Home School Advantage
Last night before opening night of Touched by the King, Ray visited with the grandfather of a couple of the actresses. This grandfather lives in a college town. He and Ray talked some about the new scoreboard at the college football stadium. It cost . . . drum roll, please . . . $13,000,000. That’s right. I didn’t get my finger stuck on the zero key of my keyboard. That’s thirteen million dollars!
Sports fans often mention the home field advantage a school has when their team plays at home. Do you think a $13,000,000 scoreboard provides a home field advantage? I’d need to see the cost analysis on that one.
Before our children graduated from home school, they participated each year in a local Bible Bowl that drew hundreds of participants from a wide area. Through the years after our children graduated, we found that more and more of the four-member teams who made it to the Sweet Sixteen finals at Bible Bowl were made up of home schooled children.
This particular Bible Bowl is held each year on the Saturday after Labor Day. For the first few weeks of the fall semester, our children studied for Bible Bowl during a large part of their homeschooling day.
A few years ago the mother of a couple of children who attended public school mentioned to me the advantage homeschooled students have in the contest.
Hmmmm. Homeschooled students had more time to study the Bible. Now there is an advantage to homeschooling and it doesn’t even need a $13,000,000 scoreboard.
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God
as a workman who does not need to be ashamed,
accurately handling the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:1
Totally insane that a school would spend that kind of money on a scoreboard. Pretty soon homeschoolers probably won’t get to participate in these quiz bowls because it will be considered an “unfair” advantage. 😛 I’ll take that advantage any day!
I cherish our opportunity to train our children ourselves, as I believe God wants us to do.
LOL! I don’t think college sports departments know how to perform a cost analysis. Just saying.
We spend quite a good chunk of time in memorizing Scripture. My kids don’t participate in Bible bowls, our church has a Christian school and they participate through some kind of affiliation of private Christian schools. However, on Sunday nights at our church , the children 8 years of age and younger can come up on stage and say a memory verse. My daughters have always been able to quote many scriptures at a time, I used to know how many verses they had committed to memory but 2 of my girls have grown up on me and I can’t remember anymore. My daughter who is a senior still memorizes it, we do incorporate that into our home school day. I have had many, many remarks about the amount of scripture the girls know (anymore, it’s just about my youngest, she’s the only one they hear on Sunday nights). Most comments are positive, some are said in such a snide way you really don’t feel like it’s a compliment. Of course, it’s always brought up that we homeschool and have plenty of time for that. A veteran home school mama that I know told me that her son could always memorize huge chunks of Scripture and people would say the same things to her. She is a very straight forward person and always told people that home schooling had nothing to do with it, that it was a matter of setting priorities and not using their time for television viewing, gaming and the never ending sports. So I’ve adopted her stance 🙂
Someone in our church (a rather prominent figure who is very pro-Christian education but mainly things that the education should be attained through Christian scho0l) has said very recently that you can memorize the entire Bible but if it doesn’t penetrate the heart, you can quote chapter upon chapter and it does you no good. While a part of me “gets” what he’s saying, God’s Word never is a waste of time and doesn’t go out void. I think even Christian schools keep the kids so busy that they don’t study the Bible enough.
I’m thankful that your girls have hidden God’s words in their hearts.