Homeschool Therapy

"We don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents."  ~ Bob Ross

It's been a wild 10 days of homeschool around these parts.  It has really challenged me by questioning myself as his teacher or if the homeschool route is right for our family at all.  It also helped me in that I have had to force myself to evaluate my reasons for homeschool, and be able to verbalize core values as to why we are doing this.  There's been some tears (mine) and frustration (mine again) and lots of ranting (as ever, me).

But here's where the problem lay:  pace and load of work to complete, and my maniacal reaction to both external expectations (i.e. the program's daily schedule) and internal expectations (to be perfect).  The daily plan the online k12 academy has prescheduled for us requires 5 subjects at an hour each per day.  So, the poor child was on the floor with his ruler to measure his shoe at 9 at night before going to bed to complete the science component of his daily agenda, after three and half hours throughout the day for his other subjects.  It looked like this in just his math:

Day 1:
Learn to count to 50

Day 2:
Learn to write numbers to 50

Day 3:
Learn to count to 50 by 10s

Day 4:
Learn to count to 50 by 5s

Day 5:
Learn to count to 50 by 2s.

Seriously.  Math is not his strong suit and to master the learning goal before we moved on to the next day was excruciating.  Good thing he's smart and remembered his numbers from our pre-K days in May (!!!) he could still count to 50 and write the numbers, phew!  But skip counting was brutal and required lots of practice and playing with the plastic manipulatives and memorization before he could be ready to move on.

Language Arts was the same way, having him begin the earliest stages of sentence diagraming before he had truly mastered what a sentence looked like!  But me, being me in all my broken glory, was determined to have him follow that stupid schedule because he would be going to school and a teacher would be able to tell if he had fallen behind!  Here ya go, Andria, shovel another heaping spoonful of stress to your plate.

He's rocking the casba in reading, though, and he loves reading to us at night before bed.  Since he was eighteen months old he has always fallen to sleep in a nest of books that we have had to slip out of his fingers, from out behind his head, or from under his little arm, before we went to bed.  Bibliophilism is rare in boys, something more common with girls, and more natural for girls to acquire reading earlier, as it's biologically the way their brains are designed.  But he's a storyteller at heart, and books are his favorite thing in the world.  So his passion to read well spurs his learning, and he's doing amazingly well.  No sweat there!  We can zip through reading in about 20 minutes.

After falling painfully behind in History and Science (entirely online texts and activities) I decided to bottle up my rage (always a good idea, right?) about the unreasonable volume of online content and save it for our conference with his teacher this week.  We're pretty stern about screen time with the boys and the fact that the program requires us to read from the computer and have him watch lame little videos on the computer, and click his way through assessments on the computer, rounding it out to about two hours a day online.  The program was not realistic at all, went against the grain as far as our values regarding screen time, and I was ready to drop out.

In fact, Wednesday was such a horrible day in school (because the child is simply NOT ready to diagram sentences!) that I was honestly convinced I could NOT do this job and we needed to march right into Riverview Elementary and register him for kindergarten on Thursday.  I called Aaron at work sobbing, and he patiently encouraged me, and reminded me to hold out until we had the teacher conference.  He also was honestly impressed with how well Andres and I were doing, and had admitted he expected me to be calling him about once a day since we started, and since this was the first time in 8 days, he felt we were a raging success!  My husband is gifted like this.  He's a blessed soul, a glass-is-half-full kind of guy.  This is one little reason (of countless) God created us for each other.  Where I saw Andres' chances of ever going to college go down in an inferno of fire and sulfur because he couldn't count by 2s to 50 on Day 5 of kindergarten,  Aaron saw a son learning new things and feeling proud of his work, and a mom working hard from the deepest corners of her heart to teach her child.  He's a good, good man, and has such clarity.

I also called my friend Rachel, in her second year of homeschool, and she listened to my ranting then gently offered encouragement and perspective.  Yes, these days happen.  They happen in public school, too.  And she helped turn my head from frustration with myself, to identifying my disillusion with the program.

