We’ve been homeschooling for four years now, and so you might expect that we know something about what we are doing. Most parents whom we talk to who are considering homeschooling say they lack the confidence to figure out how to do it. But in truth, the challenge is not figuring out what to teach or how to know if your child is doing well–it’s figuring out how to get your child to listen to you.
Yes, here we are at the key topic–the “compliant children.” If you read the blogs of various homeschoolers, (and we homeschoolers seem to have a lot of blogs) it sounds like home schooling is so easy. Just keep your kids home from school and –voila!–they will become interested in a million topics, keep you awake at night with their unceasing learning (”absorbs knowledge like a sponge!) and generally outperform the school system.
It’s ain’ t like that. Those are the compliant children, the ones you can suggest things to. With those children, if you say, “here, let me show you how fractions work,” they listen. They may not care, but they listen. If you say something like that to our children, they laugh at you and run away. They are defiant children.
We don’t homeschool because we thought the school would do a bad job, or because we wanted to inculcate our kids with religious values. We homeschool because we couldn’t get our son to go to school. How pathetic is that? What kind of miserable, spineless, mushy parents are we who could not even face the basic challenge of parenting (after figuring how to get your baby to go to sleep): being firm and saying, “Yes dear you do have to go to school?” Well, that’s exactly what happened: screaming, couldn’t sleep, afraid all day at school–we couldn’t do it, and we kept him home and said we’d teach him ourselves. Now it’s four years later, and little brother is also being homeschooled because he saw that older brother did not have to go to school.
But Galen is not one of these confident, well-rounded homeschool kids who goes out to a dozen programs and makes friends and invents creative ways to have birthday parties. He’s a reclusive, intellectual, computer nerd who would rather sit at the computer and play Flight Simulator than do just about anything. At ten, he is the prototype of the lazy young man who plays video games all day. We worry about him, miserable homeschoolers that we are, but when the visiting teacher comes from the school district to check on us he consistently wows her with his performance, his ability to present and the quality of his work. Okay, he can barely write his name, and his spelling is three grade levels behind.
Our other son is no high-flyer either. At grade two we are calling him grade one, and he can barely read although he’s about to turn 7. He has no interest in academics. Math facts like 2+2 do not stick to him. Word’s like ‘the’ have no place in his memory. He lives for playing games, doing arts and dressing up. An following his older brother around. And talking about how stupid the computer is.
If this were not miserable enough, we are that most undeserving-of-sympathy of homeschooling families: the two-parent homeschoolers. That’s right, where most families have one parent who is homeschooling, while the other one holds down a job, we have BOTH parents homeschooling. Each children has a one-on-one tutor. And we still can’t pull it off. I compare us to a family here in the valley with twelve children all of whom are homeschooled by the mother. We look upon them with complete envy–apparently they are all organized into doing farm chores, and they pull their own weight, and we’re lucky if we can even get our kids to pick up the clothes they dropped on the floor.
We fear Galen will become an undisciplined recluse who cannot take a course because he is afraid to be away from his parents, and whom no one wants to be friends with because he is so self-centred. Will is going to be a happy-go-lucky gang member whom the other kids will get to do bad things. How can we pull ourselves out of this rut, and save our children?
No comments:
Post a Comment