Might As Well Be Homeschooling Again

I had a recent conference with Dante's 5th grade teacher, and he is improving, thanks in large part to parental vigilance and reteaching at home. He still has to have behavior reports that come home every day, but that's because he has to be kept on his toes and worry that I'm going to know he's diddling around at school in order for him to stay focused. At home, I help him study for tests, I remake worksheets for him to do, and I create extra practice for him. I currently have his reading book so that I can copy the reading he has as well as a fat packet of all the upcoming vocabulary they're working on, because both of those points are his current weaker spots. At school and with everyone on his back all the time, he's a solid 'B' student. He's capable of making A's, but he has to have internal motivation kick in first, which sometimes happens. Mainly, he's at B's and C's. Which I'm OK with. Every parent wants their child to be "superior", which is what an A stands for, but most kids just can't be "superior" in every subject. That's unrealistic and unreasonable.

I think that's what I miss the most about homeschooling--the ability to throw off slaving after grades in favor of working toward understanding. Being able to cough up points on a worksheet or a test is not a true measure of whether a student understands something or not. I should know--I get roomfuls of people each semester who've been able to pass tests to get into college but can't think their way out of a paper bag. It's depressing. But because they probably got A's & B's, they think that's enough to make them "smart". One of the things they talk/write about all the time is how high school was so easy that they never had to study to make A's (seriously, in AP Physics????? not once??), and now college is kicking their soft little asses hard. When we homeschooled, it was about whether or not you "got it" rather than how you did on a worksheet.

Homeschooling failed as a choice for me & Dante for a number of reasons. I think the main reason was we simply didn't give it enough time. It takes time to figure out how to work things out as a family, how Dante learns best, how I can be comfortable with what we're doing. We didn't give it enough time, and he was miserable up here and wanted to go back to KY for a while. So, we aborted. Towards the end, before he went to KY, he was improving scholastically. When he started school there, he was reading above grade level (the first and only time that's happened--he's currently reading below grade level, which is why I have the book and the vocab sheets).

We also failed at homeschooling because of the decompression/starting in the middle problem. I don't know anybody on the net or in my life who homeschooled anywhere but from the beginning. It's different when you start in the middle--much different, especially if you have only one child. And going to kindergarten or even first grade, in my opinion, doesn't really count as starting in the "middle." Once they've had two or three or more years of public school, unless they are just abjectly miserable at school, coming home to school is a difficult transition. And the only advice people could really give me is that he needed to "decompress" from public school, one month for every year he had attended. He had finally started decompressing a bit just before he left for KY. He was beginning to work out his own schedule. On Friday mornings, pretty early, really, he would get up, bundle himself up, and drag all the library books we'd gotten the day before into the living room and there he would be, reading them one after one while I got breakfast ready. Fridays were reading and project days for us. But truthfully, we were still in transition when he left. I think we were doing better, but there were plenty of tearful days and arguments, which contributed to another reason why we failed at homeschooling.

The rest of the family was against it. I know this is true for most people, but your own core family has to be for it or it just won't work. My side of the family, Dante's father and family, and El Hijo's family were all against it, and when that happens, people are just waiting for a chance to jump on situations that prove their biases to them. It didn't work because El Hijo was also against it. I don't resent him for this. We were newly married, and he was still figuring out what being a husband and a stepdad was all about, while we were figuring out what having a husband and a stepdad was all about. I didn't expect him to co-teach, a lot of families have only one person who oversees the learning. But he wasn't really very interested in what we were doing, either. And when you start out by yourself on a homeschooling venture, there can be a lot of self-doubt. It doesn't help if the answer to all your doubts is "Maybe you should just quit, and put him back in school." He didn't know how to help us resolve disputes and he didn't know how to help me figure out what path to take. Dante also wanted to be back in school for the social elements. Even though we were busier socially and did more things with other kids when we were homeschooling than at any time that he's been in public school, his perception of "socialization" (as is most people's who don't know much about hsing) was that it equals sitting next to other children for six hours a day. Even though you get into trouble for talking and socializing with those children, it's the sitting next to them that counted to him, and that's what he wanted to do. So, trying to open up his view on those sorts of things on top of being told on all sides "This is wrong, and you should stop" probably didn't help us succeed.

What sucks to me personally is that I'm basically doing at least half the effort I was putting into homeschooling now with him in public school. I think it hit me a few days ago when I was in a craft store finishing up plans for one of El Hijo's Xmas presents. There was an atom and molecule set that you could buy--plastic styrofoam balls with rods. Dante has been doing atoms in science recently, and I picked up the box, looked at the contents and was busy thinking about how this would probably be of use in the near future in explaining chemical compounds and such. And then it hit me that it was the exact same thing I would've done if I had been in charge of his science at this point. And then I reminded myself that I was still on the hunt for a small and cheap microscope and was still making plans to rearrange his room a little bit so that he could have table space to work on. He has a natural interest in biology that I want to encourage, but now I have to figure out how to sync up with what he's going to be tested on in school, even though I really wanted to linger over the unit they were doing on plants, and so did he. We made a geography board out of a plastic placemat I found at WalMart with a map of the US on it (it's still there and it's only 99 cents, if you're interested) and a bunch of football symbols from his ESPN kids magazines. I cut out the US map and put it on a corkboard, and then we thumbtacked the football helmets with symbols on them, etc. to pieces of black string that pointed to the states they were in, in an attempt to get him to think about US geography. They're going over the American expansion westward in school right now, so I'll have to see how I can sync up the map we made with the maps that are coming home from school.

It hurts that we didn't work out, because I worked so hard to make it work. We still have the history timeline we did while he was homeschooling up on the wall in the library--El Hijo hung it there like art. It breaks my heart a little every time I look at it. We had labeled the period of time and gave it an approximate date, and then drew a corresponding picture under that. He worked particularly hard on representing the story of Gilgamesh, which we read out loud, and he liked quite a bit. He also got into the weirdness of the Egyptians, and drew a bunch of their gods and goddesses under their entry. I had figured out towards the end of it that Dante did a lot better if drawing or clay or music was involved, if he could move around a lot, and if you gave him lots of chances to be physical. We did a lot of little experiments outside. I remember we made deer ears out of construction paper to talk about sound and how they were different from human ears. Little stuff. I mean, sure there were days when he sat himself down in the hallway and squalled at the top of his lungs that he wasn't going to DO IT AT ALL; but there were also days where he piled all of his books on the couch, curled up, and did it all by himself.

I wish we could do homeschooling again. But I don't think it would work, because all those things that made it fail are still in place right now. Add that to the fact that I have to work because we don't have enough income for me not to, and you get a big, fat scheduling conflict. And I'm postitive that El Hijo is uninterested in being a co-teacher, which is well within his personal rights in our relationship--it's not like we talked about it before we got married. Well we did, but not much. So, that puts more of a burden on me to figure out how to do it by myself, to come up with the planning and the resources and to figure out how to do it during the time that I have. But what kind of pisses me off is that this is what I'm doing now anyway for public school. I'm the one who oversees 9/10ths of the homework, who does the extra planning to make sure he's up to speed, who puts down the money and investigates the outside of school activities (like art classes) to help round him out.

I might as well be homeschooling. In fact, that's my secret dream. I'd love to take another shot at it. But as much as I want to do that, I don't have the emotional resources to fight that battle all over again by myself. It's honestly the only thing I think I'll regret not having done in my life. I don't see as I have a choice. So, I guess we battle on as best we can. But there is my Christmas wish, if you will. And since it's the one thing I can't do by myself, it goes undone.

-- DV