I spent a couple of hours Sunday night writing up a "report card" of sorts for Oscar. It doesn't look like a traditional report card, it's more of a lengthy journal entry, or a letter I write to myself four times a year summing up what we've done over the last 9 weeks.
Neither the state nor the school district asks me to generate quarterly progress reports. It's something I tried last year, just to see how it would turn out, and decided it was worthwhile. Here's why:
It's encouraging. Almost every quarter, I think I have had a lot of days where we didn't meet our goals, and I usually expect to be disappointed in how we've done. I think of all the days when we ran out of time and had to skip math, or when some crisis meant a shorter day; those failures loom large in my memory. But when I sit down with my daily records and transcribe them out by subject — that is, when I list our accomplishments — I can see that we've really covered a lot of ground, and usually done some cool stuff along the way.
I can see where I need to improve my self-discipline. Did I teach each subject as many times a week as I'd hoped to? Have I been checking work as it's completed or am I letting sloppy work slip by?
It gives me a chance to reflect on how we spend our time. When I sit down and write about what we've done, it forces me to evaluate whether it's what we should be doing.
It's a way to summarize what we've done for my husband's benefit. Homeschooling is definitely a whole-family effort, and Mark is great for all kinds of cool projects and getting the kids to swimming lessons and things like that, but I supervise most of the daily work and consequently I know a lot more about it than he does. When I write up a summary, he can read it and get a much better overview of how things are going.
By injecting a little professionalism into my school year, it reminds me that the work I do is worthy of my best efforts. One of the things Mark has to do for his job — a task common to many professionals — is produce regular reports that summarize his success in meeting objectives and also lay out new short-term and long-term objectives. I had to do something like it myself when I was in grad school, too. Even though the primary audience for Mark's reports is, well, everyone who might have influence over his career path, he says the act of writing it is helpful for him personally too. And even though the primary audience of my quarterly reports is just me, I find that the act of sitting down and writing them helps me to maintain perspective. This is my vocation and my job; it is how I contribute valued work to the family. It deserves my best effort. It's not that writing the reports is a necessary part of that best effort — it's more that the reports help me stay committed and motivated.
It organizes my mental model of how our schooling is structured. If a friend or relative asks me how things are going, I can answer with specifics. "The topic that really got Oscar interested this year was our Civil War study," I can say. "He was especially interested in the naval blockade of the South and the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack. And he really liked the hardtack we made and he wants us to make it again sometime soon." That's a lot more interesting than "Oh fine, we did the Civil War this year."
It provides a record for the families I co-school with. I teach history and Latin to two other families, and it's a piece of cake to email the paragraphs I wrote about those subjects to the other families for their records. I don't formally assess the other kids — it's up to the parents to decide whether the children are performing adequately — but at least I can give them a record of which topics we discussed, which books we read together, and that sort of thing.
It doesn't have to be a chore, and it doesn't have to take longer than you want it to. I write daily, here and elsewhere, as a means of living an examined life. I never feel I've understood something until I've re-narrated it to myself. I am writing mainly for myself. So I'm comfortable with producing this document and I enjoy writing it. I write it in the same sort of style I write my more organized and thought-out blog posts. I've streamlined the process somewhat with a few changes to my daily routine — I set up my daily assignment sheets and Oscar's "portfolio" of work in a format that puts most of the information I need in one place, and I keep a lot of the files on Google Docs where I can get at them from anywhere. So the day I decide to do my quarterly write-up, it takes me about ten minutes to throw everything I need for reference into a tote bag, along with my netbook, and head to a coffee shop for a couple of hours. It helps that I produce them for myself and not for some state requirement — I'd probably be very annoyed by them if I HAD to do them or if I had to follow some official format.
It'll be fun to look back at them in a few years. At least I assume so. This is only the second year I've done them so I haven't had time to get nostalgic yet.
And, of course, it provides concise records, should I ever need them. While i'm not required to make quarterly reports to the state or the school district, I am required to maintain some kind of records of my assessment of my children's progress, records that the school district can request I show them. There are a lot of different ways to comply with this, including just keeping every scrap of paper jumbled up in a cardboard box (and I often reflect on how much fun it would be to deliver records in THAT form to the school district if they ever demanded to see them), but the nice thing about quarterly records is that they take up so little space — just a thin little sheaf of paper per year per student.
I'll write more another time, about how I put them together so they work for me and don't really feel like "work."
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