My oldest son is crying on his bed right now. I told him he was welcome to come down as soon as he was prepared to finish an assignment. "You're never going to see me again then," he announced dramatically, his tear-stained face pink and angry.
When he was five, homeschooling was the clear choice for kindergarten. He was ahead of the curve academically and a little behind it socially. I knew that putting him in an environment that left him simultaneously stressed and bored was a recipe for disaster. Whatever choices we made in the future, I didn't want him to think of school as "that place where I get in trouble every day."
Our family has been through enough transitions recently that homeschooling has continued to be a good choice, albeit a difficult one. We had a really nice kindergarten year and a rockier first grade year. Second grade has wrung me out.
I have posted very little about homeschooling, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because it is a minefield for a perfectionist like me, and I dread the thought of criticism. Maybe because it's been so rough this year. We've had some good days, but we've had too many conflicts like this one.
Right before Christmas, the NY Times published an essay in response to those studies about how bad American kids are at math. The writer said, "Who needs math when those nice Asians will do it for us? I can't help my high school kid with her math homework and I don't care." I put down the paper and said to my husband, "If you couldn't solve two equations in two variables, would you admit it in the New York Times? I could teach Alex how to do that in a week."
The next morning, I said, "Hey, let's pretend we're planning your birthday party. If you get six trays of sushi and four cartons of ice cream, it costs $44. If you get five trays of sushi and eight cartons of ice cream, it costs $60. How much does each one cost?" That was Monday. By Thursday, he could write down the equations when I gave him a problem. He needed a little guidance to isolate one of the variables, but then it was easy for him to find x, plug it in, and figure out y. He thought it was fun. I did too.
(This is another reason I have seldom posted about homeschooling: my oldest son is a sharp cookie and I don't want to sound boastful.)
But too often it goes sour unexpectedly. This morning we were reading Story of the World on the porch swing, surrounded by daffodils and birdsong. I was thinking we should have a little Paul Revere party on April 18. It was all very pleasant. But when I said, "Okay, time to write down some of the things you want to remember from this chapter" -- kablooey.
I am tired of kablooeys.
Last fall I went to an unschooling workshop. It was thought-provoking and enjoyable but it confirmed my feeling that unschooling is not for me. The featured speaker talked about her son learning to use commas at age 18 -- an anecdote which she told with satisfaction but which horrified me. In my view, if my son cannot use commas at age 18 I will have let him down badly.
But I am also not a workbook-y kind of homeschooler. We don't do spelling drills, or Latin vocabulary drills, and our three years of math lessons have all been "let's sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and see where it takes us this week" kinds of things. (If there are any other laid-back math types out there, my husband bought a book called The Number Devil which Alex has read over and over again -- he loves it.)
In between paragraphs I went upstairs to confirm that yes, I am really an evil ogre who eats small children with horseradish and apricot jam I was serious about writing down some things to remember. I fixed a quick lunch for the boy who said earnestly, "Part of the problem is that I'm hungry." I stayed beside him while he wrote down six things that caught his fancy in the chapter we read. Now he is happily writing the story of an alien civilization in side-by-side English and alien pictographs. All's well that ends well for him. For me -- I'm not so sure.
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