No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at age 16

141 Pages·2010·0.82 MB·English

by  Alexandra Swann

Available Titles from Frontier 2000 Media
Non Fiction:
No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at
Age Sixteen
Writing for Today
Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling
Mother

Adult Fiction Series:
The Planner
The Chosen
The Kingdom Chronicles
The Fourth Kingdom
The Force

Adult Fiction Single Titles:
The Twelfth Juror
The Warrior

Children’s Fiction:
Tales of Pig Isle
The McAloons: A Horse Called Lightning & A House of Clowns
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Foreword to the 20 Anniversary Edition

No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at Age
Sixteen was first published in 1989. The story you are about to read ends twenty
years ago, so references to specific curricula, state laws, school programs and
school philosophies, though true twenty years ago, are not necessarily true today.
Calvert School does still offer correspondence courses with an Advisory
Teaching Service. The American School’s website indicates that it also still
offers a correspondence high school course of study which appears to be very
similar to the program my family used. The Degrees by Independent Study
program at BYU no longer exists. My two youngest brothers, Stefan and Judah,
who graduated from BYU in 1998, were two of the final students ever to
graduate from the DIS program and afterward the program was closed out. The
BYU website indicates that the school offers a distance learning program but it is
only for specific classes and no longer appears to offer a degree program.
California State University at Dominguez Hills’ website indicates that the Master
of Arts in the Humanities Program is very much unchanged from the degree that
I received in 1987.
So much has changed in the public perception of homeschooling and
homeschoolers in the past twenty years. When I wrote No Regrets and published
it in 1989, I wanted other families to understand some of the benefits and
challenges which homeschooling creates and to understand the wonderful
opportunities which it can open up for children. The publication of the book
opened doors for us to share our story at homeschooling conventions across the
United States, and we got to meet a lot of families who were educating their own
children. Many were large families like ours who were working to raise and
educate their children in a way that would preserve and promote their values.
They were going through their own sets of struggles and victories on their road
to doing so.
Today homeschooling is widely accepted. The internet and video
teaching have brought the classroom experience into the home in a way that was
not possible when I was a child. But behind all of the teaching tools, the videos
and the internet connections, there are still real children with a real teaching
mother who is working to help her children succeed.
In May of 2000, Stefan and Judah graduated with their Master of Arts
degrees from California State University. Our family gave a party for Mother to
thank her for the twenty-five years she had spent as our teacher. She received
several gifts that day, but one of them was a memory box (a Victorian wooden
box used for keeping mementos) and on the brass plate we had engraved the
inscription, “Thank you for spending the last 25 years with us.” The box sits on
display in her living room as a tribute to her work, but one small box could not
begin to contain all the memories or to accurately tell the story of so much work
over so many years or properly pay tribute for all of the sacrifice involved in
such an effort.
Judah is now 26 years old. He worked for our company for three years,
and now he is a supervisor at a local non-profit.
Stefan is 27 years old and has worked for Frontier 2000 Mortgage &
Loan since he was sixteen years old. He has been a licensed loan officer since
2003.
Gabrielle is 29 years old. She lived in Seattle for four years before
moving back to El Paso last year to be closer to family.
Israel is 30 years old and lives in Los Angeles. He won the AP award for
first and second place photojournalism for two specific stories he worked on in
El Paso in 2002, but he decided he did not want to pursue a career in
photojournalism. He is in pre-veterinary studies in California.
Benjamin is 31. He has been married for over 10 years and is the father
of five children. All of his school-aged children are homeschooled using the
Calvert program. He is the nighttime anchor for the NBC affiliate in El Paso and
a pastor at St. Paul’s Methodist Church. He also works with the local Christian
television station in El Paso. His coverage of border stories and the ongoing
violence in Mexico has earned him attention well beyond our local area.
Victoria is 32 and has been married for over thirteen years. She is a full
time homemaker and mother of two. Her oldest child, who is eight, is being
homeschooled using the Abeka program.
Dominic is 35. He is a photojournalist for CNN based in Miami, Florida.
Wherever breaking news is, we know that he will be also. He was in Iraq three
times during the past eight years reporting on the conflicts there. His
experiences working with the doctors led him to produce and direct the CNN
documentary Combat Hospital detailing the work that U.S. military doctors do
treating injured combatants on both sides of the war. He was in New Orleans
covering Hurricane Katrina, and he most recently spent 20 days in Haiti
covering the earthquake.
Francesca is 36. She lives in Arizona with her husband and three children
whom she homeschools using a charter program through the Arizona school
system.
Christopher is 38. He is the operations’ manager for the ABC news
affiliate in El Paso, where he has worked for close to twenty years. He is
responsible for on-air operations for not only the local station, but the other
stations owned by the parent corporation. In 2008, he married the station’s news
director.
I am now 39. In 1998, my father and I started Frontier 2000 Mortgage &
Loan, an El Paso-based mortgage company, and for the past twelve years, we
have been able to help families across Texas and New Mexico realize their
dreams of homeownership. My father, my mother, and Stefan are partners in the
company.
Several years ago, I was asked to give the commencement address for the
graduating class of the El Paso Association of Homeschoolers. The
commencement ceremony was held in the sanctuary of St. Clement’s church (the
same church and school where I was going to be enrolled before my mother’s
dream changed all of our futures.) We had been studying Rick Warren’s Purpose
Driven Life as a church, and for the text of my commencement talk that day, I
spoke to the class about the key points of Warren’s book, “life is test, life is a
trust, and a life is a temporary assignment.”
“Our faith in God is entrusted to us by our parents,” I told the graduates,
“and it is our responsibility to keep it alive and pass it on to the next generation
of children so that Christianity will always go forward.” At any particular time,
Christianity is one generation away from disappearing from our culture. The real
legacy of Christian homeschooling is people who grow to adulthood and
influence a new generation of children. And the greatest tribute possible to the
homeschooling parent is to see that work carry forward.
This 20th anniversary edition of No Regrets is dedicated to my mother,
who remains my best friend and constant source of inspiration and to the work
she started back in 1975 that continues on today.
No Regrets

