I (and sometimes Brian) homeschooled our boys until high school, so it’s fun to come across this mini essay on education I wrote when Seb was only three years old and Oren was but a wee babe. Oren graduated from Allderdice this spring, and I’m finally selling off as much of the old homeschooling paraphernalia as I can. It’s of course bittersweet. I’m not making the money I spent back, but I loved homeschooling the boys even when it was messy and hard, and if I had to do it over, I would do things the same way. So here we are at the end of an era– but below is where it all began…
Education, from April 27, 2006:
This word, education, is a scary word for me. It carries with it baggage from my own shoddy schooling, and loads of noise when I start thinking about it for my kids. When I think about education, I remember liking it until high school, but not at all afterwards. Perhaps that is because in elementary and middle school, I actually liked my teachers, and they not only liked me too, they seemed excited to teach. I’m pretty sure every one of them had a genuine interest in what they were teaching. These golden years of learning for me were all in small-town Hays, KS. Does that have anything to do with it? I don’t know. I could say something witty like, Kansas is so flat and boring that they sure better like what they’re doing. But that isn’t really that funny.
Then my family moved to a suburb of Philadelphia where I started high school, and I found that education caused stress upon stress upon stress. It wasn’t necessarily a deadline thing, it wasn’t because I was a slacker–- sure, I was (and still am) a huge procrastinator, but self-inflicted stress is much different and less damaging than stress due to an incompetent teacher, a description I could use for probably 50 to 75% of my high school educators. I remember pleading with my parents on more than one occasion in more than one year not to make me go to school, mainly because of math. Algebra II, Trig, Geometry, were subjects I ended up trying to teach myself at home because all I could understand coming out of the teachers’ mouths was, “wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.” That’s only funny when you’re watching Charlie Brown cartoons. That’s not funny when it’s your education. I honestly think I had the makings of an ulcer when I was a sophomore. Other subjects weren’t as bad as math, but I can’t remember enjoying them. They were tolerable. I’m sure a lot of this had to do with my poor, teenager attitude; but why wasn’t anyone even trying to get through to me? Why didn’t any of the teachers I had in high school care whether I was enjoying learning from them? I was a good student, I followed the rules, and I wasn’t stupid.
A couple of other questions come to my mind now too, that I don’t necessarily have an answer for, nor do I care to really dwell on them much anymore because bygones are bygones, and I’m trying to NOT point the finger of blame at my parents for all my problems as an adult–- but where were they through all this turmoil and hell? Granted, I didn’t ask my parents for help in high school. We didn’t exactly have that kind of a relationship, and I will take most of the blame for that. But were they blind to my struggles? I remember them harping on me to do homework, or my dad asking us at dinner, “So, what did you learn at school today,” but they never actually knew what I was studying behind my closed bedroom door. They never checked any math problems (math was neither of their strong-suits either) or read any history or English papers– well, maybe once or twice. Sure, I was a closed-off kid, but I was still their kid, and my education ball was still in their court. Maybe it was all so bad that I just stopped caring.
Not to get mucked up in the past, but the point of me asking these questions about education at all is that I have two brand-new brains in my care, two tabula rasae on which we need to decide who gets to do the writing. Some of you reading this may be saying, “Chill out woman, your oldest kid is barely three years old!” Yeah, I know! but it amazes me that almost anytime I go out into company with other moms with kids who are Sebastien’s age, the big question I get asked is, “Have you started looking at preschools yet?” Preschools?! That’s next year, for one thing, and for another thing, it’s just preschool. It shocks me when I hear them talk about the application process for preschools– isn’t that what college is for? Then I ask myself, why haven’t I even been looking into this? Why am I shocked? And I wonder if I shouldn’t be jumping into the frenzy now myself. These are all well-meaning moms who want the best for their kids. Aren’t I a well-meaning mom? Don’t I want the best for my kids?
So now i have to start thinking about education and what I want for Seb and Oren. For the past week or so, I’ve been a little amped about it, thinking of practically nothing else (well, okay, I’ve been a little obsessed with potty training Seb too, but I’ll talk about that later), and I think we’ve decided that jumping into the mess of searching for a preschool is exactly the stress we want to avoid for our kids. We want to be laid back about their education so that they can learn in a relaxed and peaceful and enjoyable environment. We’re also not so ready to get them out of the house all day and immersed in a world made up mostly of kids their own age.
What this has made us decide is, we (Brian and I if you haven’t figured that out already) want to educate our kids ourselves. We want to be the authors of their blank slates. That doesn’t mean sending them off to school on their own and hope to be able to help them out when they get home. All of these thoughts have whittled it down to a simple answer in the end– homeschooling– yet one that carries a lot of weight, and also, one that I NEVER thought I’d ever consider.
For the moment, it means that we can relax. We don’t have to start searching for a preschool. We don’t have to furiously fill out applications or go on visits or put our names on lists. We can stay at home for now and just enjoy the kids. When it’s time for them to start learning a little more formally, we can still stay at home and just enjoy reading to the kids. Now I’m not so scared thinking about education for my kids anymore. I’m just sort of excited.
