Revisiting the school question again

We've had a wonderful Memorial Day - began the day by attending the Memorial Day service at memorial park in town.  A couple World War II veterans live in our neighborhood, and they laid wreaths at the base of a Veterans' Memorial here in honor of their fallen companions.  A few Gold Star mothers and wives and representatives from a variety of military service member support organizations also honored fallen service members from over the decades. Since this community has such a large proportion of active duty and retired service members, it's a moving event.

But the rest of the day, I have been tangling with the question of what to do for school for the youngest child next year. She is of the age to go to kindergarten, and at one point, I really thought I would stick with conventional school for her. But now that the time has come to register for next year, I am torn about sending her. The unconventional part of me thinks I should home school her. So do my older kids. Their opinion is meaningful to me since they have been schooled in a variety of schools. I'm touched they value their home school experience - except the youngest two who are the most social and are not as quick to admit they were home schooled. Their experience was briefer and just different from the older ones.

My quandary is that I don't want to quit my little teaching job, and I'm not quite sure how I can manage teaching college and teaching kindergarten at home. I almost feel like it will be harder to home school one child than several, because I am her only entertainment. I have a friend who has offered to help out, but I really need something consistent.  I put out an advertisement for a babysitter/tutor on the local home school group newsletter, but heard nothing. I also have looked into a few charter schools that cater to home schoolers, but the timing is not quite right for me. Their kindergarten classes are either on the wrong day, or the wrong time, or just not quite long enough for me to get from my school to their location, and none are willing to allow her into the first grade group. 

One part of me thinks I am being selfish for wanting to keep my job and put her into traditional kindergarten. Perhaps I should quit my job and stay home with her. My other local options are not as attractive. Our parish school apparently has a good kindergarten teacher, but she is having a baby in the spring, and the class last year had 30 kids (the class does have an aide).  Many people love the local public school kindergarten, but it, too, has large classes, and the new state curriculum is not impressive. I would love to postpone the peer pressure of public school as long as possible, as well as continue the more literature rich education we've been doing at home.  And I like home schooling people. 

The other part of me thinks that I could use the time she would spend at school to get more house and school work done, so that I am more available to the other kids after school. The youngest is very social and may be lonely at home. I tend to start projects like home schooling with ambitious plans and finish them with less enthusiasm.  She might learn more at school. The parish school does have wonderful feast day celebrations for All Saints Day, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Holy Week, and May Crowning. The other kids have done well in school, like school, and do not want to return to home schooling, even as they recommend it for elementary school.  I have friends whose kids are in the parish school, too. 

I'm probably overthinking the options. Is it a question of doing either what is best for her or easiest for me, or am I not framing the question in the right way? That question is one fraught with guilt.  I tell myself that I could start one and change course if it isn't working. But nothing quite seems like the perfect solution. I keep praying I will find either someone willing to watch her for 3 hours twice a week while I go to school or a charter school where she could go a couple days a week.  Other moms from the parish school say that they pull their kids out of school all the time. Maybe I could sign her up for the parish school and then keep her home a day or two a week to do field trips and art and reading. Maybe, maybe. The perpetual war between heart and mind continues. 

Cooperating

One of the volunteer duties I've taken on this year is actually a blessing to me more than anyone else.  A friend and I are collaborating on a preschool co-op for our three-year-olds. She was homeschooling 4 of her 6 kids, the oldest 4, but sent them to school this fall to give more time her two youngest, who are three and 14 months, among other reasons.  We both wanted to have some social/entertaining/educational resources for our threes, but much of what is offered by the recreation department and area museums and preschools is pricey and time-consuming.

So we are making our own social/entertaining/educational resources. We convinced 4 other moms to join us and are plotting our way through the school year.  On Mondays we meet for 2 hours for circle time, sensory learning and crafts, snacks, music and movement and a closing story and prayer time.  Then on Wednesdays we meet for field trips. We've been to the living history farm, the Spanish story time, a new park and next week we tour the post office. Trips to the zoo, a pumpkin patch, the fire station, and a monthly visit to the nursing home are planned, and we have a long list of other places to visit.  The idea is that every month we'll go color and do puzzles or read stories at the nursing home, check out a new park around town, and take advantage of group rates for museums.

