One foot in front of the other

You can usually tell when things start getting desperate around here because that’s when I start taking long overdue action. We finally made it to the unschooler/homeschooler park day yesterday. I’ve known about it since the summer and yet have never made it one. It seems like something else came up every week. It was especially difficult to make myself go at this late, when the initial excitement of homeschooling has worn off and I am feeling completely at a loss. But I went anyway, even though it was a crazy day, with freelance stuff to do, a meeting, P leaving town for the weekend, all of us getting his cold… but I went anyway. Footwork, right? And of course once we were there we had a really nice time and it was totally worth it.

I was only able to stay for an hour, but I was able to make some good connections. It’s amazing what a small world it is – on of the mothers I met is a yoga instructor at the studio where P has been showing his paintings for 5 or 6 years. She has a daughter close to D’s age, and the two of them hit it off right away. The really cool thing about that connection is that they haven’t been to park day at Cottonwood for more than a year, but had decided they wanted to start going again. Coincidence? Maybe. The other women I met is a great source of information. She’s got four kids and has been doing this for years. She calls herself a homeschool consultant, but as of yet is not charging for her services. Does that sound weird in writing? It sounded awesome in person. She’ll come to our house – talk with us about our schedule, our goals, our lifestyle etc. and help us come up with a homeschooling plan that will work for us, even if it’s just for the next few months.

Those were the only two people I had a chance to talk to, and they both do a nice mix of homeschooling and unschooling (though technically I suppose none of us can really claim to be unschoolers if we’re doing any schooling at all. I guess it could be called relaxed homeschooling or something.) Anyway, the point is that they weren’t all hardcore unschoolers. Maybe some of them were. It was a pretty mixed group. There were a couple of people there who seemed to have their identities wrapped up in being “alternative” and those folks definitely had a holier-than-thou attitude about the group of folks next to us whose kids all go to the same school (RISD had the day off). When Patrick and I got a chance to debrief later in the day he was like “I know why those kids aren’t in school. Because otherwise they would get their asses kicked.” It was interesting to watch Peach ingratiate herself with the group of school kids, even though she didn’t know a singe one of them. She ran off to play all their organized games, like sack races. It was like she instinctively knew which group she belonged to.

I found out about a homeschooling co-op that isn’t too far from here. It looks like it’s too late to register for any of the classes this semester, but we can go and check it out. The prospect is both exciting and overwhelming. I don’t know that I have the energy to become emotionally involved in another co-op right now. But the idea of having some structure for D seems good. That and the involvement with other kids. That amount and that kind of socialization seems ideal (or as ideal as we’re ever going to find or afford). She could use a few friends who have an idea of what she’s going through.

I wish that I had the energy/time to sort out my thoughts about all of things that we have tried this year and why most of them seem like such complete failures. It’s hard not to feel that old familiar shame for having “failed” at this so far. It’s such a bummer to find out that, even when I think I’m detached, it turns out that I have all these expectations. I realize that I keep writing the same post in here over and over, how I feel like a failure and yet how we both have learned a lot about what doesn’t work. It was encouraging to be around other families who are doing this, who have been making it work and so I’m trying to just look forward to the next meeting instead of kicking myself for not having gone sooner.

Back to School

It makes my stomach hurt to think about returning to unhomeschooling tomorrow. P said something today about the girls going back to school tomorrow, and I said something like “well, two of them at least”. To which he replied that D would be returning to school-like activities, too, right? Right? School-like activities. I’m immediately defensive. This whole internal dialogue begins on how I’ve abandoned the practice if not the philosophy of unschooling but how I’ve failed to pick up any real curriculum with D. I’m mad at P because he agreed to give unschooling a try and yet here he is demanding “school like activities”. How dare he! And yet I’m the one who has abandoned unschooling. I’m the one I’m mad at, because I can not shake the feeling that I am screwing this year up royally.

People frequently ask me how homeschooling is going and I smile and say “Great! We’re doing great.” But I don’t really believe that, or at least I don’t believe that tonight. The feeling of failure comes and goes. Somedays I do believe that the self-confidence D has gained this year is worth any amount of academic backtracking she will have to do, and how much back-tracking will it really be, anyway? How much information does the typical 5th grader actually absorb in a year of school? I have no idea, really. I know I didn’t really absorb squat until the 9th grade, and then suddenly everything started to make sense, and I was motivated and I caught up and ran ahead in every single subject. Will it happen that way for D? That’s in part why unschooling made so much sense to me. And yet, I can not take the leap of faith and just go for it.

I know I’m tired and this doesn’t make much sense but I have to post it anyway. oh, and the last thing I want to hear right now is how I’m really doing a great job, because all I can think when people say that to me is “Bullshit.” I’m totally fucking lazy, and I suck at this, and I just want the problem to magically disappear. Won’t somebody make this issue just magically disappear? Like a scholarship to the Robert Meuller Center for Living Ethics or a magic wand, perhaps, that will make D suddenly self-motivated and less of a martyr when it comes to work? Because really, that’s what I envisioned for this year. ugh. What are we going to do?

