The Ups of Homeschooling
Well, this was a good week of homeschooling. The tears were kept to a minimum. Now, if you don't homeschool, you may not understand that tears is a frequent side-effect of homeschooling. Sometimes its the parent who's crying and sometimes its the students who are crying. Let me explain.
Most homeschoolers have a schedule for doing their schoolwork. And invariably, at least once a week in my home, the child(ren) cannot fathom that its time to do math, language arts, you name it they can't understand why they are expected to get to work. So, that's when the tears start. But they never admit that the tears are about the schoolwork -- oh no, why make it easy. My eldest daughter, for example, will claim she's crying because her baby sister is humming (yes humming is a capital offense that should be punished, at least Ms. 7 year old thinks so). Or, the dreaded "is it time for lunch yet?" question. If the answer is "no" the child will commence crying, grabbing her stomach and other starvation poses. The variation of this is the dying of thirst in the desert of schoolwork. Then the child is unable to speak without a pained expression of one being tortured.
Then there's the joy of teaching a practical joker. In my case, my four year old. She's known her phonics sounds for a long time and now we're working on blending and actually reading information on her own. This is where the parent being driven to tears comes in. For example, today we were working on the sounds of the letters "M", "T", "O", "C", and "S". She got all of those correct, no problem. Then the online program that I'm using for her exercises, sets up about six or seven words starting with these letters and they'll ask the students to decipher which word matches the spoken word. You know, words like "cat", "sat", "mat", etc. Well little Ms. Joker now develops amnesia -- I don't know which word starts with the "M" sound. She says things like, "hmmmm, I don't quite remember" and then she'll pick the absolute wrong word. Now, don't think I'm being too hard on her. She is already reading a couple of the scholastic reading books that tell the story of the bat, cat and the rat who sleep on a mat. So, this is just review and should be a no-brainer. But we have to go through this foolishness just to get to the real lesson. Hence, the parent crying during the week.
So, if anyone is thinking about homeschooling, just make sure you have plenty of kleenex for the starving, thirsty, acoustically challenged people you love. And don't forget your own extra strength Kleenex for yourself. It's good for wiping away your tears of frustration as well as shredding when your Practical Joker is plucking your nerves. :-)
Most homeschoolers have a schedule for doing their schoolwork. And invariably, at least once a week in my home, the child(ren) cannot fathom that its time to do math, language arts, you name it they can't understand why they are expected to get to work. So, that's when the tears start. But they never admit that the tears are about the schoolwork -- oh no, why make it easy. My eldest daughter, for example, will claim she's crying because her baby sister is humming (yes humming is a capital offense that should be punished, at least Ms. 7 year old thinks so). Or, the dreaded "is it time for lunch yet?" question. If the answer is "no" the child will commence crying, grabbing her stomach and other starvation poses. The variation of this is the dying of thirst in the desert of schoolwork. Then the child is unable to speak without a pained expression of one being tortured.
Then there's the joy of teaching a practical joker. In my case, my four year old. She's known her phonics sounds for a long time and now we're working on blending and actually reading information on her own. This is where the parent being driven to tears comes in. For example, today we were working on the sounds of the letters "M", "T", "O", "C", and "S". She got all of those correct, no problem. Then the online program that I'm using for her exercises, sets up about six or seven words starting with these letters and they'll ask the students to decipher which word matches the spoken word. You know, words like "cat", "sat", "mat", etc. Well little Ms. Joker now develops amnesia -- I don't know which word starts with the "M" sound. She says things like, "hmmmm, I don't quite remember" and then she'll pick the absolute wrong word. Now, don't think I'm being too hard on her. She is already reading a couple of the scholastic reading books that tell the story of the bat, cat and the rat who sleep on a mat. So, this is just review and should be a no-brainer. But we have to go through this foolishness just to get to the real lesson. Hence, the parent crying during the week.
So, if anyone is thinking about homeschooling, just make sure you have plenty of kleenex for the starving, thirsty, acoustically challenged people you love. And don't forget your own extra strength Kleenex for yourself. It's good for wiping away your tears of frustration as well as shredding when your Practical Joker is plucking your nerves. :-)
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