What Is It Like to Homeschool?
Sharon September 8th, 2009
I get this question a lot. Or I get the corrollary “I could never homeschool.” When I hear this, I don’t assume that people mean “I could never actually teach an 8 year old the multiplication tables, or what a cell is” - because obviously, nearly everyone could. I think most people who find homeschooling unimaginable envision home education as a smaller version of public school. They imagine that it would be the parent’s job to keep their children firmly at their desks, to reproduce school in all its forms, to follow exactly a curriculum, and the thought isn’t very appealing.
I’m not saying there are no parents who do this, but let’s just say there’d be a lot fewer homeschoolers if you had to. We certainly wouldn’t do it. The techniques required to manage a classroom of 28 six year olds or even sixteen year olds are totally different than to manage a “classroom” of a 9 and 12 year old who are your own kids, or, for that matter, a room of an almost-four year old, an almost-eight year old and an almost-six year old.
So I thought it would be worth describing what it is like to homeschool - or at least, one way it is possible to do so. My intention is not to try and persuade people who don’t want to to do so, but to demystify something that might come up for any of us. Because, as I write in _Depletion and Abundance_ any of us may find a reason to homeschool - just as the most committed homeschooler may find themselves needing to send their kids to public school. It isn’t an either/or thing. First of all, some kids are better suited to one technique than another - some kids simply can’t handle public school, or can’t get their needs met there. The same is true with homeschooling - one child might flourish while another ends up battling with their parents, but does great in public school.
Moreover, we’re all subject to circumstances beyond our control - sometimes kids gets sick and need to be taught at home for a time. Sometimes events close schools for extended periods. Sometimes we have life changes that require educational changes. Even if you don’t want to homeschool, you should at least have some sense of what it entails, if you get stuck doing it involuntarily. For example, it is perfectly plausible to imagine that if the flu outbreaks this year are severe, school districts may close for extended periods, and you might want to continue teaching at home - a short break is fun, but bored kids stuck inside with nothing structured to do can be, well…annoying. Trust me, even if homeschooling isn’t your dream, you’ll be glad to have something for them to do!
I realize we are enormously fortunate in that we have parents around during the day - I know single mothers who homeschool and work full time, or two career working and homeschooling families, and am always impressed by how hard they work - but I don’t know if I could do what they do. I know people who supplement their children’s education remarkably after school as well, and around their full time jobs, and I’m awed by their commitment.
I’m a lazier person than that, and of course, very fortunate - in some ways, I homeschool because doing all the things we’d like to do around a full time school schedule just seems too hard - we homeschool because we like to spend time at home together. I homeschool because there are so many things that my kids need to learn that school won’t teach them, and it seems so hard to do that at the end of a long school day. But that is a luxury not everyone has. I realize that - but also realize that if schools are ever extensively disrupted, someone - parents, a neighbor, a friend, a family member - will have to meet these needs around work schedules. There may come a time when economic demands mean we have to homeschool and work out of the home full time - and it is worth being comfortable with home teaching beforehand, and having a mental sense of how it might work.
So here’s what it looks like here. We do morning prayer before we go out for chores, and brush teeth, etc… Eli gets on the bus for school and then once everyone is milked, fed, etc… we all troop back and start school. We tend to do one or two subjects a day, and for a comparatively short time - the thing to realize about homeschooling is this - you don’t have to spend four days explaining fractions so that every kid in the class gets it, you just have to spend as long as it takes. And if it turns out that your kid isn’t ready for fractions, or isn’t responding, unless you’ve got an immanent test, you can say “ok, we’re going to do Venn diagrams instead” and come back to it. You aren’t trapped by any rules, other than a general sense of what your kids should be learning.
We had planned to do ancient world history for a while last year, but Simon conceived an interest in modern history, so we switched. We were teaching him recorder, but he didn’t like it, so now we do Piano (we already had the piano, obviously). Simon is a self-driven kid in a lot of ways - he gets obsessed with things and wants to focus exclusively on them - he’s gone through bird phases, astronomy phases, Shakespeare, the Blues, the Multiplication Tables, …right now he’s obsessed with the chemical elements. That wasn’t on my 3rd grade curriculum plan, but who cares?
For some homeschoolers, the kids interests would guide everything. We’re not in that category - I’ve got no problem with unschooling, but I’ve also got no problem saying “ok, we’re going to work on this, now.” Right now we’re doing that with Isaiah - he’s not reading yet, in part, I think because his brother Simon reads to him constantly, and because he’s entering 1st Grade in his Hebrew School, he really needs to learn to read. Last year we let it go, this year, we’re pushing a bit harder - and he’s more interested (he loves to cook and wants to be able to read recipes independently). We insist the kids do music practice, do their chores and learn things they don’t care about sometimes - because they don’t always know when learning something will be helpful to something they do want to to do. I want learning to be fun, but I don’t think it always has to be fun every second - but that’s a philosophical approach.
Besides memorizing Tom Lehrer’s “Elements” song (the chemical elements as of 1950 something sung to “I am the very model of a modern major general”) tomorrow, and reading Simon’s chemistry book and looking through cookbooks for Rosh Hashanah recipes, our school day will include reading the Torah stories that accompany the New Year’s Liturgy, painting the birdhouses the kids have been making and putting them up, taking another stab at a multi-perspective history of the ancient world, beginning with a children’s version of Virgil’s founding of Rome (so far the story has been really grabbing them), English and Hebrew reading lessons for Asher (still mastering his letters) and Isaiah (sounding out words), and making a pumpkin pie - Isaiah will read the recipes, Asher will help get out the ingredients, Simon will handle the lighting of the cookstove fire (with help), and Simon and Isaiah will add pumpkin seeds to their seed-saving project.
The whole thing will probably take less than two hours, perhaps not including the pie-baking time. We also get pie out of it . Much of the time is roughly indistinguishable from a lot of time we spend with the kids anyway, reading stories, doing our work with their help, and hanging about, singing, talking and giggling. The next day we’ll work on math, poetry and music - making up insulting couplets, cutting pies into pieces (and eating them) to be counted, added, subtracted, and divided and divided again according to one’s abilities and age. It is always hard to figure out what is work, and what is play. Simon is old enough to do some work independently, so he can be doing math problems while I’m helping Isaiah with his reading and getting Asher to sort blocks by shape. Sometimes we’re doing other stuff while we do it - I fold laundry while quizzing Simon about spelling, or answer Isaiah’s questions about birds while I’m doing dishes.
Does it work, this informal approach? It seems to - the kids are on grade-level pretty much across the board, and wildly above it in places. Simon reads at 7th grade level (he won’t be 8 until November) and is the consummate astronomer’s child, able to describe explain what a gamma-ray burst is, just in case you were wondering. Isaiah alrady knows the lower multiplication tables, can bake cornbread, make bread and cookies with almost no help from memory and can identify more plants and their uses than Eric by a good stretch. At 3, Asher can already sing the first verse of the Elements Song, recite the Prelude to the Constitution (no, we don’t teach that, he’s been listening to his big brothers ), make up new tunes to “Adon Olam” and explain that he’s a carbon-based life form.
They are not geniuses, or even unusual children - Simon can’t write neatly, Isaiah doesn’t read yet, Asher still can’t eat without dripping. Their knowledge is broad in some places, and imperfect in others. What is different about homeschooling is simply this - they haven’t yet learned not to be having fun while learning. And their parents haven’t yet hit the point where teaching isn’t fun. We all stagger along as best we can, learning and getting things done, and mostly, having a good time of it.
Sharon