Alexandra Swann
Excerpt from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost edited
by Edward Connery Lathem, Copyright 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1951 by
Robert Frost. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form without written
permission from the publisher.
Copyright © 1989, 2010 by Alexandra Swann
Published in the USA by Cygnet Press, a division of
Frontier 2000 Media Group Inc., El Paso, Texas
First printing October 1989, Second Printing July 1994,
Third Printing, March 2010
ISBN # 0962361100, 978-0962361104

http://www.frontier2000.net
Two roads diverged in a wood and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost
ONE
∞
Decisions

O
ne month before my fifth birthday my mother began to teach me to
read and write, and school at home became a wonderful thing. Our classes were
not those of the traditional mother teaching her small daughter letters, shapes
and colors in preparation for kindergarten, however. Unlike most mothers, mine
had made a decision to educate me at home. She and I were engaged in serious
business, and we knew it. Each day at eight-thirty A.M. our session began, and
together the disciplined young mother and her exuberant child explored the
mysteries of the alphabet, phonics, writing, addition, and subtraction. She could
not have known then, a twenty-nine year old woman with no previous teaching
experience struggling to educate her oldest child with methods she herself had
devised, that only eleven years later she would be called to testify for
homeschoolers in Leeper vs. Arlington, the landmark court case which would
legalize homeschooling in the state of Texas. Yet even then, she possessed the
spirit of determination and self-sacrifice which would later earn her that
status.
My parents had known even during their first seven childless years of
marriage that if they ever did have children, those children would not attend a
public school. They had witnessed both the academic and spiritual breakdown of
America’s classrooms, and they agreed that no child of theirs would be educated
in such a system. Within months after their wedding they had decided that they
would opt for a private or parochial school which stressed both academics and
fundamental Christian values.
However, eleven years later when I was four years old, they discovered
that finding a private institution which would meet their standards was not an
easy task. For one thing, at that time there were only a handful of private schools