Class of 2030: Why Our Homeschooled Son is Graduating at 19

It’s been a very long time since I last published a homeschool update, and a lot has changed since then. Most significantly, I’ve spent the past year coming to terms with the possibility that our homeschooled son may be graduating at 19.

---

“There’s no behind in homeschool”

“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.”

These two mantras have echoed in my mind through the first seven years of homeschooling our boys. They reassured me on days we only got math done, when we spent 5 years studying 164 years of American History, and when we took a month off to go to South Africa. They lulled me into security when it took a year and a half to get through a 120 lesson curriculum. They challenged my assumptions of where kids “should be,” and relieved the guilt I felt when strangers would ask my children what grades my kids were in, the boys would stare at me blankly, and I would answer with something-ish.

To be clear, these ideas are the reasons we homeschool.

When you have a child who is 2-3 years ahead in his cognitive abilities but 2 years behind in his emotional and social capabilities, being a grade-ish is exactly what you need. When a medication change makes focusing on school nearly impossible, you need to know that your child doesn’t need to fit some arbitrary model of where he “should” be. When you discover that your second child needs medication too and managing distractions is a never-ending work in progress, you need a nugget of wisdom to hold on to when you’re discouraged.

There’s only one problem with these mantras:

Kids don’t stop growing. And kids eventually turn into adults who can’t stay at home with their parents forever.

Panicking about Ezra graduating “on time”…

The reality of this gobsmacked me in the face when Ezra turned 15. Suddenly I realized how close he was to adulthood, and I wondered if he would be able to graduate on time.

They say “The days are long, but the years are short.” I say they are both incredibly long…but they do pass by sneakily while you are drowning in them.

I looked at my spreadsheets and began to panic. No matter how I shuffled, adjusted, dropped curriculum, tried new things, and cut work…I was left with too much education and too little time.

For example, I LOVED The Good and the Beautiful Math when my kids were younger. But when Ezra started homeschooling in third grade, I felt he needed to go back to Level 1 because his first three years in public school hadn’t given him a solid foundation.

Level 1 and 2 were easy. Level 3 took 18 months. Level 4 took 10 months. Level 5 took 17 months—even after cutting out two-thirds of the work and having him complete only a few problems per lesson.

He was only halfway through Level 6 when he turned 15.

There’s no behind in homeschool…until there is.

Language arts wasn’t much better. We loved TG&TB Language Arts & Literature, but Level 4 took 19 months and Level 5 took another 19 months. We started Level 6 in 2025, but I didn’t feel like we were getting enough language education for the amount of time it was taking.

So in July 2025, we switched to Abeka English 7 with video instruction. It’s now August of 2026, he’s almost 16, and he still has 30 lessons to go in 7th grade English.

There’s no behind in homeschool…until there is.

Why does school take so long?

We homeschool year-round. There’s no reason it should be like this.

Anyone who meets my kids says they are smart, articulate, and precocious. Their standardized testing results are often 3-4 grades above their “grade” across all subjects.

They’re just…slow.

Not cognitively slow. If anything, it’s the opposite. Their brains move so quickly that slowing down enough to focus on academic work takes enormous mental energy, self control, and motivation.

They also struggle with executive functioning skills: task initiation, sustained attention, working memory, organization, time management, goal-directed persistence, emotional control, and cognitive flexibility.

Math is particularly difficult for Ezra. He understands the concepts, but math involves juggling so many steps at once, taxing his sustained attention and working memory. He can tell you all the steps, but regularly drops digits or makes simple mistakes. Because the book provides so little space to work, problems have to be copied onto scratch paper or a whiteboard, worked through, and then copied back into the book. If he gets an answer wrong, we then have to hunt down the scratch work to figure out where the mistake happened. All that extra writing, copying, and keeping track of information creates a huge amount of cognitive drain. So a problem that should take a few minutes can take…forever.

Then there is their creativity.

My boys are both incredibly creative, but in complex ways that war against productivity and moving through curricula in a timely manner.

Ezra started turning all of his writing assignments into a series of short stories about teenage boys fighting a retired Nazi who was trying to kill them. He called it The Summer of the White Fern. While I loved his creativity, and the content was exceptionally good, he would often spend ALL MORNING on one of these stories.

