socializednoreally

Partly.

I was more and more bored and frustrated in public school, my parents wanted me in harder classes, and I had a lot of social difficulties.

To put it bluntly: I sucked at being around other kids. I was great at being around adults.

My parents decided, I think, that rather than send me off to public middle school, already socially difficult, when I was already having problems, they'd homeschool me. I spent a LOT of time with other kids, in classes and play groups and so on. I actually spent WAY more social time with other kids when I was homeschooled, because in public school I hid behind a book. I wasn't allowed to do that while homeschooled.

I think that their decision COULD have ended up with me being even less socially adept, but it ended up working out really well. Rather than being with the kids who had already decided that I was weird, I got a chance to start fresh in a totally new environment and develop new patterns.

It helped me enormously.

A deleted comment said that I only appreciate homeschooling because my parents aren't idiots and therefore were able to homeschool me effectively.

I respect their decision to delete their comment, but I also think that that is a specific point that I wanted to refute, so I copied and pasted my response to them.

I do understand your perspective. I really do. Some people are idiots.

Unfortunately, I have met enough public school teachers who were idiots, and enough parents who sent their kids to public school but still managed to brainwash them into their own brand of stupidity, that I cannot think that homeschooling has any sort of monopoly on spreading ignorance.

Absolutely! Let me start with a VERY specific example:

My parents were concerned about me being able to write well. They edited my work regularly and spoke with me about my word choice and so on.

They didn't give a flying flip if I knew the parts of speech. Just did not care at all.

So, I went to public high school (not in 9th grade, 10th), and I could, not to toot my own horn, USE language more accurately than most of my classmates, but I could not identify more than an adjective, noun, and so on. Direct object? Indirect object? I was completely lost.

I spent two weeks miserably doing worksheets and studying, trying to catch up to my classmates in time to pass our initial grammar review test.

I did, and it worked out okay, but I have a very clear memory of sitting in the Cook Out parking lot with my father quizzing me on those damn indirect objects, eating a milkshake and trying not to cry in frustration, completely resenting that NO ONE HAD TAUGHT ME THIS BEFORE. (I think my father needed the Cook Out even more than I did, playing grammar review with a surly teenage girl.)

Give me a few minutes and I'll work on answering your other questions, but rather than turn this into a novel, I figured I'd start there.

Awesome question, thanks.

I was totally unprepared for people to give a rat's ass about what I was wearing.

I hated jeans and wore a lot of long skirts, and was shy, so people kept coming up to me and asking if I were Mormon or Muslim or Amish.

Haha, yes! Frequently! Or they assumed that I never saw other kids, or so on.

My mother apparently started, at cocktail parties, saying "Well, of course, we keep her in a box in the basement."

How about you?