In addition to two mornings a week dedicated to playgroup preschool, we are pretty regular about attending Mass one morning a week with the high schoolers on their late start day, and going to the mother's rosary group on Fridays after Mass. Then Tuesdays, we often meet up with friends for library story time and park play. There is something nearly every day, but other than our morning class on Monday, I don't feel bad about skipping one morning's activity if I need to. The structure keeps the three-year-old happy and worn out in the afternoons until the kids come home and perk her up again.

So what is our pre-school curriculum? Here is the fun - and frustrating part: I bought two curriculum books. One Memoria Press's Junior Kindergarten program, which is fine, but I didn't love all the book choices and the themes are random, and it involves too much seat time.  The other is a Circle Time Resource Book, which I found on Amazon. It has good suggestions for sensory learning and games, but also seemed to lack unity.  I debated about buying some of the other Catholic preschool curriculum guides, but none seemed to fit our vision just right.

So we have been designing our own program based on themes we picked to coincide either with the calendar (St Francis and animals this week), or a letter of the week (last week was B for bananas, blueberries, bubbles, and our theme was senses.) My friend and I sat down one day this summer to pick 26 themes, which gets us through the spring and all the letters fo the alphabet. Moms are rotating roles in the classroom (which is at our church) and once every six weeks, a turn for a week off shows up. This month I've been the circle time mom, but next month I am helping with music and movement.

It's an amateur program and the kids are still pretty young for two hours of concentration, although we have snack and free play in the schedule.  I'm discovering some new picture books at the library - a simple creation book by Cynthia Rylant and a version of the Canticle of the Sun by Reeve Lindbergh called Circle of Days.  I Hear a Pickle was cute, but didn't hold everyone's attention; our age group preferred a simple story about senses at the beach.  I'm learning that for read-a-louds in a group, simple words, preferably rhyming, and big pictures go over best. Also popular is the letter bag, with small toys and objects that begin with the letter of the week. Stamping, sorting, skipping, and gluing are all a part of sensory learning/craft, and songs and parades and little hand motions are the extent of music and movement.

The kids love it. It is the highlight of the week for them.  And I like being motivated to find little activities and learning games online or at the library.  There is so much available, and this compels me to spend a little time playing with learning and making connections. A win all around.

And here is a pretty little poem from The Writer's Almanac: https://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20170906/, where you have to read the whole thing,  via Karen Edmisten:

Nature Walk

by Gillian Wegener

The fern fronds glow with a clean, green light,
and I lift one and point out the spores, curled
like sleep on the back, the rows so straight,
so even, that I might be convinced of Providence
at this moment. My daughter is seven.
She looks at the spores, at the leaf, at the plant,
at this wise, wide forest we are in, and sighs
at my pointing out yet another Nature Fact.
But look, I say, each one is a baby ready
to grow. 

...
But she is already moving down the path
toward the bridge and whatever’s beyond.

“Nature Walk” by Gillian Wegener from This Sweet Haphazard. © Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017. 

Out of the ordinary

Last weekend we went to Mass at a small Catholic liberal arts college not far from our house.  The college is just about 20 miles away from us, and we've been a handful of times. Our boys were meeting up with some friends to go to Mass, brunch, and then a hike in the hills around the school.  Since we like to keep Sunday as much of a family day as we can with multiple teenagers, we decided all of us would go to Mass there, even though my youngers were resistant because 1. the Latin Mass at the college is long and 2. they miss out on donuts at our parish's "Friendship Sunday" gathering.  Their vote was overruled, as usual.