When I finally said, “No more White Fern Stories!” things started moving faster. A few months later he created an entire kingdom with its own characters. In an assignment where he had to create sentences using grammar concepts or vocabulary words, he would write every sentence as part of the greater narrative of the 3-book series in his head. The sentences were fabulous, with rich language and witty dialogue. But again, a simple grammar assignment would take up the entire morning. He once spent an entire morning (while I was distracted with housework) creating a detailed map of this imaginary kingdom instead of doing his schoolwork.

Ezra has been growing in his abilities, including the beginnings of notetaking skills. While this is commendable, he veered off course by turning science notes into humorous dialogue between a professor and his students. There was also that time I caught him using drawing tools to draw a “watershed” – as in a shed…for water. Get it? 

These are beautiful examples of how homeschooled children can use their imaginations to apply what they are learning in creative ways.

But when math takes two hours, language arts takes two hours, science notes take another hour…all while constantly getting distracted with what your brother is doing, or getting up to get (yet another) snack, or looking up interesting adjectives in an online dictionary…all while being positively HOUNDED by your mother to stay focused and get back on task–you either end up doing school until 6pm or you bump things to tomorrow. Tomorrow turns into the next day, and the next, and the next. History ends up happening only a few times a month, and Bible happens even less. There’s no time for homeschool social events because we are falling farther…and farther…and farther behind.

There’s no behind in homeschool…until there is.

I feel like I’m constantly failing. If we do everything I have planned, then it’s 6PM, we are all exhausted. The house is a disaster, Dad is frustrated because the boys didn’t get to household chores, I still have to make dinner, and there has been no time to play outside, exercise, or do anything social.

If I say, “Okay, let’s bump the reading…skip penmanship today…we can do history tomorrow…”, I’m watching our curriculum end dates loom farther and farther away.

Mostly, I blame myself: I’ve been too lax. We spent too much time studying the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. I made the wrong curriculum choices. I shouldn’t have taken him back to first-grade math. I’ve screwed this up.

The reality was this:

I was looking at the future, trying to figure out how to fit 5 years of education in the next 3 years so Ezra could graduate “on time.”

What does graduating “on time” mean for Ezra?

I have friends all over the homeschool spectrum. I have friends who “unschool” and believe their kids don’t need subjects they never used. Others are determined that their children will be completely college-ready or even intend for their high-schoolers to start college courses while still in high school.

Then there’s me.

I have a 15-year-old who still enjoys playing LEGO and Hot Wheels pretend play with his little brother and was ecstatic when I found Thomas the Tank Engine soundtracks on Amazon Prime to listen to. But he also loves to work with his hands. He has learned enough to run our church’s livestream. He also has been alongside his grandpa on car repairs and maintenance—changing oil, replacing brakes and rotors, and fixing a broken side mirror.

He has no desire to go to college. Honestly, he has trouble seeing beyond the next hour, much less visualizing himself as an adult.

He’s completely time-blind. Even with multiple alarms on his watch, he needs constant reminders about things like taking medication on time. He has similar aged peers working at Chick-fil-A, and I’m trying to get him through his seventh-grade language arts without it taking two hours a day.

A well-rounded education is incredibly important to me. I want him to have biology, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, geography, world history, government, economics, and maybe even physics. He’s 15 and we haven’t started any of it.

So with each passing day, my panic and frustration continued to mount.

There’s no behind in homeschool…until there is.

In desperation, on January 23, 2026, I posted in a homeschool Facebook group asking for book recommendations for homeschooling teenage boys with ADHD who struggle with focus, self-discipline, staying on task, and internal motivation.

I also admitted, “He still hasn’t started pre-algebra, and I’m panicking because I don’t think he’s gonna graduate until he’s 20 at this pace.”

The beginnings of a new direction:

A gal named Lindsey responded to my post with a math recommendation: Denison

She said it had helped her struggling daughter become independent and confident in math—and stopped the tears for both of them.

I went to the Denison website and watched their Pre-Algebra flip through, and I was sold. Some of the key differences in the Denison curriculum:

Written by a homeschool dad, Denison is designed for students who struggle with or dislike math. It uses small numbers, clear instructions, humor, ample space in the worktext for notes and work (reducing cognitive drain), and includes both solution guides and videos so students can check their own work.

I ordered Pre-Algebra immediately, and didn’t even make Ezra finish the last 20 lessons of TG&TB Level 6. (And I HATE not finishing curriculum!) He started January 30th, and loved it. A week and a half later he got a 100% on his first two tests!

