It was 1985 when the principal of my high school took my mother aside and strongly urged her to continue my education at home. I was an excellent student and was even in the Gifted and Talented program. But my director saw trouble coming.

My peer group changed the way my high school educated its students, or so I’m told. The story goes that the administration was aware of our impending seventh grade arrival and ‘upped the ante’ in the gifted program as a result. Apparently we were all so smart and so talented that they needed to come up with new ways to challenge and educate us.

Now I don’t know about that, but I do know that he was very busy. In addition to my regular course load, my group has taken on special projects including group projects and presentations, independent research studies, advanced classes in high school, and classes at the local university. Our teachers were energetic and enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy the extra time they spent with us.

I was smart, motivated, involved and challenged. Along with my regular course load and extras, I played in the marching band, jazz band, and performance bands. My peer group was pretty much the same in all of those areas and we were all good kids from good families. We hang out together, study together, and party together. When one of our friends showed up drunk one night, we all gathered around him to get him help. None of us drank, smoked, or slept.

But less than two years later, I was pregnant and kicked out of my house. So what happened?

The answer is complicated. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last 20 years, and even more so in the years since we started homeschooling our own children. It sure sounds like there was some kind of disconnect that happened. Like after I left that high school bubble something changed. And maybe it did.

Despite taking advanced classes in high school and having friends there and even playing in the high school band in the summers, he was bored. Maybe high school was such a challenging experience that everything else fell short. Maybe I discovered the power I had over guys and thought it would be fun to use that power and see where it took me. Maybe we all changed once we got to high school and I had trouble figuring out where I fit in.

In retrospect, it’s easy to think of theories, but I honestly don’t know what happened. She was gifted and talented and intelligent and then she was pregnant.

So, are we homeschooling to prevent unplanned pregnancies? I hope our motives run a little deeper than that. For now, I want to make sure that our children are not bored in school, but are excited to learn. By being in control of how fast or slow we progress through our lessons, I hope to instill in them an early love of school that will help them stick around in later years.