The church at this school was designed by one of my husband's professors at Notre Dame.  It is stunning, large and light drenched. Its neoclassical design belies its recent completion a few years ago. The interior is covered in marble. In the axis of the cross design stands the altar, canopied by a large baldacchino. Light streams in from stained glass windows, and replicas of famous portraits of educated saints, mostly Dominicans, adorn the walls.  Needless to say, every sound reverberates.  Music sounds ethereal from the choir loft; the cry of babes sounds piercing.

The other times we have attended Mass here, the Masses were more sparsely attended, but this past Sunday the pews were full.  We had to sit in the section to the right of the altar, which was fine because the echo isn't as bad there. And we were not alone. Each pew was brimming with small children.  During the Communion hymn, I was distracted by trying to figure out which kids belonged to which family. I counted 10 kids in one group; my son counted 12.  Our baby's voice was one of many pipsqueaks.

I assume these were primarily faculty families.  I know there is a large home school community in this area, which is also where a popular umbrella school is based.  There must be some form of the Catholic ghetto up here in the hills.  In light of the hullabaloo over Pope Francis' recent remarks praising large families and then being accused of comparing Catholics to rabbits, I felt like we were in the midst of the audience he was praising.  I surreptiously checked out the other families: they looked happy enough, not too overwhelmed, the older kids were helping with the younger kids, they all seemed well fed and dressed appropriately.  Nobody appeared neglected, unhappy, or abused.

If we were going to stay in the area, I might be tempted to get to know some of these families. I have more than once felt like the object of curiosity because of our large family.  We have been compared to rabbits more than once. In fact, when my husband and I first arrived at our newlywed apartment, we found an enormous rabbit hiding in the shrubbery by our door.  It turned out to be the tame pet of the chef down the street, who was so grateful to be reunited with his friend that he baked us a lasagna. I always thought it was a sign.

So at a moment when I was feeling a little lonely for a community of like minded individuals, lo! there appeared to be some here! I projected onto them a little of the "thickened" culture that Melanie described in her recent post.  These families seem to live and share faith and practice and community.  In the middle of Mass I was having this existential moment of both recognition and disconnect. Ah ha! here is a community!  But no! I don't belong!  I wondered if I should try to strike up a conversation after Mass. I didn't. Mostly because we met up with our other friends (!) for brunch.

But I also felt distanced because I couldn't help but make associations with a home school group we were on the periphery of when we lived north of Chicago. After one meeting, I left feeling shocked and disappointed when the group voted not to allow a family in which the mother was not Catholic to join. She was married to a Catholic and was raising the kids Catholic. She wanted to join. She probably was a Catholic in the making, but that rejection was harsh. It may have determined her to think negatively of Catholics from then to the end of her days.  The intent of the home school group was to protect the integrity of their mission and the innocence of their children. And I can understand now the difficulty of raising a countercultural family in the midst of mainstream culture. But I left feeling disillusioned.

My thoughts also meandered to the land of whatmighthavebeen.  My husband was once offered a job with his professor. He would have been a measly draftsman, copying designs, but in an up and coming firm. At the time, exactly at the time, the Twin Towers were bombed, and being in the military was a noble and patriotic profession. My husband declined the job offer because of the timing, the security, the opportunities.  We did not go to live in South Bend in a little cottage for the next 14 years, but have migrated from place to place.

Whatmighthavebeen is a dangerous place, and I don't like to linger there long. When I was in the midst of those large families on Sunday, feeling like the mother of a small family, (only my children are large), I could see that perhaps I could have belonged to a community like this.  We might have gone ahead and had a couple more kids between number 6 and 7 if we didn't have to pack up all our belongings every couple of years.  The kids would have had ready made friends; we might have continued home schooling; I might have been more skilled at domestic crafts.

But I couldn't help but wonder if these families were like the ones we once knew, who withdrew from the mainstream culture to raise their kids without rude comments from grocery store clerks or the influence of advertising and mainstream peers.

