I want to be a ballet dancer when I’m old enough. Right now I am 14 and in 10th grade. I am taking 10 classes outside of school, 5 days a week. My mom says that she will support me in becoming a dancer but only if I keep up good grades and get GREAT standardized test scores. I’m having trouble keeping up with school work with this much dance all the time. Unfortunatley, my parents are divorced, my dad works all the time and travels frequently. My mom also work a full time job usually 5-6 days a week. I was wondering if any one had any idea if I could be home schooled and how it would work. Are there online classes that I could do at home at a faster pace that will still allow me to graduate and have a safety net in case ballet doesn’t work out? Any info would be a great help! Even if you aren’t a dancer, I also need info on home schooling in general.
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If your mom is out of the house working, and you are home alone taking online classes, that sounds like a really isolating life.
If you want to be a ballet dancer (and while an admirable goal), it’s like being a pro football player. Best case scenario, you have a potential career span of 8 to 10 years tops. Ballet dancers make very small salaries and rarely are able to support themselves from dancing alone. Think for a minute about how many professional ballet companies there are in the country and how many dancers each one hires. This is a very small number, probably less than a few hundred people in the whole nation.
You say nothing about whether you have any experience as a dancer and whether you have any talent for it. At 14, if you don’t already have years of experience dancing, it is really too late to mold your body to the point of becoming a professional dancer. Again, think about the analogy of a pro football player. If a boy doesn’t start playing football by age 14, it is unlikely he is going to make his high school team, which he needs to do to make a college team and a pro team.
Yes, by all means, be a dancer, it is wonderful discipline, exhilarating, beautiful, sweaty, bone-jarring, muscle-tearing work. (I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything.) But understand the limits of dance as a life’s work, do you want to teach later, be a choreographer, a producer? These are the natural progressions for a dancer who stays in that world.
Back to your first question. Your state will have standards about home schooling, talking to someone in the office of your home city school district should be your first phone call.