Every year once the new school year starts and I manage to curb my desires to buy brand new pencils and pens I think of the one year when I went to school for the first time. Eleventh grade wasn’t my first year of school by a long shot. We homeschooled first grade through tenth grade and the beginning of every school year was preceded by piles of books usually coming through the mail. For some reason the month before the beginning of my eleventh grade year that didn’t happen. Instead we visited a school, had placement testing, went uniform shopping, and barely made it to Staples before all the 3-ring binders were sold out and school started.
It was all completely different and not just because I wasn’t used to attending school outside of the house. Dayspring Christian Academy was a different kind of school. My school supplies consisted of several empty (for now!) 3 inch 3-ring binders (the large ones!) and one smaller 3-ring binder. I also acquired my own copy of the largest dictionary (“Webster’s 1828 edition”) I had ever seen along with my own “Strong’s Concordance.” There were rules for things I didn’t even know you could do, let alone you weren’t supposed to do.
It was a bit of shock to find out I couldn’t go to the bathroom whenever I wanted to, but it was delightful to acquire scores of new pens, pencils, and colored pencils. It felt weird to get dressed up in the same thing every day, but it certainly cut down on clothing decisions in the early mornings. Those early mornings included running out the door way too early in my opinion! (We never did home school in our pajamas and we had a school starting time of 8:00 or a little later usually, but we certainly didn’t have to be ready to go out the door at 7:30 every morning either!)
I felt quite at home with the classes at Dayspring even if the teaching method and testing were different. Because of the classes I needed I was thrown in with almost every grade in high school at some point during the year. Dayspring teaches the Principle Approach which makes the basics of the Bible a part of every class. I took tons of notes which mostly filled up those 3 3-ring binders by the end of the year. The notes were so detailed that I could easily take them today and with a little refreshing and research be able to teach a class from them.
To be continued…