I know I am stereotyping to connect these two groups. Yet I also know I'd still feel a little out of sync in this crowd. It is an interesting subculture up in the hills removed from the "beach culture," the "consumer culture," the world at large.  It is a beautiful place to live, where your practice and your ideals can come close to being identical.  But it is not my place, which is in the midst of the traffic.
As much as I long for a community of like-minded people, there are few of those around. As much as I love the beautiful liturgies and the instant camaraderie of large families, I also love my friendly parish that sings the Gloria with jazz hands where the old ladies pat my baby and comment on her growth, and the priest remembers all my kids' names. I love feeling free to teach and work outside of the house. I love the military community that reaches out so freely to near strangers.

After reading Melanie's post about creating holidays and community and Pentimento's reflections in the same vein, I thought back to last Sunday morning, when I sat in Mass pondering both the beauty of the Mass and the church and the goodness of being among families as large or larger than our own worshiping together. I also realized that living as an oddity (one among many) in a secular community is my calling right now.  Even though sometimes we are a bad witness, I love that my kids are witnesses to the gift of having multiple siblings.

I don't have any answers to the situation of yearning for community and feeling the thinness of celebrating holidays like saints' days and Epiphany all by ourselves. I don't doubt that up in the hills some of those large families got together for a party for Epiphany.  Maybe even for Michaelmas. I know that the community of students and tutors at the College is tightly knit because of the testimony of our friends' daughter who just graduated and now is working there. It is a kind place where people are excited about beauty and wisdom, and perhaps we would find soulmates there. My stereotypes are most likely wrong.

We'll be looking for a new community again soon. Every time we move to a new place - which will happen yet again this summer -  I have to push myself to show up at the parish Moms group or the school volunteer meeting or the Navy wives' luncheon when these things aren't really what I want to be doing, but I'm always surprised by the offers of friendship waiting there.  These people are sometimes baffled by our choices, but often the feeling is mutual, so we share something!  In many ways the community created by a mom's group or a marriage ministry or at a library story time is a bit artificial. But sometimes real friendships are begun through the casual acquaintances these events facilitate. I'll be adding a few more addresses to my list of friends I keep in touch with when we leave here.

I didn't take any photos in the big church but here are some pics of the campus:

Tiny altar in the guest house chapel where Blessed Mother Teresa once stayed and prayed.

Good kids

Hidden ponds

Stations of the Cross in the woods

Redwoods were planted here long ago by the original property owners.

As were these calla lilies that grow along a little stream

Second guessing

I talked to my mother-in-law the other day, and she commented on what unusually nice weather they were having – sunny and in the 60s.  Before I spoke, I caught myself thinking, Wow, that’s really cool for the summer. Oops, I mean warm for winter. What season is it? I’m going to miss Guam.

We still have just over 4 months left. Plenty of time to enjoy island life. But the calendar is filling up.  I’ve been researching schools in California and printing applications. It’s giving me technostress.

I’m considering putting all the kids back in school this move. The boys all wanted to go to school here once they made friends, although, ironically, it seems like several new home schooling families have moved in to the area lately. Nonetheless, even though the past few weeks with just the girls home have gone well, I’ve appreciated the ability of the older kids to take advantage of things like free music lessons, Spanish class, drama class, etc.  The older boys in particular seem to work harder for other teachers than myself, motivated partially by competition, which is perhaps not the best motivation to do well in math, but viable. And the younger boys are being assigned more work and taking more responsibility for it than they did with me. School has been especially good for my youngest son, who needed the routine and structure, as well as the encouragement he receives from his teacher, who is absolutely wonderful.  It’s been a good semester.

Of course, as soon as I feel sort of at home with this decision to send all the kids to school in California, I read something like Jennifer Fulwiler’s post on the dangers of being too detached from your kids, so that they identify more with their peers. Maybe I should reconsider.  Especially since we’re moving to Southern California.  Are my kids going to be pressured by their peers to give up their faith, to smoke pot, to bleach their hair? AHHHH! Peer Culture!

