Hello.. So here's my story: When I was seven years old my house burnt down completely while my family was on vacation, and we came back to a pile of ashes. We were really poor at the time and we ended up moving from Florida to rural Alabama, next door to my grandparents. I had moved 4 or 5 times before this and had always done really well making friends in my new school, immediately. This time was very different. The teachers were stupider than me, all of the students were stupider than me, and the entire town promoted a culture of ignorance and violence (esp. against cute fuzzy animals). I couldn't afford the "right" clothes, I didn't have a Southern accent, and between 2nd grade and 10th grade things got progressively worse for me (socially) every year until I was a klepto cutter who would steal sleeping pills so I could sleep for days on end and write long letters to my mother begging her to homeschool me, which she would then pretend not to have read. I dropped out, got my GED, and ran away from home at 16, which is the legal age limit for dropping out. I'm twenty one now, and my little sister just turned 16. She wants to quit school, NOW. Things aren't quite as bad for her, she has one or two friends. She's very different from me in a few ways however; While I was always very advanced for my age, reading early, being super ready to drive the second I turned 15, she's always kind of lagged behind, and as far as I know she still hasn't gotten behind the wheel of a car. Anyways, my mum e-mails me telling me that my sister is crying herself to sleep at night, begging to be homeschooled or being allowed to drop out. I talked to my sister and she pretty much told me that she uses the threat of dropping out to influence my mum to homeschool. I really think my sister needs to finish school, because she has extreme social anxiety, worse even than me and there's no way she could hold a job anytime soon. (I still can't.) I would really like to move somewhere on the West Coast and have her live with me and attend school. Unfortunately that's not possible right now (tho it may be next year.) However, my question here is please please please recommend a high school homeschooling program that is really easy for a really stupid mother to use, or a good one for teaching yourself, that is accredited in Alabama. That's not fucking A BEKA, or religious anti-evolutionary bullshit.
Have your sister get and read The Teenage Liberation handbook. Anything is legal in Alabama as long as you are being covered by a "church" school. There are all kinds of church school, some are pagan, non denominational and very religious. Staying where you are miserable is rarely a healthy thing for anyone at any age.
Tell her to try After-schooling herself. This is taking control of your own education, and to hell with teachers. My husband after-schooled himself through high-school. He still had to go, but only as a formality. He learned with libraries, the internet, and experiments. You read, think, and apply. This is the basic learning method, but self-made. Math Addison-Wesley puts out the Pearson series of mathbook that my college uses, and they make younger ages' books as well. Find some of them on Amazon: the older editions are cheapiecheap. I just got three years worth of college maths with solution manuals, for under 40$ for the set. And they are spectacular books if used right. I ignored the professors completely and just worked out of the books, using the manuals to check my work and learn how to do the problem. It took me from flunking math through home-high-school into straight A's in college math. I can't afford to take any more math classes officially, but with the books you don't really need to. History The best history lesson I have ever had was on the road with my father in the Summer (trucker) listening to old Vietnam protest songs from the sixties and seventies while he explained what the songs were singing about. To this day, I can remember nearly every event from "American Pie," "Eve of Destruction," and "We're All Fixin' to Die Rag." The movie 1776 is amazing history and bloody entertaining. Remember that dates are nowhere near as important as cultural effects and causes. It's storytelling at it's finest. Literature Read. Read everything, and find what you like. Read more of that. Try reading what is reccomended for you. If you don't like it, don't read it again. If you do, find more of that author. Find other authors of that time period, country, or genre. Read that dusty book on the back of the shelf that hasn't been checked out since 1953. You may just like it. Also, constantly reading the classics eventually negates the need for grammar classes. Yay. Science The internet is a marvel here. Read scientific journals. Find books from the library on whatever branch you're curious about. If you get bored, find another branch. I am good in biology. I read about it on GoogleNews, and get books galore on it. I find that my favorite fields this year are arachnology and botany. I garden and like spiders. I have questions about my plants, and the spiders in the basement, so I look up the spider on an arachnology site and get a better idea what to research in the library. Next year I may be passionate about bacteria. I pity my landlady then, because I can buy agaragar (bacteria food) at Hobby Lobby and I have made petri dishes out of saucers before. . . Language You really need at least a speaker of the language available for practice. Spanish is the trend now, but I am a French major. Try the Michel Thomas CD sets. They're a bit pricey (unless you download them illegally from IsoHunt. . . ), but well worth it for conversational langurage use. Get dictionaries, and readers. Barnes and Nobles is good here. Music Get an instrument, and a few books. Practice intensely. You'll eventually get it. I'm not a musician myself. Read the news religiously, and buy a huge dictionary and a huge thesaurus. Also, the west coast may be bad for homeschooling. I've heard some stories. I'm from Illinois, and the laws are very lenient on homeschooling there, Indiana, and Missouri (where I live now).
