A student who has never seen the inside of a high school classroom has finished the year with a perfect exam score.
Stephen Zhang, 17, has been home-schooled since year five and was one of 35 students, from the Australian State of Victoria, to achieve a top mark of 99.95 this year. “I was flabbergasted at first. It was honestly beyond any of my wildest expectations. My parents were very happy for me—we hugged and cried for a while,” said Stephen. His top marks were in line with top students from Melbourne private schools, including Melbourne Girls’ Grammar School and Camberwell Grammar School. The results also secured a national scholarship to study at the University of Melbourne next year.
Stephen said home-schooling was not easy; he would often do up to 12 hours of study a day in preparation for his final exams. Parents Joseph and Sarah decided to bring him back from state school at year five to be more involved in his education. “My parents chose to home-school me because they valued the whole person instead of just academics, they also wanted to instill some personal qualities that they strongly believed in,” he said.
Stephen’s only experience of a state school was in a rural Victorian primary school up to year five. He remembers feeling lonely being the only child of Asian family background. He said home-schooling is better suited to his style of learning compared with the traditional school model as it could be specially designed for his strengths and needs. “During the early years of being taught at home by his mother, ”Stephen said, “they both had to learn the transition from mother and child, to a teacher and student relationship.”
“When we started home-schooling, my mum had to basically learn how to teach,” he said. “And being my mum she was quite strict,” he laughed, “but my end of year results are really a testament(证明) to her and my father.”
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