The First Day of School and Other Missed Milestones

Until my reunion, I checked facebook weekly at most.  It just feels overwhelming.  I am not entirely sure why, but I usually blame it on my fibro since my mother also finds it overwhelming.  However, since I have been spending more time on it, I can't help but notice all the "First Day of School" pictures that people put up.  Should I put up a picture of my kids with a caption "First Day of Not Going to School" or some other like post?  It is very tempting, I can tell you.

Of course what kind of picture would capture the homeschooling spirit the most?  A picture of C sleeping in with Dad after he did a late shift?  The kids playing a board game with Dad in the middle of the day before he heads off to work?  A picture from a day trip (more like half a day, I didn't feel up to a whole day) we took to nature trails earlier in the week?  T reading?  The kids working on their lessons on the computer?  A picture from our play date yesterday?  A picture of us getting on the NFTA bus?  A picture of them with one of their dolls with a homemade paper dress?  What about weighing bulk items to buy at the Lexington Co-op?  Cooking?  Caring for the worm farm?  I suppose I will need to analyze this carefully since there are so many choices.  How about this one - sending Dad off to work while we head out to the playground?

Am I a bad person to say that I find the whole "first day of school" and "back to school" somewhat cheesy, for lack of a better way to put it?  It seems like such a manufactured milestone.  Ending a school year presumably means accomplishing something, but at the beginning of the school year kids haven't done anything yet.  If parents were really interested in learning wouldn't they be more excited about their kid learning to read (or swim or paint or sing) than turning a certain age by a certain deadline to be included in a school class?  Is some of the frenzy that everyone does it and that you have to shop for it?  After all, Americans love comparing themselves to other people and shopping is part of it.  I guess this is it, I am just disturbed by the materialism and pressure to be like everyone else, rather than the pride of other parents.

Am I depriving my kids of the attention that comes with these sorts of milestones?  T didn't have a kindergarten graduation, just a trip out for dessert just the four of us (it was last December, not even when graduations normally are).  Certainly, the grandparents would have gotten excited about a graduation.  I suppose that I could have bragged about it online or at the playground or at church.  How would it have been received if I showed up at church in December and told my friends that T finished kindergarten?  I am not sure it would have been the same.  Regardless, I see it more as he completed the skills that are considered kindergarten in conventional school since my research has yielded the fact that the sequence is somewhat arbitrary.  Also, the completion was just the core curriculum we use, but not the things that the kids come up with that are of interest.  Can I really put a grade level on those things?  The paper Barbie dress, the handmade paper skirt?  The perfect freehand drawing of a princess?  Baking?  Making patterns with coins?  Totaling up scores for board games using different methods?  Learning to ride the NFTA bus?  I think you get the point.

Am I doing my kids a favor by focusing more on the learning than the milestones?  It feels like I am.  Since I was so compliant about school and the whole work-hard-and-get-ahead, I always felt like I was living for the next school break, year completion, or graduation.  There was too much pressure to savor the learning.  I don't recall nurturing my outside interests all that well either.  Research supports that focusing on the learning is better.  If you read anything by Alfie Kohn, you will find this out too.  Focusing on reward or punishment always takes away from the intrinsic value of the learning.

This homeschool year (if you want to call it that, since we don't take summers off) I want to do more unschooling.  I am afraid to give up a structured curriculum completely, but we are going to do less of it.  Time4Learning is already pretty efficient, but we are going to, where appropriate, test first and only do the areas that we don't know to free up time for whatever the kids want to do or read.  We are going to read as many of the classic books as we can without overwhelming the kids.  My health permitting, we are going to do more outings and field trips and play dates.

What about you?  What are you going to do this "homeschool year"?  What do you think about "back to school"?  Am I the only one?

Reunions and My Decision to Homeschool: A Reflection

We are coming upon the 20th reunion of my 8th grade class from St. Joan of Arc School in Chicopee, MA.  Since we were a tight small group of under 30 students, it is a reunion I am going to make every effort to make.  Until facebook, I fell out of touch with everyone, partly because I moved to Buffalo in 1997, but mainly because I was the only one from the group who went to my high school.  Recently, I have been excitedly checking my facebook for info on the reunion.  I go on almost daily, up from about weekly.

One of the funny things is that there was talk of who the class couple was.  Despite seeming to be nominated, I don't have much of an opinion on it.  However, I keep getting the funny feeling that if there is a "most changed" or something of that nature, I may be sure to win.

I wouldn't win at first glance, since other than being quite grey on top, I actually look quite a bit like I did twenty years ago.  I don't have too many wrinkles and I am within 15 pounds of my graduation weight.  Of course, in between I was 40 pounds heavier than now, but I had to lose weight to help my sleep to help my fibromyalgia.  Of course, depending on the kind of fibro day I am having at the reunion, I may be hobbling or waddling around especially after the long car trip out there.  We'll have to see about that.  The best part for everyone though will be when I open my mouth and they hear the slight but distinctive western New York accent I acquired.

But what about the more substantive changes?  Is anyone expecting a home schooling, bus riding, urban, Episcopalian, stay at home Mom with no car (I'll rent one to go there), no yard, no makeup and a home hair cut to boot.  Heck, I have a worm farm composter in my kitchen and rarely go to grocery stores.  I get my food from a CSA and a neighborhood food co-op.