The following day the boys and I went for a walk to that special little park near our house, and it just so happens to be down the road from Riverview Elementary.  On the way there, the playground was full of children, their squeals and voices filled the air, and the three of us, Raph in his stroller, watched in silence as we passed.  We relished the warm, pine scented zephyr pushing over the bark chips at our little park for an hour before it was time to return home, and Andres asked if we could go inside the school on our way home.  To myself I thought "sure why not?" considering how badly it went the day before we might as well consider it as a viable and realistic option.  So we entered the doors and made our way through the lunch lines of kids waiting to get into the cafeteria to reach the front desk.  The secretary was pleasant enough, and an odd expression crossed her face when I mentioned that we're presently homeschooling, but were thinking of enrolling.  But I expected that.  She politely handed me a registration packet, but I got the overall feeling that it was not a good fit.

But here's what broke my heart.

As we made our way to the doors as exited, we bumped into a little friend we know from church.  She waved at Andres and he waved back.  Then behind her, about three kids back, a boy made a mocking face at Andres and waved a fleshy, floppy hand at him.  "Bye bye" he said with a castrato voice.  A couple boys around him snickered.  And my child smiled warmly at him and said "bye."  When we made it through the myriad of kids, he asked me why that boy waved to him, since he didn't know him.

"He was trying to be funny," I said.

I walked home praying.  Part of me worries that Andres isn't around the larger culture enough to pick up social nuances such as when he's being teased, for instance.  I also wonder what he would gain from being in public school, how it would change his personality or hinder/distract him from learning, or how he could face the challenges and grow by fighting his way through.  It was feeling like both choices were wrong, and I started to dispair.

After the carnage of homeschool Wednesday, we needed a cozy, easy day where we could snuggle in and reconnect; we needed triage.  And it was lovely.  We worked on handwriting and read together.  And I loved it.  I love watching the magic of reading emerge in him.  And then I felt that I had my answer, and the struggles I had were much deeper than what I thought.  The struggles I had were mine. There is no wrong answer, because I've learned first hand how God can take big mistakes and use them for good in our lives, if we let him.  That I have always struggled with being part of broken home, and never really having a normal (read nonalcoholic) family, or even a respectable family, my own insecurities of apartness are impressed (unwillingly) onto my children.  And my fears of Andres being marginalized, or being lesser in some way, less prepared to operate in the "real world" or get a "real job" or become a productive, functional citizen in society because he's homeschooled, surfaced.

This morning we all loaded up at 8:20 to make the conference with his teacher.  (Aaron was able to take a vacation day to make the meeting because he wanted to be there for it.)  She was really awesome, and let Andres play with legos as she spoke with me and Aaron.  She shared with me that other parents were overwhelmed with the online feature and reassured me that it is only a guide, and that really, I should be just doing (here's the kicker) about 5-10 hours a week TOTAL at home, since he spends another 5 hours with her.  So you mean I don't have to do 5 hours a day?  Nope.  The breakneck pace online is NOT to be followed ver batem, and she won't be correlating her activities and explorations with the schedule in that program, but will be monitoring his progress to make sure he IS progressing, keeping in close contact with us as she observes him in class. So, in two weeks Andres is nearly a third of the way through kindergarten. She gave us total peace of mind, and we left feeling recharged and energized, eager and excited for this year in Kindergarten.  She reminded me that education is real world, that he can learn at the grocery store (which we use as a learning tool for conversations on everything from health and counting to agriculture and economy), at the park, on a hike.  This is exactly what we had wanted after all.

The truth is we simply are not a normal family.  Aaron and I have always done things skewed, and not just out of order, but angled completely differently.  We're alternative.  Not bad or wrong, but different.  And at the end of the day, how can I expect my alternative child to be confortable in his skin if I can't model that?  And how can I encourage him to follow his heart and listen to God's voice if I myself am filled with questions and doubts?  We're a weird, indie, artsy family. And this crazy journey in homeschooling is teaching me that it's okay.  Go with it.  Groove with it.  Dance with God.  And let Him lead.