let's not even use the word school

I have heard two things nearly every day for the past two weeks: 1) "I'm really happy we're homeschooling" and 2) "My brain keeps tricking me and even though we're homeschooling I keep dreaming that I have to go to school."

It's amazing to me that after only a week my son is plagued with the same anxiety dreams that I have at least once a week after 12 years of traditional schooling. So, that's how that experiment went. A bit traumatizing for the whole family. Oh, not the same kind of trauma that comes with living through war or being severely abused, but in his five-year-old world, given what it looks like, it's trauma none the less. During that first week that just became progressively worse to the point of sleepless nights, tear-filled mornings, and quiet hunger strikes, everyone told me to just wait it out. "Give it two weeks, he'll come around." Come around? You mean, after two weeks, his spirit will be sufficiently broken to the point where he'll stop begging me not to send him, stop crying and reaching for me as I drop him off in the morning, and stop silently refusing to eat his lunch?

I guess I could have waited for that, if I had magically swapped minds with some other person who was in no way invested in my children, and/or had faith in the public school system. But, you know, I couldn't do it. All I could do was follow my instincts; my intuition. What countless people described to me as typical behavior for kindergartners in the first weeks of school, was in no way typical behavior for Sol, under any circumstances. I've spent a lot of time with my children and therefore have come to understand them pretty well. I know what his anxious looks like. I know what his fearful looks like. I know how he responds to new people, places, experiences. I know about how long it takes him to come around. I know that that place was not a good place for him. And he knew it, too. And the poor guy did everything he could to tell us.

On Friday of the first week, his last day of school, I went in to observe and to eat lunch. It was just as bad as I remembered and worse than I thought it could be. I was thinking Kindergarten would be all playing and songs and read-aloud time. But I guess with the majority of children in preschool these days, that by the time they are in the big leagues, play becomes obsolete, a concept relegated to a 20-minute block called recess. Kindergarten, which used to be about transitioning from the homeworld to the schoolworld, with an emphasis on social interaction (taking turns, being part of a larger group, not biting your neighbor,) is now about acclimation. The programming period.

From what I could see in my few hours there, everything from the extended day (over 6 hours!) to the limited opportunities for socializing ("No talking") to the countless transitions (lots of standing line and walking "Quietly, hands behind your back" from one room to the other), everything is about teaching children how to be good students. And a good student is a very different thing from a good learner. Good students don't ask too many questions. Good students keep their hands and their bodies still. Good students only speak when they are permitted to. Good students do what they are told and nothing else. If you think about it being a good student is quite antithetical to learning.

Most people don't know how to respond when they learn that we are homeschooling. I've gotten lots of "That's a big decision," as if I didn't already know that. As if we haven't been learning and thinking about it for the past 6 years. There also seems to be a good deal of concern over how we will be able to teach him what he needs to know. You know, since we don't have teaching degrees, and Adam never even finished college. I just say we're not worried about it. I don't go into how all that is expected of him academically by the County School System after completion of Kindergarten is being able to count to 30 and backwards from 10 and the ability to identify individual letters. The child is reading and doing multiplication. And all this on his own, without us "teaching" him anything.

We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."

Comments

[Mike Janssen]

Right on! You guys rock. And there's no reason that the educational system's standards for what children should know when should be the de facto standards for all of us.

[bexn]

L, this "big decision" sounds like the best one for everyone in the family. i have no doubt that Sol & Luna will flourish and grow into amazing people.

[adriana]

I am a volunteer after-school tutor one day a week. I'm shocked that most of the work the elementary school kids do is both remedial and boring. I work with one girl who is nine and can barely read. Her teacher knows this but is dealing with too many kids to do much about it. We try to encourage the ones who finish their work early to draw, make up stories, or read one of the hundreds of books we have on the shelves. Most of the kids just want to go home. The day is too long and boring and they can't wait to plop in front of the TV. It's disheartening.

[Mark]

Geez, this is just so TUFF, I'm amazed.

My roommate works for FCPS, and he remarked to me just a bit ago "Today I saw one kid break another kid's arm." It reminds me of those videos of chickens in factory farms, and how they have to be dis-breaked to prevent chicken-on-chicken violence.