I feel like there may be some surprised people whether they say it or not.  When I was at St. Joan of Arc and high school - undergrad too - I was a really hard worker and good at school.  I did every bit of homework, worked ahead, thought about school all the time, felt stressed about it, only read for pleasure during the summer, and had little other interests.  I wouldn't say I was smart for two reasons.  I had to work hard for my grades and I am pretty sure now that I only had (or only developed) the intelligences recognized in school.  School wasn't the only institution I was all about.  I was a Roman Catholic who never thought I would ever be anything else.  My Catholic school teacher mother would never have let me miss church.  I had visions of working super hard in Catholic high school and going to college with the best scholarship I could get.  While I may not have expressed it at the time, I bought into the importance and order of the institutions in my life.  I was going to get a good job, be thoroughly devoted to it, and live the same life as my parents.  I'd live in a similar neighborhood and drive a similar car and have a similar house and go to a similar church even if in a different region of the country.

In some ways, I didn't disappoint.  I graduated high in my high school class, got a full scholarship to college, got a good job, became a CPA, and went to graduate school part-time while I worked.  I kept getting better and better jobs.  My last job involved overseeing 3 departments at a large school district.  These were pretty good accomplishments, if I may say so myself.

As I went along, I became tired, physically and mentally.  Some if it was the fibromyalgia starting slowly and some of it was lack of satisfaction.  Regardless, I gradually started to question the conventional life and institutions to which I had been devoted.  I first realized that I wasn't living my faith, but punching the metaphorical church time clock.  I became Episcopalian because it felt more like who I am.  I got my traditional church service with women priests and openness to views on issues that I had.  Next, I got tired of the mindless (despite NPR), waste of time, environmentally horrifying commute to my cozy condo in one of the two cars we had.  As soon as I got it worked out we moved into the city in walking distance to my new job at the time.  We immediately shed a car and actually started participating in things since we were closer to them again.  Then Tom and I switched places.  I stayed home with the kids to care for my health and he went back to work.  I eventually found out I had fibromyalgia (shed the last car at the same time), something my mother didn't get until she was 50, 20 years later than I got it.  Obviously, the genetics weren't in my favor, but without an traumatic triggering event, I can only surmise that it is the result of the pressure I put on myself to comply and be good at school and career.

This combination of realizing that whole schooling to career to consumption lifestyle was unfulfilling and realizing that all that hard working couldn't safeguard against (and maybe even caused) the onset of a lifelong chronic illness led me to researching homeschooling for my own kids.  I also saw that despite being sold on school and college, that my husband with a masters degree was in and out of low wage collections jobs all the time.  Fortunately, now he is a security guard which is more stable (and he loves it), but is still not in line with what we were told growing up about getting a good education.  With all this, I wanted my kids to have a childhood rather than be cooped up 7 hours a day plus several hours of homework.  I want them to explore all their intelligence types.  I wanted them to have interests other than traditional academics.  At home, academics can be handled in a fraction of the time and at one's own pace leaving time for bigger multifaceted project experiences.  Certainly I put pressure on myself when I was young, but conventional school encourages and rewards this kind of compliance.  It is also a mission with enough flexibility for me now that it looks like I won't be returning to the career I had.

So what am I saying about St. Joan of Arc if I am homeschooling my own kids?  Nothing against it.  If someone is going to sent their child to conventional school, I know of no better place.  I enjoyed great classmates and the best teachers you can find.  Without the great people, I wouldn't be the person I am today.  I received an education from caring people with great values.  I just reject the full time job school is for kids, especially now 20 years later (no more half day kindergarten and pre-k a year earlier). Homeschooling just feels like the right thing to do.  The funny thing is that my kids are healthier than I was as a kid, happier, and further ahead than I was academically to boot.  The other funny thing is that I don't spend any more time on hard core academics than my friends do just getting their kids ready for school and helping with homework.

If you are a homeschool parent, are people from your past surprised?  Are you even a little surprised at yourself?

There Are No Breaks in Homeschool!

Thanks to the grandparents I got to take the kids on vacation to Maine.  Dad had to stay home, luckily to start a new job, not continue to look for one.  So, did we get a break from homeschool? Not at all!  Yes, I let the kids skip their Time4Learning for the week, but they didn't stop learning.  Besides, what better place to learn than at the beach!  It was unstructured learning though.  I brought along several books from the library on the ocean, Maine, rocks, and seashells.  We looked things up as needed, but made no effort to read anything cover to cover.  The first day, it was raining, but the tide was out at a good time, so we went for a walk and collected rocks and seashells.  Over the next several days we tried to look them up to see what we found.  For the rocks we tried to make an educated guess at igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary based on what we read.

I showed the kids that if you dig, you can reach water.  We even made a little canal and a sort of tide pool.  It wasn't exactly the Erie canal, but I think they got the idea.

They also had a great time playing in the ocean.  C rode some waves with Grandpa and T goofed off in the water.  They wore their long suits and hats to stay out of the UV rays.

Grandpa took T and C candlepin bowling for the first time.  He got them bumpers of course, but, hopefully, it will get them interested in the sport.  Too bad there is only regular bowling in Buffalo.

Don't forget about crafts too.  Mem helped them teach them how to do a type of knitting.  It was fun to watch them since I did that as a kid.

It was a great time.  There was a lot of learning too.  While many homeschool families say that they take the summer off, I doubt they stop learning.  I think when homeschool families say they take a break, they are really taking a break from formal curriculum.  Reading and exploration continues anyway.  This was certainly the case for us.

What about you?  Do you take a "break" from homeschool?  What does taking a break mean to you?