It's a new school year, and many new homeschoolers have started in teaching their children at home here in Pennsylvania. The phone here was ringing fast and furious all through August and early September with new families needing last minute information or support. I'm sure its been the same with all support groups across the state, and I hope all new families have received the help they need. We warmly welcome all first time homeschoolers, and wish you the very best. We hope that through the networks and support groups all across the state and the letters and articles in PA HOMESCHOOLERS and local newsletters, that you can find that supportive voice to help you keep going even if the going gets rough-- which it most likely will at some point in your year.
I thought, too, that maybe first time homeschoolers might be relieved to hear that ALL of us, no matter how long we've been at it, have areas of difficulty with our children and have times when everything seems to go a bit (or a lot!) wrong, and days when we are left seriously wondering if this one can honestly count as "a day", one of the official 180. Many of us, if we're honest, would probably admit that we've even threatened to send our children on to "real" school if things don't turn around for the better (yes,I have too....).
The rough times happen around here just as around most homes. I guess we all imagine that everyone else has all facets of their homeschooling lives in order-- no one else could be struggling like we feel we are at times. So I've compiled a list of "One Dozen Things That Still Challenge Me Even After 8 Years of Homeschooling." I don't write this to discourage you, but just to let everyone realize again that we're all in some of the same boats together, and we all have doubts and worries and anxieties-- as well as the successes we all usually write about. So here's my personal "dozen."
1) I still feel overwhelmed when I see all the catalogs and read all the brochures about great and wonderful and new curriculum materials. I don't know automatically what will be best for our family, and I still make goofs in purchases. Sometimes something sounds so good I'm tempted to buy it even though all my kids are through that stage and I don't need it right now. I often think I've found out about everything available that I could possibly use, and then suddenly a whole new field opens up, with new materials and therefore new decisions to make.
Remember the catch phrase "future shock" from a few years back (or was it well over a decade ago... time flies...)? I think "future shock" is probably now a common ailment among homeschoolers of all stages-- how to know what to buy, when there is SO much out there, and SO much that looks good and worthwhile. The saving grace in making wrong choices in books or materials is that you can probably at least get some of your money back at a homeschoolers' secondhand sale next spring. And it's always good to remember that no one material will make it or break it for your child this year, and that you can bounce off any material, no matter how lowly, in creative ways that will be unique to your family. As an evaluator I've seen many families take what I might think of initially as boring or limiting curriculums and turn them into real gems with lots of library use as a supplement.
And remember that all of us face these same struggles every year, just as you first time homeschoolers have been facing them this fall, simply because our kids grow one year older and we have to make new choices. We may need to move on to new areas of study and new subjects and higher levels. Or we may have a child who is very different from our first one and who will need a different approach. I spoke with a mother this summer who has always homeschooled her children, but who faces buying all new materials for each child, because the "hand-me-downs" just wouldn't fit the different temperament and learning styles of the next one. And sometimes we just enjoy a change of pace-- using the same approach all over again could get stale for us.
2) It's still a trick to work out the intricate ballet of balancing out lots of kids. You know, the problems of seeing that 7 year old Molly is doing something somewhat constructive while I'm working with Jacob and Jesse on spelling. Sometimes it happens, and everyone is occupied productively and happily at the same time and peace and calm descends over the home (and quiet peace at that occasionally!). But at other times I too feel like I'm juggling a few too many balls, while standing on a wobbly 2 legged stool at that. Sometimes just when I'm having that terrific break-through in math with Molly, that's also just when three year old Hannah falls down and starts crying, the boys start squabbling over something in the livingroom, or the soup I so competently put on to simmer all day boils over. Or the phone rings and I feel compelled to answer. (We do love answering machines!)
All sorts of things still happen to distract us from the tasks at hand, and it can still be frustrating just like it was 8 years ago. Family life is, after all, family life, and we can't always predict or control all parts of it. We find here that giving our day a rough schedule really helps, having set times when each child knows if I'm to be available to them or not. But in all honesty I can't say we fully follow through on our plans every day, or many days in a row. Big projects take all our time some weeks, and the "basics" get laid aside for a time. Pleasant diversions always pop in and we make exceptions-- sometimes wisely, sometimes maybe not.
3) I'm still struggling with housework and integrating it with homeschooling. I've made progress over the years, but it's slow and none of us here has completely developed those longed-for (by ME!) diligent habits of neatness that would prevent all problems. Homeschooling is like having a full-time job, and it's hard (especially for some of us) to keep a house halfway neat at the same time. Especially when our "job site" IS our homes, and our fellow workers are our kids. And remember that there's one major advantage that teachers in schools have that we don't have-- they have professional janitors. Organizational ideas all do help, but a little homely perspective helps too-- some version of the old "dust bunny" poem with its line "... so dust go to sleep, cause I'm rocking my baby and babies won't keep" (translate to "I'm teaching my youngster, and learning won't wait", if you need to...). Any tips you can come up with to alleviate-- even temporarily!-- the housekeeping blues of homeschooling mothers will always be appreciated in this newsletter. I'll read your ideas as eagerly as anyone.