Not only did I start to second guess my inclination to put them in school, but I began to wonder whether my working at the community college and leaving them at home for an hour or so before their dad gets home is abandoning them. I fear we have not given them roots. I fear we should have read them to sleep more often. I should not have let the older ones get ipods.  I began to think of all the compromises I’ve made in my parenting. I let them eat hydrogenated oils and corn syrup. I found out our water has unacceptable levels of trihalomethanes, and we're all going to get cancer because we haven't been drinking filtered water.  I’ve been parenting all wrong.

Fortunately, before this fear crippled me, we received a note in the mail yesterday from a young couple newly arrived on island. My kids have taken a liking to them, and we had them over to dinner last week. They are like a young aunt or uncle or an older set of cousins. Anyway, in the midst of my parenting crisis, we got their thank you note that said “Being in your home, so full of life and love, was a heartening and inspiring experience.” “Full of life” may be a euphemism for “loud and rowdy,” but I was still consoled by this little note. Maybe we’re not doing it all wrong.

Deep breath. Perhaps it's me who needs to detach from peer culture and focus more on what's around me, so that I can see the kids are ok.  This move is going to be another challenge, but also another opportunity to find strength in and from each other. It's one more way our family will grow in our identity as a family. Having lived on an island will give my kids a sense of their uniqueness.  And the last two years have provided multiple opportunities for our family to bond, even though I'm not home schooling everyone. Trust. 

And at least my older boys haven’t caved to peer pressure yet to get a tattoo like 75% of their classmates.

The crust crumbles

It’s been a short week, full of activities. In addition to the usual sports and classwork, there’s been a fortieth birthday party (one of several this year?) and a baby born. I finally was able to pay forward the favors I’ve received as a parent of multiple children and babysit for kids whose mom was having a baby. 

Since we’ve rarely had family close enough to stay with our kids when a baby was born, we’ve had to call on neighbors and friends to watch our other kids while my husband and I ran off to the hospital.  (A by-product of military life and the general diaspora of modern life - you are always calling on new friends for favors that used to be the job of extended family.) Once my mom and dad were on their way home from vacation and were able to make it to our house before we had to go to the hospital. That one time my dad babysat while my mom, a labor and delivery nurse and the best birthing coach ever, and husband took me to the hospital. Providentially, that was the only time I had a baby in the middle of the night. The rest of them were born during the day while the kids happily played with friends. 

One other time, I was going to watch our next door neighbor’s toddler during the birth of her sister, but when the neighbors tried to call us and even banged on the door in the middle of the night, we never woke up.  I felt so bad about that moment that I went and bought a new phone for our bedside, even though up until then, I didn’t want a phone in our room. Now we continue the phone by the bed because we anticipate the call in the night that someone has died, although we’re down to one great grandmother.

So I was glad to be able to feed and put to bed someone else’s children, who all went down obediently, although they kept asking when their sister would be born.  We met this family because they home school also, and although they are not Catholic, this is baby number 5 for them.  Stepping into someone else's home is always an opportunity to compare.  These kids were all well behaved, and I envied their bookshelves and neat home school workspace, and their maps on the wall. Our efforts looked weak in comparison.  It was hard to turn off that inner voice of self-criticism.

As I tucked the kids in, I told them that their sister would probably be born by the time they woke up, but I anticipated spending the night on their couch. But this baby wasn’t waiting. I don’t think the parents were at the hospital more than an hour before she was born. So I got to sleep in my own bed.  And a new baby was welcomed lovingly into the world.

****

The other event of the week was a nonevent.  When I came home from class late Thursday night, my husband announced that we were taking a trip over the weekend.  Some of his work friends were going to Tinian, the next island over, famous for being the launching site of the Enola Gay, for a mountain bike race. The mayor of the island had arranged a half-price airfare to attract racers.  The biggest (only) hotel on the island, the Chinese-run casino, was offering a good rate, also. My husband wanted to take our whole family on a last minute three day vacation. 

