I am Aditi Laddha, a13 years old girl from India studying in
The Shishukunj International School (Indore ).

I am in 8 th class. I wish to be a good illustrator when I grow up.

At present I have worked for Stone Soup magazines and am a regular illustrator of   Stories for Children Magazine,a monthly Ezine for children . 

 I have won around 23 international awards in drawing contests.

I love eating spicy food and
watching good movies.

            I saw that raised eyebrow – you’re wondering how on earth I can go to a school if I’m homeschooled. Well, we have  our ways. In my case,  my local community college, Middlesex County College in Edison, N.J., has a program that allows high school students to take classes to supplement their curriculums. I've taken classes at the college ever since I was 13. At that time  I took a basic chemistry course with some other homeschooled friends (which is not an experience I’d recommend to any other 13-year-olds out there). Since then, I've taken four semesters of French, a pottery class, summer Algebra II boot camp and some amazing English courses. Tally all of those up, and I've got some elective and humanities credits to save me some money when I finally go to what I call "real college."

            This semester  I'm taking physics, pre-calculus and journalism. It's a challenge to stay on top of assignments when they come at me with the vicious speed of a semester-long college course, but somehow I am managing  all the news stories and lab reports and logarithm problem sets without developing a nervous tic - yet.

            So in one side of my life, I get to take cool classes that aren’t offered to most high school seniors.  But I also get to be part of a vibrant homeschool community. I’m in a Shakespeare class made up of 13- to 18-year-old homeschoolers from all over New Jersey. We meet once a week to do crazy improvisation and group activities, like creating giant animals with our bodies or turning sonnets into mini-plays. Over the past two years  I’ve become really close to all of the awesome kids in the class.

            Other than courses taken at home and isolated classes, there are homeschool co-ops (short for co-operatives), which are groups of families that meet, usually weekly, to take one or several classes together. There are co-ops for everything from biology lab to a homeschooler orchestra. I teach beginner’s French to 3rd- through 6th-graders at a co-op that my mother founded three years ago. I have eight amazing students  and they are all très fun. I’m also a student leader of sorts in my local Institute for Cultural Communicators speech chapter, which is part of a different co-op.

                 I help organize and edit things, and critique and train kids to be better public speakers. I have so many different vibrant social circles I get to be part of -- my church friends, my friends at my job at Chik-Fil-A, my homeschool co-op friends, and my MCC friends. When people ask if I go to school, I jokingly say that I actually go to five different schools because of all the different places I go and people I see during my week.

Lots of people think that homeschooling is all about being trapped in a house and that homeschoolers never get to see the light of day. But for me and most other homeschoolers,  homeschooling is freeing . I've been able to speed ahead with the classes I want to spend time on and slow down on grasping harder subjects. I've been able to make friends with old and young people from different countries and walks of life and I've been able to spend a lot of time with my family. I wouldn't trade it for anything!

Biyu at home relaxing.

By Xu Li

When I was eleven years old, I faced a whole new world – my family immigrated to the United States. Everything was different from China, especially the language. No one spoke Chinese at my new school in Edison, New Jersey. Although I had a translator who was Chinese, we couldn’t understand each other because he spoke Cantonese and I spoke Mandarin, the official language of China.

I had learned many formal English phrases in China, but I quickly learned they were not useful in the United States.

When I met my classmates, none of them said, “How do you do?” so that I couldn’t say, “How do you do!” Instead, my classmates said, “Hi” “Yo” and “What’s up?”

My tongue was so tight that I couldn’t say a word, and I forgot all the sentences I had learned. I couldn’t understand a single word as my classmates welcomed me. I tried to smile and show my friendliness, but the smile froze on my face. I could hardly move my head, and my feet stuck to the floor.

What’s worse was that I couldn’t even understand a single sentence during my teacher’s lesson, even though I had listened to many ESL tapes right after I came here. Why couldn’t I understand? I felt that I was both deaf and mute. I didn’t know how I could begin to understand English. For the rest of the class, I didn’t hear anything my teacher said.

What’s worst was that I could only blindly answer “yes” or “no” to every single question from my classmates during recess.  Some of them laughed so hard at my answers that they could barely stand upright. I wished that I had a magic translator in my brain, and also I wished for a hole that I could hide in. I was saved by the bell, but when back in the classroom, I just stared at the board without seeing or hearing.

Then, I remembered what my dad told me that he used to call 1-800 to listen to the menus again and again to train his listening during his first half-year in the US. So I tried to listen to the lesson, and copied as many words on the board as possible and took the notes home to study.

I borrowed easy books and cassettes, and short biographies of American Presidents from libraries. With my mom’s help, I worked four hours a day and soon I could read a bit by myself and could understand a little of my teacher.

One day I understood a complete sentence during recess – “What’s up?” That night, I told my mom excitedly, but I was confused because nobody looked up.

Mom said, “Maybe it’s like WATCH OUT. Maybe it’s a rhetoric which implies watch out.”

The big day finally came. I suddenly understood several students during recess — “We can play pushing game again with Mr.Yes-or-No.” the pushing game was a trick they played on me – they had called it a game, but it was just an excuse to push me around. I would not play that again.

At the end of the school year, I could understand and participate in class and made some friends.      

Summer was coming fast and I made a big decision to complete summer readings. My first target was Hatchet. I flipped open the book, and I was stunned. Holding my breath, I counted fifty vocabulary words in two pages. Disappointed and frustrated, I put down the book and turned on the TV. However, I couldn’t watch the TV. I almost cried. Holding tears in my eyes, I told myself crying isn’t a boy’s behavior.

I counted one, two three, and then I wrote a daily plan: make vocabulary list, memorize 50 words, read 2 pages. I started to make the vocabulary list, and I found a big secret buried in the lines within several minutes — I found that PILOT repeated six times, HEADSET repeated four times, RADIO repeated three times, DASHBOARD repeated two times, and … more. There were only about 30 new words in the two pages! With my mom’s help, summer reading started.

I was so excited — I understood a sentence that was seven lines long on the bottom of page two! I couldn’t wait for the second day to read, so I read 4 pages on the first day. We usually worked fourteen hours a day. For every sentence we had to piece together each individual word. Sometimes the finished puzzle didn’t make sense because many words had multiple meanings, and we lacked grammar skills.

Finally, after three weeks, we finished the first book. By the end of the summer, I was so proud because I had finished four summer reading books. The school only required one, even for the regular students.

     When sixth grade started, I was still placed in ESL level 1 because I had been in the U.S only half a year. However, a week later, my schedule changed — I moved up to level 2 ESL. After two weeks, my schedule changed again — I moved up to regular science class.

By the end of my sixth grade, I successfully passed the ESL exam and skipped the three remaining ESL levels. All of my teachers congratulated me.

During that summer before we moved to another apartment. I found an old sheet hanging on the wall with many different phrases, like “Where is the restroom?” “Where is the library?” “I’d like …” “Would you please tell me …” “May I beg your pardon?” I remembered that I used to read them every morning before school. But right now, I was a regular student.

In seventh grade, I took all the regular courses. I am currently taking AP Literature, and I enjoy the study of English.

No matter how difficult the situation is, a positive attitude will always help. Along with hard work, everything is possible.