More and more doubt

I dreamt last night that the mother of a friend of D’s decided to take her out of ACM and homeschool her. I had mixed feelings about it in the dream. First it was like, wow, if Jessica’s mom is pulling her out, boy things must be bad. And she wasn’t the only one in the dream, either, it was like a quarter of the school decided to homeschool. Maybe the district would finally wake up and make some changes. Then panic set in because I realized in the dream that a lot of these parents were following my example, and I was horrified to think that all these kids would be running around with basically zero instruction. Yeah, there hasn’t been a whole lot of “schooling” going on these days.

My unschooling connection called out of the blue the other day and gave me the date for the next unschooling get together. I have it on the calendar and I am determined to get there this time! I really want to talk to some families that are unschooling veterans.

Refrains from Wednesday on a Saturday

Today homeschooling feels like a terrible mistake. The last two weeks have been tough. Actually, things have been tough ever since I started asking Daryl to do actual school work. This week has been especially difficult, though. Everything I do is wrong. She seems mad all the time, and has had several melt downs, something that up until recently had become rather infrequent. I thought we were past some of this. She was so upset today that our friend and her daughter didn’t come over today as planned. We’ve been planning a trip with them down to Mockingbird station for weeks now and it keeps getting cancelled and postponed. This set the tone for the entire day. It didn’t help that Party City didn’t have any costumes and that we had to use her favorite swim towel to clean up her little sister’s vomit when we picked her up from swim team. It was “the worst day in her life.”

I’m realizing that I had completely unrealistic expectations for what homeschooling would look like and be like. This is so hard to admit because I tried so hard not to have them. Not only do I “know better”, I had been warned from several places/people to beware of expectations. Especially from unschooling. But damn it, I want D to like learning! Is that so much to fucking ask? Does she have to drag her heals on everything? (How could she not want to watch the very informative PBS special on Slavery in America that I ordered from Netflix? and what about the joy of looking through the paper for a current event? and art – everybody likes art, right?) I thought that having the schedule would alleviate some of this, but I have a hard time letting the schedule do the work. I find myself reminding her more than once a day to “do her work”.

What business do I have homeshooling? There are so many people better suited for this. People who started planning their children’s education before they were even born, for instance. I have no idea what I’m doing. I cringe when I think about devising lesson plans. How can I expect D to be excited about these projects when it all seems like such a chore to me? It’s nearly impossible to concentrate and maintain the patience I need in order to help D when I’m also trying to soothe a fussy baby who doesn’t want to stand (let alone sit) still, and a two year old who seems bent on destroying our house and peeing all over everything. When I finally have two hands and two ears free, all I want to do is veg in front of the computer or create some art. I really don’t want to sit down and do math or plan lessons for the next week.

And yet that isn’t entirely true. We had a great time doing math together the first few times we worked out of the text book. I DO like learning once I’m in the middle of it. I just don’t always like the getting there part. I can see that my lack of preparedness can actually work to our advantage in these situations, though, as D responds much better to the material when we are figuring it out together as opposed to me “teaching” her. The time for that kind of mutual investigation is incredibly hard to come by, though. Hello!. It’s just like what I wrote about the other day. If I keep treating homeschooling as something I don’t have enough time for, that is how D will keep approaching it. It doesn’t matter that, from my perspective at least, she has all the time in the world. Again, she will do as I do, not as I say. See? I am completely unfit for this. I don’t make the time to do homeschooling properly and I can’t take the leap of faith that is necessary for unschooling. I try to comfort myself by saying we’re doing a nice mix of both, but truthfully I think it’s like most things in my life; that by not committing to one thing, I’m just doing a bunch of things half-ass.

It’s Monday.

The week is off to an auspicious start. I didn’t even have the schedule written down until late this morning. Received quite a bit of flak for the quote I chose for her to memorize, but managed to keep my cool both then AND when she called me in to help her with a math review problem she didn’t understand. Very hard to do when she’s bouncing all over the place, adamant that the book didn’t explain it and that I’m not making sense. I kept telling myself to breath, to be compassionate, to keep it light hearted when what I wanted to do SO BADLY was to tell her to sit still and listen, God damn it! I was so proud of us when I was finally able to come up with a real world example for her and she was finally able to sit still long enough and pull the cotton out of her ears and really hear it. For us to come out of a situation like that without either of us loosing our temper is pretty remarkable.

It almost made up for the guilt I’m heaping upon myself for not making more of the fact that this is an election year. A really good home schooler would have developed all sorts of fascinating projects and lessons and field trips and simulations, but not me. Nope. I’m pretty sure that the only thing we’ve really spent any time on regarding the election was to sit down together tonight and watch the SNL Presidential Bash. Does laughing together hysterically at Tina Fey count as a lesson?

On a completely unrelated note, I am still lurking on the unschooling Yahoo! group. I’ve decided that maybe they are not all as crazy as I originally thought. More to come later…

The schedule

This is the first day of the first week of our new schedule, and it seemed to go well! I made a checklist for Daryl of all the work she needs to accomplish in a week, broken down into managable chunks for each day. I don’t like being the nag so I sat down with her and told her that she is now going to be in control of when she gets her work done. She has to finish the week’s assignments before the weekend, otherwise no friends over, no swim meets, etc. until it gets done. Today was the first day since we started this that I didn’t remind her to do her work, which was a huge relief to both of us. Here’s what the schedule looks like:

At some point I want to explore the numerous reasons we decided to jump ship from the unschooling philosophy, but I had to start somewhere. Today was a pretty good place to start.