I taught in public schools for more than a decade. Homeschooling my kids shifted my perspective on a student's success.
· Business Insider
Courtesy of Nicole Schildt.
- I taught in public schools for over a decade and measured success by test scores and benchmarks.
- Then I started homeschooling my two children and realized that success was more nuanced.
- I learned that I had to let go of the belief that learning only counts if it can be assessed.
For more than a decade, I taught in public high schools. I believed deeply in standards, benchmarks, and measurable outcomes. I trusted data. I tracked growth. I aligned objectives. Success, to me, meant progress you could prove.
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I wasn't wrong. But I wasn't seeing the whole picture either.
When I began homeschooling my own children, at ages twelve and five, those carefully held definitions started to unravel in quiet, uncomfortable ways.
One morning I sat down at the kitchen table with a math worksheet I'd printed the night before. I had a plan—fractions, then reading, then science. My son stared at the page for 10 minutes before pushing it aside in frustration.
Later that afternoon, I watched him outside with his brothers arguing over batting averages and calculating which player had the better on-base percentage. No worksheet. No rubric. Just numbers, curiosity, and a lot of debate.
It was the first time I wondered if learning might be happening in ways my old definitions couldn't measure.
Achievements looked different
There were no grades at the kitchen table. No standardized tests waiting at the end of the year. No pacing guides or bell schedules to keep us on track.
At first, the absence felt unsettling. As an educator, I had been trained to look for evidence. How do you know learning is happening if you can't quantify it? Where do you point when someone asks, "Are they on grade level?"
Instead, I began noticing things that never fit neatly into a rubric when I was in a traditional classroom. A child lingering over a book because he was genuinely curious. Another explaining a concept back to me in her own words, not because it would be tested, but because she wanted to understand it. Progress unfolded unevenly, sometimes invisibly, and often in ways I couldn't chart.
That lack of measurable proof forced me to sit with a harder question: Had I been mistaking structure for success?
There is more than one way to measure success
In the classroom, I saw countless students who knew how to play the game. They followed directions, met deadlines, and performed well on assessments. They were labeled successful. At the same time, I watched others struggle not because they lacked ability, but because they resisted the system itself. They questioned the why, moved at a different pace, or disengaged when the work felt meaningless.
Homeschooling made that distinction impossible to ignore. When there was no external pressure to comply, learning looked — and felt — a lot different. Sometimes messier. Often slower. But also more honest.
At home, my son interrupted constantly with questions — sometimes ten in the middle of a single lesson. In a classroom, I might have asked him to hold them so we could keep moving. At the kitchen table, the questions became the lesson.
I realized how often schools reward obedience and call it achievement. We praise students for sitting still, meeting arbitrary benchmarks, and producing the right answers on demand. Those skills matter in certain contexts, but they are not the same as curiosity, resilience, or deep understanding.
During a reading lesson, my son stopped halfway through the chapter and began explaining why he thought the main character had made a terrible decision. He pulled examples from earlier pages and started predicting what might happen next. None of it was part of the comprehension questions I had planned, but it was clear he wasn't just reading the story — he was wrestling with it. And, though he wasn't completing a test about it, he was demonstrating mastery, application, and independent thought — skills rarely assessed in multiple choice.
This shift has not been an indictment of public education, nor is it a manifesto for homeschooling. It's been a personal reckoning.
I had to rethink how I taught my children
I had to unlearn the idea that rigor requires constant measurement. I had to let go of the belief that learning only counts if it can be assessed. Most uncomfortably, I had to confront how tightly my own sense of worth had been tied to productivity and performance.
Watching my children learn without chasing metrics forced me to ask what I had been chasing myself.
Success now looks quieter. It looks like a child who asks better questions, not just faster ones. It looks like confidence built over time, not urgency driven by comparison. It looks like learning that bends to fit the learner, rather than the learner bending to fit the system.
As an educator and a parent, I no longer believe success is something you can always measure in real time. Sometimes it shows up years later, in ways no test could predict.
Homeschooling didn't change my respect for education. It changed my understanding of it. And in doing so, it challenged me to redefine success not as something to be proven, but as something to be lived.
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