Many homeschool parents feel that to be able to homeschool high school you need to be able to teach the advanced subjects. When you find yourself unable to do it successfully you feel like it is impossible. You could teach the advanced subjects if you wanted to, but you don’t necessarily have to. You can choose to work ahead, learn the subject, study it in advance, and have your children learn it, but you don’t have to do that.

There’s a huge difference between teaching and learning; what you are trying to do is to get your children to learn. Whether you are the one who teaches it or not is not nearly as significant as whether or not they might learn it.

If most parents don’t know how to teach piano, they will hire somebody to do it. The child will go to piano lessons, take lessons from someone else, and practice on their own. Parents wouldn’t know what they are supposed to do, but parents should oversee that they do what they are supposed to do.

My family did it the same way in our home, but for Calculus. I bought a self-teaching curriculum for physics which was from Apologia and a self-teaching curriculum for calculus which was from Saxon. The kids would get their instructions either from the book or the CDs, and learn it themselves that way.

My only job was to make sure that they did the work and oversee their daily work being done. With calculus, you can’t just hear it and there’s no piano recital at the end so I would only take away their answer keys to those subjects when giving a test.

Of course, it’s hard to correct a test like physics and calculus because I didn’t know what the words and symbols meant; I had to look at the answer key and at the answers that my children gave me to make sure that they were exactly alike. If there was a discrepancy and my children were absolutely certain that their answer was correct, that’s when I was thankful that it was a homeschool curriculum because then they would call the 800 number.

We also learned Latin in our homeschool. My children and I did not know Latin before and we used the Latin Road to English Grammar. The first year we did Latin, I studied ahead, stayed two weeks ahead of them and actually did learn the language. The second year we did Latin, I wasn’t as excited about it and learned along with my children. By the third year, I didn’t want to do it at all. The children wanted to, so they continued with their Latin studies just like physics and calculus.

Even though I didn’t know Latin, physics, and calculus, my boys still went to college well-prepared in all of those subjects. One of my sons is an engineer and took physics, calculus, and advanced math for fun in college and still got straight A’s. My other son really likes the languages so he was well-prepared with our Latin studies.