoy learning again, like I did before the 8th grade. It felt like I’d just been freed from prison, free to experience the world as it is meant to be experienced instead of through a tight, iron lens, carefully crafted by principals and teachers and administrators and the ever-present social hivemind of my peers. But of course, homebound instruction was temporary. It was by no means a permanent solution, nor was it designed to be. And so, the end-date loomed, and having tasted the feeling of true freedom, of being able to learn free from the burden of soul-crushing anxiety and the unjust bureaucracy of the school system, I felt all the worse. I did what was natural: I went back to the doctor who put me on …show more content…
He was more understanding, though, as if he knew what I was talking about and gave it the consideration I thought it deserved. He told me that my psychiatrist really dislikes homebound instruction, and that even if I managed to get an extension, it’d only be for 2 months. This shattered my self-delusion that things would work themselves out, and of course, the dread came back, as I counted the days until school started again. When I went back to see my psychiatrist, he prescribed me some medicine and told me to come back in a month, which would be late summer. I saw my counselor, told him about the medicine and how it worked (or rather, how it didn’t really work), and we started looking at my options. It boiled down to testing my psychiatrist’s patience with homebound extensions, looking into homeschooling, or going back. I immediately clung to the second option, and researched many different options for homeschooling, and the laws surrounding it. I will admit that I also, at desperate points, scoured the legal system for loopholes in compulsory attendance law, to no avail. All online homeschooling options were either way out of budget, unavailable in my state, or disreputable. The only offline homeschooling option was manual, old-fashioned homeschooling, wherein my parents would have to take on the roles of instructors and buy textbooks, create curriculums, and teach me, and as I mentioned
I didn’t have to worry so intensely any longer, I didn’t have that dread consuming every inch of my life any longer. My grades restabilized and I started to enjoy learning again, like I did before the 8th grade. It felt like I’d just been freed from prison, free to experience the world as it is meant to be experienced instead of through a tight, iron lens, carefully crafted by principals and teachers and administrators and the ever-present social hivemind of my peers. But of course, homebound instruction was temporary. It was by no means a permanent solution, nor was it designed to be. And so, the end-date loomed, and having tasted the feeling of true freedom, of being able to learn free from the burden of soul-crushing anxiety and the unjust bureaucracy of the school system, I felt all the worse. I did what was natural: I went back to the doctor who put me on …show more content…
He was more understanding, though, as if he knew what I was talking about and gave it the consideration I thought it deserved. He told me that my psychiatrist really dislikes homebound instruction, and that even if I managed to get an extension, it’d only be for 2 months. This shattered my self-delusion that things would work themselves out, and of course, the dread came back, as I counted the days until school started again. When I went back to see my psychiatrist, he prescribed me some medicine and told me to come back in a month, which would be late summer. I saw my counselor, told him about the medicine and how it worked (or rather, how it didn’t really work), and we started looking at my options. It boiled down to testing my psychiatrist’s patience with homebound extensions, looking into homeschooling, or going back. I immediately clung to the second option, and researched many different options for homeschooling, and the laws surrounding it. I will admit that I also, at desperate points, scoured the legal system for loopholes in compulsory attendance law, to no avail. All online homeschooling options were either way out of budget, unavailable in my state, or disreputable. The only offline homeschooling option was manual, old-fashioned homeschooling, wherein my parents would have to take on the roles of instructors and buy textbooks, create curriculums, and teach me, and as I mentioned