Ballad Of A Homeschooled Boy
How I learned the rhythm of high school life and found there is no “normal.”
Story by Sam Whitney
Illustrations by Grace Matson
Halfway through the first grade, Xander bit me on the View Ridge Elementary School playground. I don’t remember many specifics from that day — I was 6 years old — but I do recall the imprints of his teeth being visible on my arm for a few hours. I knew that wasn’t something to be happy about.
What I remember most is that those teeth marks were the final straw for my mom.
“I felt like our neighborhood school wasn’t safe for you,” my mom said.
The school administration didn’t do anything about Xander biting me because I didn’t ask him to stop. This reasoning, compounded by a series of previous incidents, led my mom to decide that she could better handle my education in-house. “I didn’t know how I was going to homeschool. I just forged ahead, having confidence that I would figure it out,” my mom said.
The basic concepts like math, English and history were easy enough for her to teach me at home, but when it came to science, my mom outsourced to various homeschool co-ops. A co-op is essentially a part-time school with professional teachers and small class sizes that help out families that are homeschooling. The way my mom used them was largely as a way for me to learn STEM material, since she was out of her depth in those areas once I got to the middle school years. One of my favorite co-op experiences was learning astronomy with Mr. Raven in the event room at the Evergreen Lanes bowling alley. Additionally, my mom made sure to not just teach me the subjects, but to show me how they applied in everyday life. My favorite such memory was sometime in my middle school years when my mom took me to the courthouse to sit in on random court cases so I could see the judicial process at work.
As my freshman year of high school approached, my parents and I decided that it would be a good time for me to reintegrate into the public education system. My mom was approaching her limit in terms of what she was able to teach me, and we figured it was a natural point of transition. It just made sense. Or so we thought.
When I arrived at Everett High School on the first day of my freshman year, I didn’t know what a meme was. My mom’s parting call of “you’ve got this” as I left the car offered frighteningly little encouragement. The dull thunk of the door closing behind me sounded so final. I was on my own.
I looked up at the imposing, slate grey brick of the “A” building, re-shouldered my backpack and marched forward. Even before I could get through the four-wide front doors, I was met with a throng of bodies all clamoring to pick up their schedules. There were far more people my age than I’d ever encountered in one place before. I needed to take things one moment at a time.
Seeing as I’d been home during most weekdays for the last seven years, it was also an adjustment period for my mom. “There was growth for me too,” she said. “I wasn’t your teacher anymore, but I was still your mom.” From the beginning, my grades were good. My mom had spent the last seven years diligently teaching me everything she could according to Washington’s Common Core State Standards. She’d even kept teaching me while undergoing chemotherapy while she battled breast cancer. Even so, while I did well academically, my social successes were fewer and farther between. I didn’t get a lot of the jokes my peers made, especially when it came to dark humor. All I could think was, “9/11 really isn’t funny, guys.” Jokes I tried to make were childish by comparison and not well received. If anything they tended to generate the wrong kind of laughter.
It made me feel different, like my friend’s parents understood me better than my actual friends. I wanted to learn how to fit in — to talk or think like them — but it wasn’t something I could force to happen any faster than it was bound to naturally. Even more to my detriment was my complete lack of a social media presence. I texted like a grandpa and still used proper capitalization, punctuation and grammar.
“I wouldn’t say I was concerned,” my mom said. “But I was mindful that you’d be going to school with people who were more savvy than you.” My greatest disadvantage as a freshman was that I was a poor judge of character. I had a hard time discerning who to try to be friends with, and I ended up pinballing between various groups that I could never truly connect with. I tried to understand them, but when it was my turn to talk, they couldn’t level with me.
The one social aspect of high school that was normal to me rolled around in the spring. While I had been homeschooled, I needed a physical education equivalent with some structure to it. I started playing Little League Baseball when I was about 4 years old, and I stuck with the sport all the way through high school. Come springtime, baseball season was my saving grace. Not only did I love playing it, it offered me some degree of socialization with boys my age growing up. The baseball field was a place where I was always free. I could work hard, compete even harder and yell as loudly as I wanted. No other place could I bounce off the mound, throw my arms in the air and fire up my teammates.
