North Carolina Woman Grew Up With an Amish Curriculum. Says Homeschool Failed Her: ‘I Didn’t Know There Could be Letters in Math’
She also didn't understand what 'current events' were.
School is supposed to prepare children for the real world, a place where they learn how to interact with other human beings, understand abstract concepts, and navigate society. But Stella McCormick (@stella_mccormick) from North Carolina said her homeschooling experience “failed” her.
“My parents basically failed me and all of my siblings because we were essentially unschooled,” McCormick told TikTok. She claimed that she had been homeschooled all her life and learned through an Amish and Mennonite curriculum.
“They only go through school to eighth grade, so all curriculum stops at eighth grade. So, there was nothing for high school,” McCormick said of the Amish community. McCormick alleged that to remedy the insufficient curriculum, her mother would supplement their high school years with a Christian curriculum.
“So, we kind of just did no school for high school, or if she did find like one book, we would make it last for multiple years. So we were basically doing no school, essentially,” she claimed. Eventually, McCormick said that she and her siblings did dual enrollment at a community college. But things drastically shifted for her when she started college.
She felt left behind in more ways than one
“Once I got to college, I realized very, very quickly, like day one, that I was behind in so many ways,” she said. McCormick didn’t think she’d be socially left behind by her peers. But upon walking through those doors, she felt like she landed on a different planet. McCormick recalled how she didn’t understand pop culture references, and her clothes looked drastically different from those of her peers.
“I looked like a little Amish kid walking into a college,” she expressed. McCormick wore a long, denim skirt and had her hair in a braid. In contrast, she observed that her peers were wearing bright colors and skinny jeans. They were wearing fashion-forward clothing, as far as 2013 aesthetics go. It’s not uncommon for people to wear awkward clothing. One woman proudly wore a shirt that said, ‘I have rabies’ during a hike, scaring off two men at one point. But McCormick wasn’t just having a bad fashion day—she was unaware of how to navigate her social situation.
Her academics suffered from homeschooling
“I didn’t know there could be letters in math. I thought math was numbers, no idea what the letters meant,” she said. McCormick also felt clueless with her academics. She claimed she struggled in multiple subjects.
“I didn’t know how to write an essay or, really, anything in English class. I didn’t know how to do research, because we didn’t have computers at home that we were able to access,” she alleged. When a teacher told her to “look up a current event” and write about it, McCormick said she had a difficult time understanding the instruction.
“I went to a computer lab at the college and Googled ‘current events’… I had no idea what it even meant,” McCormick said. She thought ‘current events’ was some sort of party, or a literal event that people could attend.
Aside from research, she also struggled to keep up in sociology class. While her peers excelled in discussing social issues, she was just finding out that gay marriage rights were a heavily debated subject at the time. “Combined academically and socially… I was so unprepared for college,” McCormick concluded.
Although McCormick has had an unpleasant experience with homeschooling, one mother is considering it after hearing an inappropriate conversation between a bunch of teens in a park.
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