I couldn’t get my mind around it.  On Friday I had to take a kid for a hearing test in the morning, then had to prepare for and host company for lunch, and had to shoo my company out to leave for a cross country meet.  The thought of packing in the evening for a trip to an island where I would be sitting at a casino with the kids while my husband struggled through a six hour or more bike race was not appealing. 

Anxiety set in. I told my husband in the morning that I didn’t want to go.  He tried to convince me. In the afternoon, panic started to set in. While we didn’t have a lot planned for the weekend, we still had soccer, had to serve at Church and to teach CCD, and had papers to grade.  I didn’t want to make time Friday to make calls for subs.  I had entertained visions of addressing a few items on a list of niggling things to do that keeps growing. We are talking about taking trips over Christmas and Spring break – we should be saving up and planning for those vacations.

I have no sense of adventure, no flair for spontaneity, I guess. But this didn’t sound like an adventure. It sounded like work. The younger kids didn’t want to go. I set my heels in. My husband made me call the airline to let them know we wouldn’t be making our last minute reservation, which I did with a sense of relief.

 ****

As so often happens, after a good night of sleep, I woke up feeling differently. Why am I so rarely at peace with my decisions? I saw clearly that I had been driven by selfishness. My resentment about going was all because my time was being threatened.  I didn’t want to deal with the work of packing and unpacking, with the rush to get caught up afterwards on everything that didn’t get done over the weekend.  I like staying home.

But the older boys were disappointed. My husband was disappointed.  And on Saturday morning, I could see what I couldn’t see Friday night: that the initial discomfort would have been forgotten in the rush of adrenalin from taking off on a tiny plane across the ocean.  The wonder of being in someplace new would have offset the irksomeness of extra laundry.  The memories would have been worth the money spent on tickets, hotel, and food.

So in my guilt over not going, I’ve been trying to be entertaining all weekend, although a dark cloud of regret keeps coloring my mood gray. We checked off some of the items on that to-do list: errands and yard work Saturday morning. My husband repaired a couple car problems, which gave him a sense of accomplishment. I made dinner for the family with the new baby, and we had friends over Saturday and Sunday night, one night a family whose dad was gone, and the other, a doctor friend who just returned from a deployment to the hospital in Afghanistan (another story). My husband and I went on a long bike ride and swim early Sunday before church. We fit in a dive Sunday afternoon with the older boys, and my husband and the older boys went diving again early Monday morning before going on their scout hike, which was the other event that would have been cancelled if we travelled.  

Our busy life has continued.  But all weekend, I’ve felt choked by the sense that I let the family down.  Had we gone to Tinian, we would have spent the weekend together as a family. Instead we’ve gone our various ways, one kid here, one kid there.  I’ve already failed at what I announced a couple weeks ago I was going to do: be led by faith.

This regret and guilt is just one more piece of evidence at how weak my faith is. I find it difficult to let go of my failures. Even though on Friday my reasons seemed strong enough for NOT going that I was nearly in tears at the thought of leaving, I can’t be confident in the purity of my intentions.

Lay it down, lay it down. 

My decision means nothing in light of eternity. If nothing else, the emotional turmoil of decision making and regretting has succeeded in chopping away at the crust of complacency, making me little yet again. 

Summer's end

After a summer of indecision, our fall is shaping up. Here’s the final fall out:

We will not be moving next summer. That is the biggest news, and the most disappointing.  Another well qualified officer was chosen for the position my husband had put his name in for.  It would have been a great experience, but now it is clear that we will be staying put for the full three years in Guam. I’d like to say that I am relieved to know something at least, instead of being unsure about the future, but this was not the something I wanted to know!

The next decision: schooling. 

Over time it has become obvious that my youngest son would do better in a more structured environment.  In other words, he just doesn’t listen to me. Everything’s a battle. I don’t want him to think that learning involves warfare with your mother. He did well in school in Mississippi, so I feel good about the decision to send him to the DODEA school, which starts next week.