Between those chalk lines — which I made sure to never step on — I was an entirely different person, and it was probably the truest version of myself most people have ever gotten to see. Near the end of my freshman season, I got called into the coach’s office in the locker room. They asked me if I wanted to join varsity for the playoffs, which I figured had to be the stupidest question of all time. Two weeks later, I hadn’t touched the field in a varsity game, but the team had won the district championship and punched a ticket to the state tournament.
During the downtime between districts and state, I was eating dinner at home when one of the seniors on the team called me and asked where I was. Apparently, someone’s mom was a hairdresser, and the whole team was bleaching their hair in the locker room parking lot. I had missed the memo. I convinced my mom to drive me there. Somehow, even though I had been on the team for the shortest period of time, I ended up with the most bleach in my hair.
It was yellow, messy and an all-around awful look. In hindsight, I waited far too long to just buzz it all off and start fresh, but wearing it in the hallways showed I was a part of the team. Even though I didn’t get to play in a playoff game, the upperclassmen still drove me to all the practices and team breakfasts before the games.
My childhood best friend Kailie Parliman said that playing baseball provided me with a social standing above rock bottom, but that I still had to work to adjust the rest of the way to public school. “You’d always had a small sample for social interaction, and as it expanded, so did your ideas of being social,” Kailie said.
By my sophomore baseball season, I was catching up socially. I even ran into Xander, who insisted that he didn’t remember biting me. For me, it was the single event with the most impact on the course of my life. For Xander, it was a Tuesday. Regardless, I had some friends, and I was getting better at making new ones. The only issue was that on March 13, 2020, the world shut down. Baseball season got canceled. That day after school I was waiting in the locker room parking lot with my teammates. When our coaches arrived, they broke the news to us. At first, I felt lost. Now that I knew how healthy and freeing it was to have a consistent social outlet, I was angry that it had been taken from me without warning. I didn’t even have baseball as a fallback. I became disconnected from anything beyond my house and my front yard. Soon, though, I realized that I was essentially just back to homeschooling, except I was learning from teachers over Zoom rather than from my mom in person. Once I framed it like that for myself, I was remarkably at peace with the situation.
“You’re a very adaptable person, and I don’t think COVID stopped your progress,” Kailie said. “I think you grew with the time you had to reflect.” By the time I shuffled back through the doors of the “A” building for my senior year, I still had some work to do, socially, but I had hope. While most of my peers had stagnated or even regressed socially and educationally, I had been in my element. Because I had already made the switch from homeschooling to public school once, I was able to reconnect with the friends I had made and make new ones.
A big part of those connections was that I was a much better judge of character than I had been when I started high school. At first I had blindly believed that everyone was a good person for me to be around. But after the pandemic, I realized I shouldn't take my social circle for granted. I looked for people that I truly felt I could be myself around rather than trying to adapt myself back and forth to get along with different crowds.
Eventually, my circle was an odd mix of academic achievers and athletes, the venn diagram of which featured very little overlap besides myself. When it was time for graduation, I felt proud of where I was, both academically and socially. I felt like I fit in with my peers. Two years at Everett Community College only served to further cement my newfound sense of stability.
“The kid who started his freshman year of high school is not the same young man who graduated,” my mom said. “From my perspective, it was all about confidence.”
Now, two quarters into my time at Western, that awe-struck high school freshman from 2018 is still very much a part of who I am. I’ve learned that I don’t need to be “normal,” if such a thing is even possible. I’m content with who I am and what I do, and being away from home for the first time has had the unanticipated effect of making me more comfortable among my peers.
“I was confident, and I know you’re level-headed,” my mom said. “I know you can come and go, and it’s all gonna be okay.”
At my mom’s insistence, we asked a stranger to take a photo of the three of us standing behind the Nash Hall sign at the corner of High Street and East Oak Street. I hugged my mom and dad goodbye and watched them walk toward the parking lot. I turned around, walked back into Nash, and set about making some friends. This time, saying goodbye to my parents didn’t feel isolating; it felt freeing.
I figure if I can do it — starting from seven years behind my peers and with a global pandemic throwing a wrench into the process — anyone can do it. I still don’t have any social media, and I’m still not very well-versed in memes, but these days I can live with lacking those things. I don’t feel like I need to play catch-up anymore.