Tale of a Home School Dropout

We’re in a magazine article, sort of. We were some of the people sitting around the camping trip at the beginning of this article from Touchstone. Reading it has made me wistful for home schooling, but I also want to point out Mr. Mitchell’s idealism. I am in complete agreement with his conclusion: Home schooling can form kids to a good kind of normal ("a steward of the good, the true and the beautiful" - an oddity in the world's eyes).  I concur with his approach to education, similar to Uncle Ambrose’s: lots of high quality books, music, and art, limited exposure to television and other forms of mass media, unscheduled free time to play, and lots of family memory-making/character-forming moments.

On the other hand, although I fully ascribed to this pedagogy for the four years we home schooled, and continue to follow it as much as possible as a parochial school family, the reality is that we don’t live in a quaint English village like the Linnets that doesn’t intrude so rudely as the contemporary world does. Nor does every child’s temperament respond to this approach.  And schooled children get more opportunities to practice virtues in the face of temptation.  And sometimes Mom just gets so tired of trying to sell these ideas that she burns out and turns into a screaming meanie (or is it meme?).

Perhaps I had too high of expectations for our home school: I pictured the kids sitting around listening to me read out loud while they colored or did puzzles quietly at my feet. We were going to be done with school subjects by noon and then go for nature walks. We’d memorize poetry and Bible verses and make little notebooks. The kids would turn out faithful, artistic, literate, imaginative, and whizzes at math and logic.

For maybe a year this little tableau actually took place a good portion of days. I was in danger of becoming a self-righteous home schooler, but I had to endlessly monitor math work, so we were rarely done at noon. I couldn’t quite get organized enough to play very many math games. We took nature walks, but my energetic boys never really wanted to sit and sketch what they saw. They memorized a couple poems and copied out Bible verses for handwriting practice, but don’t remember much, if any. Somehow, when I said, ok, now we’re going to do this, no one ever jumped for joy or worked very hard.

Then my fifth and sixth began to demand more attention, my olders became more reluctant to do what I asked without complaints, my middles needed extra help learning to read, so that I didn’t have time to read out loud myself. The world intruded: my husband’s job required him to travel more; our house seemed too small and then we had to get it ready to sell; I got too busy with outside things: all small volunteer jobs in themselves, but together they took up a substantial amount of time and emotional energy. My mass attendance was sporadic because wrestling toddlers distracted me enough that I often felt I needed to go straight to the confessional after attending. Needless to say, my spiritual life was not healthy. By our fourth year, I daily found myself screaming and pleading and generally making my kids hate “school.”
Can I complain more? If I could easily diagnose just one reason for why our home school failed it would probably be that I got distracted from our real purpose of learning to love to learn, and focused more on trying to do too much. I pushed too hard, both the kids and myself, and we all collapsed. I wanted our home school to look like some of these happy, crafty places, but I wasn’t willing to negotiate on amount of math and grammar we did every day. I couldn’t be happy with what we did do, and focused too much on what we weren’t doing.

My theory is that people who succeed at home schooling are of two types: Relaxed, unschoolish, take each day as it comes types, or very organized, focused, disciplined types. Wanting to be both, I ended up neither.
So now my kids are in a smallish Catholic school. I am pleased for the most part with their education. They use a lot of home school basics: Shurley Grammar, MCP Phonics, Saxon math. The Accelerated Reader program allows me to make some suggestions for good books, and my sixth grader is actually more motivated to read classics to earn extra points. My second grader adores her soft spoken, pretty teacher. And my very active kindergartener is finally learning some letters and sight words. At the weekly Mass, they sit up and seem to pay attention because the priest caters to them. (I could do without the singing during the consecration, however.) Their new friends seem like good kids, although many have cell phones and ipods. They all are excelling and happy for the most part.

But when I subbed a couple weeks ago at the high school and helped out in the elementary cafeteria today, I was saddened by some of what I saw: at the high school, the halls reeked of hormones. Most classes had a flirter and a goof off distracting everyone else. Lots of preening, not a lot of academic challenges. At the elementary, I felt sorry for the classes that were being punished with no talking at lunch because a couple of kids were being kids. You can already see the exhaustion in the teacher’s faces from trying to meet all the goals they have to meet with 15-20 kids who are at different levels. A lot of time is taken up with telling kids to stand in line, sit up, quiet down. Concepts are repeated frequently to make sure the slowest learner gets them (although I recognize I didn’t repeat things enough). And when it rains, recess is spent watching a PBS kids' show because the school doesn’t have a proper gym, only a PE room.

So I remain half hearted about school. I loved the little family run school the kids attended when we lived in Illinois. I loved our home school co-op and sports league in Virginia. I am happy with our little Catholic school in Mississippi. Can it form my kids into stewards of goodness, truth and beauty? Maybe. But when we move next, I may order up some home school catalogs. Then again maybe I won’t. I’m hoping God will send me an obvious sign.