MY HOMESCHOOLING EXPERIENCE
My twofold experience with home schooling and attending a regular school has been a very stimulating and insightful venture, an experience that exposed me, in a period of 7-8 years, to two very distinct ways of going through formal education. I had been going to a conventional school from kindergarten through grade 4. When in school, I had to get up every morning at 6am, get ready, wear my school clothes, and rush to school, not to come back until half-past three in the afternoon.
Those bittersweet memories still reverberate in my mind.
“Get up, Abdullah. You will be late for school again.” My mother would shout in exasperation.
“Mom, just a few more minutes and I …”
My mother would dash into my room and threaten, “Get up now or...”
Then I would jump out of my bed before she would unleash her wrath on me. The last time I went through that experience was about four years ago when I bid farewell to my regular school and welcomed k12.
When I started doing full-time Hifz, which is memorizing the entire Quran, the holy book of Muslims, cover-to-cover, I had to allocate a few hours in the morning for Hifz, which conflicted with my school schedule. While searching for an alternative to regular school, we discovered k12, which provides home-schooling curriculum, so I started doing home-schooling in the evening. That was my first year in home schooling.
My mom used to teach me in that first year in which I was home-schooling, Grade 5. After I completed