Transitioning to public schools

Janine and I started homeschooling fifteen years ago.  Our oldest was in kindergarten and we figured if we messed it up we could also then turn to public schools.  We had a few family members who were role models for us.  My cousin had been homeschooling for close to twenty years and one of my sisters had been homeschooling for close to ten years.

Unfortunately my sister died twelve years ago.  My brother-in-law struggled for a bit and then decided to send the children to public school.  One of my nephews is in town this week.  I asked him about the move from homeschooling to government schools.  He wrote:

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Transitioning from a home schooling environment into the public school system was more surprising that it was challenging. A few relatively minor things were completely foreign to me; cursive handwriting, for instance, had become mandatory by the 4th grade, whereas I had yet to be exposed to it at that point. On the other hand, passing public school standards in the subjects of reading, writing and arithmetic proved to be all but effortless and the coursework dwarfed in comparison to the material with which we’d been working. I feel the transition was very manageable, and that with a few simple preparations it would have been even less of a shock. In my particular circumstances, things like social studies and geography had not been as deeply impressed on my mind as they would have been in the public school, but the added advantage of reading ability and analytical thinking more than compensated for the deficit and enabled me to catch up at a speed which would otherwise have been impractical. I would also like to mention that lacking one or two of the skills others had may have been a blessing in the end, as it kept my head down and my work ethic up, and allowed for an opportunity to learn how to focus harder on those particular subjects--a skill which would later prove completely invaluable as an educational asset.
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