4) I'm still dealing (sometimes patiently, sometimes hopelessly impatiently) with the day to day little things: "motivating" my kids to find their pencils that they've "misplaced", or helping them stick with an assignment or project until it's done ("Jesse, are you done with your piano time, honey?", said as Jesse is sitting at the piano bench, hands on keyboard maybe, but eyes staring off thinking of his hut in the woods that he's building....). And then there's the bi-weekly task of locating, piling up, and actually getting out to the car with all the library books in the whirlwind 2 minutes before we NEED to be going out the driveway. I still have pretty sizable overdue book fines at the library, too, though I'm finally improving in that a bit (I always consider it a charitable donation to a worthy cause, at any rate).
5) I still wonder about socialization. We are all fond of criticizing our critics who continually ask pointed questions about socialization. But frankly, most of us do worry and think a lot about our children's social opportunities and their possibilities for making positive friendships with a variety of people. Our solutions are not usually the school type solutions, but that doesn't mean we don't all invest emotional energy into this area. I especially see the families with older children (junior high and above) worrying about this area, even if they've been homeschooling for years. Some of my inner questions go like this, and maybe they are similar to yours: Do my kids know enough other kids? Am I taking the time to plan or drive a distance so my children can be with others? Do my children have positive and concrete on-going activities to take part in with other homeschoolers? Do we see other families often enough for the kids to really develop friendships? Or are we occasionally out so much visiting that we forget our own family routines and traditions? How can I balance out the different social needs and abilities of different children in our family (that is, social butterfly Molly vs. shier Jacob)?
6) It's still hard for me when Jesse forgets his French pronouns after we've gone over them for months, (translate this one to "multiplication tables", "spelling", "short vowel sounds", or whatever your child might currently be having some difficulty with...). And I've made games for him to help him, he's listened to tapes and my reading aloud in French, and he's been really reading French to help him learn in context. And then he can still on a given day, if I pop up with a quick, "Jesse, what does 'nous' mean?" draw a complete blank. This is sometimes the motivation for stern lectures from me about diligence and study and remembering and "what he would be expected to know if he were in school" tirades. Or it is sometimes the motivation for me to realize that maybe something is still not quite meeting the need in the way I'm approaching the task, and I'm sent "back to the drawing board" to come up with a better way to help him. Both responses seem necessary (and helpful) at times. A sense of humor is also a real boon here, and a sense of perspective and the long-range view of things.
7) I'm still frustrated by the amount of time my kids can seem to dawdle about things. You know, the stretched out time period needed to find a pencil, or sharpen the pencil, or write the date on the right piece of paper so we can get started with the math lesson of the day. Some of us have loved to read and gloat over studies that show terrible statistics like "in the public schools, on average only 2.2 hours out of the whole day is spent on actual time on instructional tasks." What they mean is that the rest of the time is spent on finding pencils, or putting away one book and starting to switch gears for the next subject-- and time for teachers to yell at their students to hurry up about it. In spite of all that's said about how wonderful the one-on-one time in homeschooling is, in all honesty most of us probably deal with a fair amount of "non-instructional" time in our days also. Switching gears between subjects or projects does take time, and after all we do want to socialize and chat and talk with one another. We actually do want to take time for being leisurely about things. But sometimes it can get to us, or get out of balance, and the whole day is spent being "leisurely" and we feel at the end that nothing solid was accomplished. Again perspective helps, and sometimes having a stopwatch handy helps, as in "Molly, you have exactly 1 minute to...."
8) I still deal with kids who don't always get along with each other perfectly. They usually do get along quite well, and homeschooling is probably in large measure responsible for that. They share and they help and they enjoy each other. They don't quite understand the "typical" school-kid stories in magazines that seem to hint that it's a bit odd, or at least unusual, to like your siblings. But they also act immature and fight over what I think are silly, inconsequential things-- like who gets to sit next to me when I'm reading aloud to them on the sofa, or who gets which seat in the van, or who gets to read a library book first. They haven't yet "put away childish things," because they are, after all, children. They tease, or get their feelings hurt because one of the others has teased them. Sometimes it sure seems that Jacob indeed did wallop Molly on purpose as we are doing our morning warm-up exercises and we are "snapping and stretching" our arms with wide swings. Molly thinks he did, at any rate, and retaliates with her own "womp" in return. There goes our happy morning PE time, at least for a few minutes until apologies are given and bent out of shape feelings soothed. Helping our children learn how to work together well as a team and a supportive family is a continuing challenge, for all of us.
9) I'm still overwhelmed by deciding just what to focus on in our studies, especially in areas like science and social studies where we usually choose not to use a set textbook for a whole year. Sometimes there is just so very much that is interesting and good to learn about, and we want to do it all, right now. I sometimes envy people who seem able to plan out their whole year in advance, and then calmly proceed to carry out the plan. We hop and skip and jump from such a variety of interests that I indeed wonder sometimes if the "big picture" will be able to form from all this jumble of topics (so far it seems to!).
