…this post is for you. Hope you all have a great start to the school year!

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Sharp new pencils, crisp clean notebooks, unsullied glue sticks, markers still inked up and ready to go. Fall has definitely descended upon Target.

This wonder is lost neither on me nor on my kids. When I see the preprinted lists of back to school supplies on the cardboard racks, I feel a slight twinge because I’m not required to follow a list to get what my kids need for school, and they miss out on the cultural rite of passage of selecting a new backpack and lunch box each year.

Still, there is something about joining these kids and parents digging through the bins of 25-cent crayons that brings us together, regardless of our schooling choice: We are thinking about and preparing for another season of educational intention with our kids.

Having a husband who is a schoolteacher is of great benefit to this homeschooling family. When he returned to the classroom two weeks ago (which seemed insanely early, but not unusual), it spurred a natural response in my own kids to resume their studies. When I announced to them that we would begin our own studies within four days, they were neither surprised nor disappointed; it was the natural course of things.

Similarly, I have become Facebook friends with a lot of people from my past who are now living out their lives in the field of public education. The homeschooling me of three years ago would have really been intimidated by this, but the homeschooling me of now knows that we’re not enemies; we’re both doing what we believe is the best thing for our kids. Their shared enthusiasm inspires me to be a better teacher in my own home, and I’d like to hope my zeal does the same for them in their classrooms.

When I see my friends with children in the local public school gather together weekly to pray for their children and their teachers, it strikes something very deep inside me. I’m proud of them for doing that; I need to do the same within my own school at home.

Proverbs 27:17 says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” In the sometimes-fierce educational philosophy debates, the tendency is to be sharpened so much that we have a dangerous edge. I think if we allow ourselves to drop our defenses, we would see we actually have much to learn from one another . . . and much to teach our children by doing so.

I’m a homeschool mom. And I like standardized testing. Any questions?

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I have a dirty little homeschooling secret: My kids take standardized tests every year.

I can hear the gasps among all the homeschoolers—some because we participate in that educational evil, the standardized test; others because we do it every year. Either way, I find myself defending our decision more than I ever thought I would.

I understand many homeschoolers, for reasons legitimate and otherwise, don’t want to be accountable to the state when it comes to educating their children. I also get that standardized tests don’t account for the differences in how many families study core subjects. Finally, I believe that being my kids’ teacher and discussing what we learn gives me an intuitive understanding of what they know (I don’t need a test to tell me).

But there are benefits to objective analysis. My oldest daughter learned to read at the expected age of kindergarten and first grade; she finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe all on her own when she was 6. But she hated math to the point of daily tears. Not wanting to stress her out, I let math slide that year and focused on her strengths. Not surprisingly (though I wouldn’t have known it without the Stanford test she took that May), by the time she finished third grade, her reading level was in the high school range, but her math level was stuck in first grade.

I didn’t need a test to tell me that. I knew she excelled at the one and struggled with the other. But having it objectively stated on the test results sheet was very productive for all of us. Having that mark of first grade level on my otherwise intelligent, entering-fourth grade daughter spurred me to action. It spurred her to action as well. We helped her set some goals for herself for the school year, among which was to raise her math score on the standardized test the following year.

Fast-forward 365 days and a whole lot of hard work: My daughter’s math scores were four grades higher than they were the year before. This was cause for much rejoicing.

Again, I didn’t need the test to tell me she had made improvement, but honestly, I didn’t know exactly how much of an improvement she’d made until I saw an objective analysis of her ability. Whereas the test from the year before surprised me by how much she didn’t know, the current year’s test surprised me by how much she had learned since. And it was encouraging.

Some would say that experience is the best teacher, but what we’ve found out is that it isn’t experience that is the best teacher; evaluated experience is. For our family, that’s what standardized testing—three days, once a year—helps provide.