Astonishingly, it has been five years and one month since we graduated from high school in May 2008. So much has happened since then! On that memorable day we were blessed to have over 150 friends gather in our yard to share in the celebration. As part of the event, the two of us teamed up to deliver a speech. In honor of the day, we’ve decided to share a portion of that speech with you.
Graduation Speech
Gratitude for the Past & Hope for the Future
Firstly, we would like to thank all of you for being with us today. It is such a joy for us to be able to share this celebration with you.
For our family, this is not only a celebration of our high school graduation, but of twelve years of successful homeschooling.
Especially during our high school years, when we would meet someone, one of the first questions they would ask us was, “Where do you go to school?” Of course, we would say something like, “Oh, we’re homeschooled,” and to save them the trouble of asking the question that invariably would follow, I would usually add, “And we like it”. However, a few months ago I was thinking about these conversations and realized that this wasn’t really true. We don’t “like” homeschooling; We LOVE homeschooling!
As we look back on our twelve years of home education, we recognize that two of the greatest gifts we have gleaned from these years are gratitude for the past and hope for the future.
Above all, we are very thankful to God for these twelve years because it is He who enabled us to begin, to continue, and to finish our homeschooling adventure....
And, God has given us grandparents—a great gift. We have been so very blessed to have not only our biological grandparents but also “adopted” grandparents like Mr. and Mrs. Chase, whom we would like to thank for all that they have done for our family and for being such godly examples for us to look to.
Of course, we also want to thank our “real” grandparents, firstly, Kenneth and Alice Hammer for all they have done for us, for telling us their stories and for sharing their wisdom and their pies that you will get to eat in a little bit. We are proud of our grandfather served in the United States Air Force during WWII and of our Grandma who gallantly supported the “soldier boys” on the homefront. We thank them for their sacrifices as they kept in mind not only their own future but the future of their nation. We are also grateful to them for all they did for their son Steven—our father—for the trips through the States and overseas and for the economics lessons at the dinner table and all the other good things they did that laid a foundation for our family.
Secondly, we want to thank Dan and Ruth Greenwood for all they have done for us, for sharing their stories, for moving out of their home and keeping our house while we were in Guatemala and for making cleaning seem fun. We especially want to thank Grandpa for doing something that few fathers did in the 1960s: He would sit his children down and explain to them the importance of family, “The way of the family is the way of nation,” he would say. “We must be a strong family.” And, we especially want to thank Grandma for making a foundational point to our mother. When Mom would come home from public high school and ask, “Mom, is what everyone is saying true? Does a woman have to have a career, wealth, and prestige to be fulfilled?” Grandma would reply, “Well, I’ve always believed that the best thing a woman can do is to raise a good family.” Even though these may seem like insignificant events, these moments are priceless to our mother and to us. ...Our homeschooling adventure began in a large part due to the lessons Grandma and Grandpa taught our mother, and we thank them.
Now we come to the two people who have been most instrumental in our education, our godly mother and father. Next to God it is to them that we owe any success we have had....We are grateful that our parents had the courage to step completely into something they had rarely seen done before. They had few examples before them, but they were willing to try it.
And, thus, year by year, our family continued homeschooling. Now as we look back on these twelve years, we do see things that we would change if we did it again, but we have absolutely no regrets that we chose home education over all the options offered to us. In fact, our family is far more convinced about homeschooling now than we have ever been before.
We have successfully home educated in four different homes, in two different countries, at times where we hardly ever cracked the cover of a textbook and at times when we used nothing but textbooks. One thing about the Hammer family that has helped us home educate is that we love books. We still laugh over the fact that at the first homeschooling conference that our parents went to, our father purchased the complete World Book Encyclopedia set for his daughters’ use. Mom was skeptical because we were only three years old, but she also has been known to buy books ahead of time. We owe a lot to our parents for instilling in us a love for books by reading to us every night....
Well, there you go! That’s a snapshot of a special moment of our lives. We’re glad to say that we still love home education - and that if we were going to do this speech over again, we might be able to write it better!
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