This is a fantastic post from a mother who switched from homeschooling to what we around here call "away school" — and then back again. I'm going to bookmark it and read it the next time I start stressing out about lesson planning.
… I had homeschooled all the kids from birth on, and I think we all had some illusions about public schooling–just about all kid movies show kids in a public schooling lifestyle, so the kids had impressions that public school was all about shiny yellow schoolbuses and fun sports and neat science experiments. (I know, such a load of crap. Those same movies also show everyone living in massive 3-car neo-colonials decorated by Pottery Barn. It's not like Disney profits by telling the TRUTH, hello.)
And I was taken in, too. I have many public-schooling friends, and just think……the school handles the transportation….the school pays for the textbooks…..the school offers free daycare for 6 hours a day. Man, that can get tempting when life is really real on the less-fun homeschooling days. Especially when scrounging through the bottom of the budget barrel for pennies to buy curricula. The idea of not having to buy ANY of it….wow, huh?
So we tried it this last year. And you know what I found? That sending kids to public school is easier in some ways–yeah, it's not all on my shoulders anymore; I don't have to find testing companies; I don't have to round up every single book, etc. No lesson plans.
BUT it's also harder. Really. Waaaay harder than homeschooling.
Just yesterday, while we were waiting with our seven-year-olds in line for the First Communion interviews (he passed! woo-hoo! now we don't have to cancel his pizza party!), a mother from our parish told me I was a saint for being a homeschooler, and I explained once again that I am a homeschooler because, well, basically, I am a slacker except when I am a massively incurable nerd.
There you have it, folks: if you are a Slacker Nerd Mom, then homeschooling is for you. That's my prescription. I basically have two settings: Why Bother (dealing with bureaucracies; getting library books back on time; crafting) and Geek Out (designing history curricula from scratch; pushing a shopping cart through Office Max; learning Latin grammar two steps ahead of a gaggle of middle-schoolers whose parents trust me to teach it to them).
In fact, now that I think about it, the story of my time on earth may be nothing more than the intense drama of trying to figure out which setting I should apply to which basic life skill.
Since I became a parent, I've moved a number of things from one category to another. For example, once I was Geek Out about getting good grades and earning professional praise, and that pretty much has to be Why Bother now. Cooking elaborate dinners used to be Geek Out. It's now Why Bother for the foreseeable future, replaced in the Geek Out category with a decidedly different style of cuisine that has its own challenges.
What's moved from Why Bother to Geek Out over the years? Becoming fitter, stronger, and faster. Learning to be kind to people. Making friends with other women.
I knew all along that some things, like tensor math, were kind of fun because they were difficult. Somewhere along the way I figured out that this is true not only of the things that most people find even more difficult than I do, but also of many things that I find hard even though most people find them easy.
But I'm also pretty sure that I will never enjoy getting up early to force someone to catch a school bus.
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