Home-schooling American kids in a Chinese village
An American family tells Mark Graham about the joysand challengesof home-schooling in a Chinese village while volunteering at an orphanage
Home-schooling children is a tough challenge, even with a support group in the neighbourhood and the help of internet resources.
American doctors Bill and Ana Moody made it even harder by moving to an out-of-the-way Chinese village where, despite the many obstacles, they successfully home-schooled their sons.
The upside of being in an isolated environment where little English is spoken or understood was that their boys learned to speak fluent colloquial Chinese. The eldest son, Matthew, is now at college in the US, where fellow students are dazzled by his command of the language.
"Looking back, moving to China was a very enriching experience and changed the course of my life," he says. "The convenience of being home-schooled allowed me to learn Chinese, which is going to be very valuable in the future. Also, the very structure of home-schooling has helped me because it has taught me to be self-motivated.
"At first, the transition from the United States to China was a bit choppy. The general concepts and methodology of home-schooling stayed the same. The main change was that we no longer were really part of a larger home-school organisation.
"That meant that for sports and managerial questions we had to find new sources. For sports I started to play with local kids, for questions about managing curriculum and charting high school graduation, my mum had to rely on e-mail and occasional trips to the States."