Fieldtrips and fun "extras" often become so interesting, even if "off topic", that we jump in and switch gears right off without any forethought. After going to the Pittsburgh airport this past week for a terrific tour, we started reading about the history of the FAA and doing little experiments about lift and force and propulsion and Newton's third law-- but weren't we really in the middle of studying pendulums, and colonial Pennsylvania? And we were also at the same time reading Shakespeare's "As You Like It", to prepare for a free presentation of the play in a wonderful outdoor theater--too bad that thunderstorm chose to hit that night and it was canceled. Oh, well, the reading and preparation was still wonderful... and Jacob even read a short biography of Shakespeare. And we did tie it all in with William Penn, remembering how one biography mentioned that Shakespeare's plays were banned during the Cromwell era, and brought back by the "Merry Monarch" who ruled during Penn's youth. And we got back to pendulums after a few weeks (Howard is handling science this year, which really helps keep us on track a bit).
Some people can probably happily live with more spice and variety and surprise happenings than others, and indeed we all love the fact that homeschooling gives us flexibility (isn't it one of the good things we always mention if asked for a list of advantages?) Just sometimes it can be overwhelming and make us wonder where we are headed. Sometimes it is wonderful, and so relaxing to just open the math textbook and say, "And now we are on lesson 23" (because we actually did lesson 22 the day before, and lesson 21 the day before that). Balance is always nice.
10) I'm still faced with making new decisions about keeping records. I'm used to keeping records now, but each year I feel a need to reassess how I'm doing it, and see if I can do it in a more meaningful way. For me this means not only streamlining the job so I'm not spending too much time on it, but also finding ways to help my kids keep more of the records, and in ways that actually help them accomplish more and gain awareness of what they are doing and learning. We go through many continually upgraded forms and checklists and charts, and we learn something from all new attempts at keeping track. We are currently using a detailed weekly checklist that the kids keep (with reminders!), and find that this really helps all of us see the shape of the whole week and not just separate days. Sometimes old ways really need to be scrapped, and that can be hard to do-- probably almost as hard as the first year homeschooler's decisions on how to keep records at all. I get good ideas and input from my kids on this, too, and that is a boon. Keeping my perspective on what the purpose of record keeping is important for me-- I'm not just doing it to comply with a law, I'm doing it to help us realize what we've learned and done, and to gain insight on where we still need to go, and to help us keep some overall balance to things.
11) I still find, after all these homeschooling years, that 24 hours simply isn't enough time in the day to do everything we want to do. Apparently a big problem in schools is finding ways to "fill time"-- think of all those cute books of reproducible worksheets teachers can dole out if the kids are done with their "real" assignment early. Around here we could use on average an extra 3 or 4 hours each day to really do what we want to do, and we'd be really happy with maybe an extra 6 (anyone want to start a legislative campaign on that one???). Sometimes time well spent on one good project, like the kids' family newspaper, inevitably means that for that day (or that week-- it usually takes more time than we bargain for...) we won't get a chance to do much else. You can't be full tilt into everything at once, and it takes most of us a while to feel comfortable with that. It can be hard to keep our perspective and realize that this is just how life really is sometimes and that it's OK. And of course sometimes we do better than others at balancing things out or catching up, and it's important for us to have those calmer times too (we love it when the brief "lulls" hit...). And sometimes we do better at realizing that even in busy times we actually do have good little spaces that we can use to our advantage.
I've also (slowly) been learning that I can't expect to feel like I've had a good full day with the kids if I am always ready to drop whatever I'm involved in with them to race to pick up a ringing phone receiver. I'm always sure I'll be able to limit myself to just 3 minutes this time, but an hour later I look around and wonder where the kids are. So please excuse our answering machine if it answers you at 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday; I'm just trying hard to keep my focus where it should be.
12) And last, I still deal with a fair amount of anxiety on a daily basis. The old "I am doing enough? Am I doing too much? Is this indeed the right decision? What if....? Is this the right approach? Could I do it better? Am I pushing too much? Am I letting them get by with too much? Am I setting a good example? Am I being consistent enough? Am I being flexible enough? Am I letting whole subject areas slide? Am I being creative enough? Am I being creative to a fault? Am I keeping enough records? Will I care about these records at all in ten years? What's a waste of time? What's the real core of what we should be focusing on? Will they look back and feel they had a loving mother or a...?" The internal questioning can get pretty intense, and I routinely find myself saying to new homeschooling families (with a smile!) that if you can't take a fair degree of anxiety on a daily basis, then homeschooling just might not be for you.
So there you have it, one homeschooler's list of personal challenges. There's nothing like homeschooling to help us all examine what we are doing on a regular basis! All this questioning and struggle may be actually good-- it keeps us from getting stuck in one spot. But I don't think we should let these sorts of worries blind us to the many special and wonderful things that are also happening in our days at home with our children. They are there too, on a daily basis along with these challenges. At the end of a long day, I try always to focus on what went well about the day, even if it was something very small. For many families, regular prayer about their homeschooling decisions is a major help, and new directions are often shown after a quiet focused time searching for what is truly the right path. Also sharing and fellowship with other homeschoolers in your area, or reading other's stories and tips, can spur on our own better ideas. We all are continually striving to do our best, with what knowledge and abilities and resources we have at each moment, and with the right spirit I hope we can let these many challenges be a spur to good action and new directions and not just something to weigh us down or burn us out.
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