Ezra doesn’t complain about math anymore. It’s often the subject he chooses to do first, and it rarely takes him longer than 45 minutes. He loves Mr. Denison’s humor and jokes! He has completed 11 out of 16 chapters in just under 7 months and has a 94.5% test average.

As the boys have gotten older, I have observed that they respond SO WELL to video instruction. We used video instruction with Memoria Press for ancient Greece and Rome and Apologia Physical Science. Even with Abeka English, where Ezra complains about how long everything takes, I can see him grasp concepts more readily when someone is actually teaching them.

These were positive changes. But it still wasn’t enough…

By March, I was still looking at the calendar unable to see how we were going to fit everything in for Ezra to graduate on time. Our days were still incredibly long, managing creative distractions was still an exercise in futility, and the end dates for our current curricula were still beyond the horizon.

On March 14, 2026, my Sunday morning alarm went off at 6AM. My waking thought was sheer panic about how we were going to get Ezra through the rest of high school. That’s when I found myself lying on my couch in the dark asking ChatGPT: How “bad” is it for a kid to graduate at 19?

The “conversation” that ensued was exactly what I needed to cut through the fog and noise and look at things realistically.

Is graduating at 19 really harmful?

You mean I won’t have failed? He will actually be okay?

Obviously, ChatGPT isn’t the end-all authority. But reading this was incredibly freeing and comforting. Once I gave myself permission to consider the option of graduating at 19, I felt the panic lifting.

(Yet) another curriculum shift…featuring BJU Press!

The prior evening, I had been looking at curricula (again). I was seeing the benefits of video courses for my kids, but also struggling with Abeka’s intensity. What Abeka excels in (repetition ad nauseum, classroom recitations, and review) also makes slogging through lessons a drag.

Even IF we were considering giving Ezra an extra year of high school, there was still more coursework than time, especially if Abeka courses were taking him more than a year to get through.

I had chosen Abeka World History for the boys to complete in conjunction with each other, but (unlike other curricula we can get through Ezra’s ESA+ Scholarship), I was going to have to purchase everything out of pocket. I started to wonder if Abeka was the right path.

That’s when I found myself really looking at BJU Press. I knew that BJU Press and Abeka are often viewed as the Pepsi and Coke of Christian conservative curriculum, and both were in my Christian school education. I assumed they have similar educational structure and pricing.

But the BJU Press video courses I was looking at were roughly half the cost of the corresponding Abeka courses. So I began researching what other differences there were.

BJU Press had separated from Bob Jones University and had moved away from its old HomeSat/Linc model into prerecorded video instruction. Unlike Abeka’s classroom recordings, BJU’s videos are designed specifically for the individual homeschool student.

The course previews on YouTube looked modern and geared towards kids, with interactive graphs and maps, animations, and silly segments. The videos were also half the length (15-20 minutes instead of 40-50)!

Several homeschool blog posts I read confirmed that BJU Press tends to emphasize critical thinking and application, while Abeka leans more heavily into repetition, review, and drill.

Within 24 hours, our homeschool landscape looked drastically different. If we give Ezra an extra year of high school and switch as quickly as possible to BJU Press for most subjects, we might actually have enough time to give him a quality Christian education, leave room for a social life and career preparation, and still have him graduating at 19.

CLASS OF 2030, here we come!

I approached my husband with this newfound knowledge and tentative plan…and he agreed it looked solid. I expected more pushback about Ezra graduating at 19, but instead he said it sounded like Ezra simply needed the extra time.

When we told Ezra, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sure! That sounds fine!” Later, he was absolutely thrilled to discover that he’d now graduate the same year as his best friend!

I tried to explain that I didn’t view this as a failure at all. He hasn’t let us down, and we haven’t let him down. He just needs an extra year to grow up, finish up a really solid education, and have the space and time to mature into a successful adult.

He graduated from preschool in 2016. Since then, I’ve kept an 8×10 picture on my desk of him holding that little diploma. Sometimes, when life and homeschooling overwhelm me, I look at that picture and envision him walking across the stage in a cap and gown for his high school graduation. I know that when we get there, even though he will be graduating at 19, it will be one of the proudest days of my life.

Later that evening, I broke down in tears of relief. It felt like all the puzzle pieces that were scattered on the table finally made sense. I’m not done putting the puzzle together, but I have the border done, everything is sorted, and I can actually see what it’s going to look like.

I can also now officially tell you what grade my child is in:

As of June 1, 2026, Ezra is officially in ninth grade!

For more of Ezra’s educational journey, you can read the following posts: