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Dear Calvert, My wife, Julie, is about to conclude her tenth straight year as a Calvert homeschool educator. I would like to commemorate her talent, dedication and perseverance.
In 1996, Julie doubled the size of her classroom by starting our second son on first grade while our oldest son moved up to fourth grade.
As the school year ended, we moved from Okinawa to Waldorf, Maryland, just south of Washington, DC. We were in Waldorf for only ten months, preparing for my next overseas assignment in New Delhi, India.
From 1998 through 2001, we lived in New Delhi while I worked at the American Embassy there. In that time, Julie shepherded our son through Calvert grades six, seven and eight and his younger brother through grades three, four and five. Our oldest daughter started with a kindergarten program in 1999 and completed first grade in 2000-2001. Our youngest spent her mornings in the schoolroom as well, in a sort of unstructured pre-K environment.
In August 2001 we moved to London, England, and got our first glimpse of the academic payoff from Julie's homeschooling efforts.
Putting to rest any lingering concerns about "socialization," he thrived in the high school environment. He played golf and soccer and became active in student government. The guidance counselors looked favorably on his homeschooling background and were supportive of our desire to place him in the most challenging classes. After one week in freshman World History, his teacher recommended transferring him to the AP American Government course. He completed this course as a freshman, earned an "A" and passed the AP exam. As a sophomore, he took a Model United Nations course and participated in The Hague International Model UN Conference in the Netherlands, where he researched issues and argued his position in front of hundreds of fellow students from around the world. He was inducted into the National Honor Society at the end of his sophomore year.
Meanwhile, Julie continued teaching the Calvert curriculum to our other children. By the time we left London in August 2003, our second son had completed seventh grade, one daughter, third grade and the other, first grade.
After living overseas for eight of the previous nine years, we returned to the States in 2003 and settled down in Winchester, Virginia, where I would finish out my twenty-year career in the Navy (I retired on June 1, 2005). In Winchester, we had the options of enrolling our children in a good local public school system, sending them to a small and equally good parochial school, or staying the course with Calvert. We chose Calvert.
We did so because we know what Calvert offers, and we like the results. Between the daily lesson guides, the reading materials and the Advisory Teaching Service, the Calvert homeschooling program gives us the tools to succeed and the confidence to try.
Julie constantly sought and found ways to broaden our children's horizons and spark their imaginations. In New Delhi, she and the children joined an informal group of other American home-schoolers, who met twice monthly for group activities, field trips, oral reports, sporting events and old-fashioned play time. To enhance her instruction of French, she arranged for a French Embassy official to tutor the children weekly on speaking and listening skills. In London, Julie planned outings to the British Museum and the National Gallery, orchestral performances at the Royal Albert Hall and performances of Shakespeare in the Park.
In Virginia, Julie arranged for the children to participate in competitive fencing classes and tournaments (our two sons), horseback riding lessons (our second son and two daughters) and violin/classical guitar lessons (our two daughters). Yet all the while, both overseas and back in the States, she included our children in the mundane requirements of day-to-day life: the cooking and cleaning, shopping and chores of all sorts. The result of all her efforts, from my perspective, is four children who are grounded in reality but whose imaginations soar.
As Julie concludes her tenth year as a Calvert home school educator, and prepares for her eleventh, here is her report card:
Last summer he spent a month at the Virginia Governor's School for the Humanities at the University of Richmond, where he honed his particular talent for creative writing. It should be noted that his selection for this program was competitive-only 400 students throughout the State of Virginia qualify to attend-and that the James Wood faculty nominated him after he had been enrolled at the high school for only a couple of months. He was accepted for admission to both Saint John's College in Annapolis and the University of Virginia. In August, he will enter the UVA College of Arts and Sciences, where he will major in Political Philosophy, Policy and Law. He hopes to become a lawyer and possibly enter into politics.
Looking back on the tumultuous path our family has traveled over the last ten years, it is difficult for me to imagine a better solution for our children's education than homeschooling with Calvert. It is impossible to imagine a better teacher than Julie to make it work.
