After her sophomore year, Caroline Feddeler felt she was at a crossroads.
Having spent kindergarten through fifth grade at Our Lady of Grace in Highland, she was home-schooled on-and-off before completing her first two years of high school at Marian Catholic in Chicago Heights, Ill.
Quiet and cerebral, Caroline, 17, was increasingly frustrated at the prospect of returning to school. She said she wanted a tougher challenge and moving her learning from the classroom back to her home was the answer.
Earlier this month, Feddeler was one of just hundreds of students — and only six home-schooled students — to be named a National Merit Scholar semifinalist in Indiana.
The designation is for juniors that score in the top 3 percent on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) nationally. Her score was 1,510 out of 1,520.
“It’s an achievement into itself to actually be a National Merit Scholar semifinalist,” said National Merit Scholarship Corp. spokesman Matt Budreau. “Each student should feel very proud that they are part of our programs.”
The summer before her junior year, she’d been assigned coursework, annotating five or six books, Caroline said. She and her family began to question if traditional schoolwork was the best use of her time.
With that summer workload, “you’re taking away even their free time when they can learn who they are meant to become” before they go to college, said her mother, Jennifer.
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Backed by her parents, Caroline opted to switch back to home-schooling for her final two years of high school.
“I mean, I understand the value of working on what you struggle at,” Caroline said. “That’s why I had to leave, because I wasn’t working on what I was struggling at. I was working on what I already knew.”
It was a judgment call, based on how best to harness her interests, what suited her personality and her capacity to do it, said Jennifer.
Now for two semesters, Caroline has taken classes at Purdue University Northwest. This semester she is studying calculus and physics. She is planning to take an additional college-level government class online, and also works part-time at the library.
Caroline still sees friends, but does not regret leaving a high school setting, she said. It suits her personality and since she was home-taught through much of middle school, it wasn’t an adjustment.
Originally, she had no intention of home-schooling, Jennifer said. A former math teacher, it was not a one-size-fits-all solution for her five children.
Staying at home has given her daughter the opportunity to get one-on-one attention tailored to her interests and academic needs, rather than being one of many in a classroom, Jennifer said.
Her daughter writes well, is adept at math, plays violin and piano and has an interest in foreign languages, including Latin, which she has studied. Rather than writing repeated term papers, she’s done customized literature lessons like creating a children’s book based on the Iliad, according to her mother.
While her youngest three children, aged 12, 9 and 6, are also home-schooled, her only son, 15, attends Bishop Noll Institute, because he needs the structure and academic motivation to play sports, she said.
“I think every kid is different,” Jennifer said. “As a parent, you have to know your kids, listen to your kids. I don’t mean they always get what they want.”
In her daughter’s case, “sometimes it’s just really, they are saying this is not valuable to me. I want more. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be educated. It’s just that she didn’t want to sit in a classroom and waste her time.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of home-schooled students has grown nationally to 1.8 million (3.4 percent) in 2012 from 850,000 (1.7 percent) in 1999.
A 2012 study of more than 11,000 students in 50 states that were given standardized tests from California and Iowa showed they landed in the 89th percentile for reading and 84th percentile for math.
Reasons for home-schooling varied, according to the study. Topping the list were dissatisfaction with institutional academics, concerns about school environment or a desire for religiously oriented instruction.
Feddeler is considering colleges including Georgia Tech and Purdue. She wants to become an engineer — possibly aeronautical — although is not entirely sure how she wants to chart her career.
Across Northwest Indiana, high schools with semifinalists this year were Chesterton, 6; Crown Point, 1; Andrean, 4; Munster, 10; and Valparaiso, 4.
National Merit Scholar finalists will be announced in the spring.
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