Another homeschooling mom gave me great me advice about what to do when homeschooling isn’t going well. She spent weeks just taking her child on long walks. It’s amazing how much education can happen on a walk!
The thing about homeschooling that’s particularly difficult for me, and I’m guessing for a lot of parents out there, is that I don’t have a formal relationship with my child. She and I have an ongoing relationship that started the first time I felt her kick, so there’s a lot more complexity and emotion in there than there is between a teacher one of many students.
People who are homeschooling devotees will tell you that this is what’s great about homeschooling: you know your own child better than any teacher ever will. You are able to tailor your child’s learning to his or her interests and strengths, while working on his or her weaknesses at a relaxed pace.
The thing is, as I see it anyway, a great strength is always a great weakness when you turn it around and look at it from another angle. I certainly do know my daughter better than anyone else. Each time a teacher has told me something surprising about my daughter, it’s been something I knew. Not necessarily something I’ve thought about consciously, but something I knew in a deeper way.
But the negative side of this is that as we know our children better, it’s harder for us just to turn off that relationship and say, “Now is the time for math. Please stop playing and return to your seat.” A teacher has the authority to say this. A parent? Well, in my house, I certainly don’t have the authority. I’d love to have it, but my daughter is not interested in giving it!
She knows and I know that there will always be another day for us to be together. We are not in a nine-month relationship that ends with a grade and an apple. We’re in it for life, and that makes it so much more complicated!
So this morning I attempted to get her to focus on schoolwork. First, I let her have her time. My daughter is not what people call “a morning person.” But from another perspective, she IS a morning person. Mornings, to her, should go slowly. Much gets done while one is still in one’s pajamas, and those things are seldom (if ever) things assigned to you by your teacher, ESPECIALLY if your teacher is also your mom! Mornings go slowly and involve a lot of impromptu artwork, reading, crawling on the floor, playing with the cats, bugging your mom in the shower, and whatever else takes your fancy.
For a morning person like my daughter, mornings are definitely NOT the time that you follow a schedule, get your clothes on quickly, brush your teeth when asked to, then sit at a table and be told what to do. No Way.
That’s where the walking comes in. Some mornings, like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds, my daughter dutifully sits and does something that I consider schoolwork first thing in the day. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does I get immediately visions of grandeur: Amazing Homeschooling Mom Never Has To Give In And Go For A Walk!
On mornings like this morning, however, I try to start something like “school,” and my daughter rebels. Immediately she finds something so much more important than the subject I bring up, and always there’s One More Thing she has to do before she can join me to talk about our day. If I push, she starts getting abusive. You might think that nothing a six-year-old can say would upset you that much. You haven’t been my daughter’s mother!
So then we go for a walk. Today I packed her snacks while she filled her backpack with her doctor kit, markers, and stickers. Then we marched into the forest and down to the stream. Immediately, the abuse stopped. She started to riff on two raccoons that live in the forest, named Garbage and Compost. You might be able to guess that their mother’s name was Recycling (she didn’t believe in eating garbage, you know). We talked about mushrooms, spores, and mycelium, and wondered where the mycelium is for mushrooms that grow on solid objects like fallen logs. (She hypothesized that the mycelium lodges inside the rotting wood, which sounded good to me.) We met various other walkers and joggers along the way and practiced our social skills. Then I stopped at the picnic table while she went on to her secret “island” and checked on things there. She came back and checked my heartrate and blood pressure.
From the point of view of preparing her for standardized tests, I failed as a teacher today. For a homeschooling mom, it was a rousing success. We got back, she took a bath (having gotten muddy in the stream), and then we studied the grasshopper lifecycle and tried to figure out whether what we read was true, that locusts are grasshoppers who have lived longer than normal. She made a birthday card (spelling and penmanship), a gift for her father (art), and set up a store selling hand-colored stickers. She made $1.50, and figured out the correct change. Math!
It was cool. It was homeschooling. It was yet another day in our life.