Sincerely,
Mike Gannon
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We began homeschooling using the Calvert curriculum and your Advisory Teaching Service in 1995, while living in Okinawa, Japan. We started small. Julie's only student that year was our oldest son, who was then starting third grade. We were looking for two things from homeschooling: curricular continuity and academic rigor. In the time since he started kindergarten, my career as a naval officer had brought us from California, to Rhode Island, to Virginia and, finally, to Okinawa in the span of less than two years. In Okinawa, our one realistic option for conventional schooling proved in its first year to be less than satisfactory. So, having learned about homeschooling from some Navy friends, we did some research and selected Calvert.
It bears mention that at the time Julie began her homeschooling career with our oldest son, we had three younger children in the home: a six-year-old son, a two-year-old daughter, and another daughter born three months after our school year began.
Through her meticulous planning and unwavering commitment, Julie was able to begin and complete our third year with Calvert while living in Waldorf. At the same time, she prepared our family in every way-medically, logistically, emotionally-to spend the next three years living in South Asia.
We enrolled our oldest son in the regional high school run by the U.S. Department of Defense Educational Activity. Competing in the classroom against children of other American military families, he soared to the top of his class.
None of this would matter, though, without a dedicated home educator to pull it all together. For our family, homeschooling worked because Julie made it work. From one year to the next, she planned ahead -- sometimes months ahead -- and then executed her plan. She made sure that our household budget could absorb the annual outlay for the core curriculum, supplementary enrichment materials and the indispensable Advisory Teaching Service. In four cases, our family made inter-continental moves between the end of one school year and the start of the next. Julie made sure that she stayed on track to finish one academic year before each scheduled move, while arranging for timely delivery of the materials necessary to start the next academic year promptly on arrival at our new residence. In six different houses she moved in and set up a functional schoolroom under varying conditions of space, lighting, furniture and even electrical power. In every case, she established optimum conditions for learning.
She organized family trips to Paris and Venice, where the children saw with their own eyes some of the art and architecture they had studied with Calvert. A month-long vacation in Ireland, made possible by Julie's careful planning and budgeting (backpacks only, travel mostly by bus, week-long stays in cottages to balance the cost of hotels in Dublin and Donegal), became a short course in the history and culture of our own families' shared Irish heritage.
Our oldest just graduated with honors from James Wood High School in Frederick County, Virginia. While at James Wood, he continued his involvement with student government and participated as a volunteer in the 2004 Presidential election campaign. Having exhausted the high school's social studies curriculum, he took two semesters of world history and geography at the local community college, earning "A"s both semesters and scoring a perfect 800 on the SAT II world history exam.
Our second child completed eight years of the Calvert program in 2004. He just finished his freshman year at James Wood High School with a 4.0 grade point average, standing first in a class of 388 freshmen. Like the Department of Defense School in London, the counselors at James Wood worked with us to place him in appropriately challenging classes. He competed on the district-champion chess team with his brother; he also played freshman football and junior varsity soccer. To fulfill a religious education service requirement, he served as an assistant coach for a Special Olympics basketball team. Football camp starts at the end of July, and the academic year in late August. He is interested in everything but for several years he has talked about studying medicine and becoming a doctor.
Our oldest daughter is about to complete Calvert's fifth grade program. She has been studying the violin for two years. On her music teacher's recommendation, she auditioned successfully for the Shenandoah Youth Orchestra at Shenandoah University. This year she performed in two SYO concerts. She will resume formal music lessons in the fall, concurrent with Calvert grade six. She appears to have a near-photographic memory and academic interests as varied as those of her brother.
Our youngest, meanwhile, will complete Calvert's third grade program this week. She has been taking classical guitar lessons for the last year, which she will continue through the summer. Having made a breakthrough in her reading skills this year, she is ready to resume the Calvert program with her sister in the fall. She loves the fact that we now live someplace where we can keep animals, including a dog, a cat and her very own hamster. With Julie's patient guidance and oversight, our daughters are learning what it takes to care properly for a hamster and a cat, respectively. She tells us that she wants to become a veterinarian and to marry a farmer. Time will tell.
As their first and most enduring teacher, Julie has found ways to connect to each of our four children individually, teasing out and cultivating their unique talents, interests and abilities. For each of them, their first lasting experience with structured education was an overwhelmingly positive one, filled with individual attention, careful pacing, encouragement and gentle discipline. The ultimate success of her approach will not be clear for some time yet, but the results so far are promising.