'Homeschooling' - it's just like parenting in a way. Well, of course, it
is a special
subdivision of parenting, if you wind up finding yourself going this route, taking this very special road....
What I mean to say is that before you have kids, you have this idea of what parenting will be like, what your kids may be like, what you think you will do if certain situations arise, what your life will be like living with children, what 'type' of parent you will be, how you will handle issues like discipline, how you will do things differently from your own parents, and so on.... But the fact is, you just really don't know until it
happens. You have all these great ideas, maybe you have read some books, blogs, articles, talked to other friends who do or don't have children, but you really just
don't know until you are right there, in the thick of it, in the gloriously messy mixing bowl of family life,
figuring it out as you go along.
Without digressing too far into this tangent which could be a whole 'nother post, (and in fact, I think has been...) I will just say that I was raised in a very unconventional way, by a single father whose attitude about childrearing was expressed thus: 'Everyone thinks your whole life has to change when you have a kid, but that's not true. There's nothing to it! You just clothe it
, feed it, give it love, and go on with your life!' This was my attitude going into parenthood also, at age 28. Well, I was in for a big surprise. I did manage to sustain that perspective to a certain degree for the first couple of years, but of course, things did change. Undeniably so. Sooo much has changed in my life over the past 11 years of parenting.
To return to the original point of my post, before I ever had children, I had an idea that I wanted to homeschool them, for a variety of reasons. But in my mind, it looked very neat and compartmentalized compared to what it is now. For one, I visualized a possible scenario in which we would be involved in some type of co-op with 4 other families, and that the kids would rotate houses, which would give each responsible parent one day on and 4 days off to work, freelance, or whatever their needs dictated. This is part of how I envisioned I would be able to 'afford' doing this as a working artist of one sort or another. The group of kids would all be together, each day of the week, but under the supervision and tutelage of a different parent each day. Sounds nice. Having lessons in various subjects, with each responsible parent getting to focus on their area of strength with the kids, complimentary studies happening....
Well, the fact is that it's difficult enough to even get a co-op scenario to gel for even
one day a week, for a number of reasons. For one, part of the reason most people homeschool is because we actually
want to be with our kids all day, or most of the day, pretty much every day. We formed and sustained a co-op with a few other families that lasted for a couple years (see previous posts) that was really fabulous, and it started off with the intention of being a swap-off situation so that each of us would have a chunk of time most weeks to do some work or whatever we needed to do, but that rarely happened, because we just enjoyed being with our children, each others' children, and
each other so much that we just all stayed together most of the time, swapping off responsibility and who would host and give the kids a lesson that week.
And there are so many activities and classes offered for homeschoolers that the kids would miss out on if they were committed to being at someone's
house 5 days a week. Which leads me to why I place 'homeschooling' in quotation marks to begin with. Homeschooling is actually a bit of a misnomer for most of us. I tend to refer to what we do instead as 'lifeschooling' because working or 'schooling' at home is only a portion of what we do, and in fact most of our at-home 'lessons' do not really resemble school at home (again, another post). There is also 'carschooling' (all homeschoolers know this ;), when we are going from place to place, and doing our Spanish lessons - Pimsleur approach to conversational Spanish, or singing, or listening to classical music, jazz, blues, quizzing from 5th grade Brainquest cards while at stop lights, making up stories, and so on. That's in between our
Museum class that I'm teaching, our art classes, Earth Champs meetings, writing class, Shakespeare rehearsal, and so on.... Then there are other real-world experiences like going to the bank, the grocery store, thrift store, comparing prices, budgeting, going to more museums, nature walks, historical tours, bike rides, other field trips... it's boundless really. That's a big part of where the inspiration of the name for my businesses came from, this overall attitude that
We Can Do Anything We Want.
Reading this, school-going families may think, 'well yeah, of course, we do a lot of those things too.' Yes, you do. As homeschool families, we are held accountable (in most places - it depends on where you live, and varies) and called upon to show evidence of learning, thus we may come to value these real-world experiences in a different light as we begin to see the learning opportunities inherent all around us, every single day.
My original point is that homeschooling, or lifeschooling, like parenting, is a beautiful, unfolding, sometimes chaotic, sometimes harmonious, ever-changing
process with twists and turns, revelations, successes and failures.... And just when you think you have it all figured out, that you have found 'a way,' life will throw you a curve ball just to keep things interesting, and you have to try again, change it up, find a new way. Some things change, some things stay the same. There is so much more to education than schooling.
Until next time....
'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.'
-Yates
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