The 12 year old is also going to school there. He’s a more willing student, so I’m conflicted about sending him, but he is, like his older brother, motivated by competition, and he’s an extrovert.  Ironically, that same older brother, the introvert, thinks the 12 yr old should stay home because he sees that there is much to learn at home. If it weren’t for sports, I think the oldest would happily return to homeschooling for high school. Or rather, internet-schooling.

Meanwhile, the two girls are staying home by desire, which made my choice easier.  The 6 yr old is a Miss Priss and easily swayed by groupthink, so I worry about her going to school.  I know I’m caving to a wish to shelter her, instead of responding to wish to share my love of learning, but I’m hoping she’ll at least learn to like reading by the end of the year, instead of resisting it more.  The 10 year old is less girly-girly, but she also is a follower, and seeks affection and approval. I’d rather she get that from me. The thing I’m going to have to work on is keeping these two interested. I’m going to have to get crafty, I’m afeared.  Or they will defect from me and want to go to school too.

That means I’m going to have to fight the tendency to prefer to work on the classes I am teaching at the community college, which started last week.  I picked up a second class, composition, in addition to the literature class. Since I never took a composition class, teaching it requires extra planning on my part; it’s too late to teach these students to write the way I learned: read and read and read, though we’ll read in class. When I taught Freshman Composition in Mississippi, I was following someone else's syllabus. That plan didn't seem intuitive enough to me, so I'm trying something different.

After teaching two classes so far, I'm convinced my literature class is going to be fun - it's a small group, but interested and inquisitive - while the composition class is going to require some magic tricks.  I think that there might be one student who likes writing, but the rest of them just don't want to be there. Judging by their assessment essays, I'm going to have to review some basic grammar.  

Even though I struggle to come up with a plan for this composition class, I’d rather spend time planning a classroom lecture for college kids than a lapbook or display board for a 5^th and 1^st grader.   I’m hoping they’ll be happy to do a lot of reading outloud together and call it school.

While I hemmed and hawed about the school decision, summer rushed to a close.  The younger kids participated in the Missoula Children's Theater production of "Beauty Lou and the Country Beast," which they loved immensely despite the cheesiness of it.  We watched A LOT of Olympics (about Guam Olympians here).  I was inspired to race an Olympic length triathlon (1.5K swim, 40 K bike, 10 K run) last weekend, and got 2nd out of the women (out of about 5, but the first place girl was at least 10 years younger than me.)  Now walking is painful.

And we've been puppy sitting for a couple weeks for a cute dog. The kids ask for either a dog or a baby regularly. 

Yes those are Bart Simpson comic books. Summer isn't officially over.

Then sports practices began: football for one, cross country for the other and soccer for the final four.  This means I spend a LONG part of my day shuttling kids places. This does not make me happy, other than for the fact that it makes them very happy. Practice is the highlight of their days, rain or shine.

My orchid was working on its third shoot before a recent squall.

Now the broken stems from the garden are on the window sill.

And raining it is has been. Lots of rain. I thought I’d have to push the car to dry land one day, but it floated through a mini-sea on its own.  Monsoon season is here, and a typhoon system has been forming in the Pacific. I’m hoping it doesn’t have power to arrive here. We survived two years in Mississippi without facing a hurricane, and I’d be happy to leave the Pacific without ever having weathered a typhoon.



We did catch a break in the rain to take a last boonie stomp to Priest's Pools and one of the mass graves of Chamorros after they were massacred by the Japanese during WWII.

Outside of the War in the Pacific National Park's visitor center. Great new exhibit there.

Catching up with old news

I'm a good week behind the times here, or more. Presidential politicking is blessedly far away.  I know that it is civicly irresponsible of me to be ignoring the big decision coming up in November, but I'm grateful to be far from the throes of angst and mudpie slinging.  Big issues are at stake, but I keep hoping some perfectly awesome philosopher-king will ride up on a white horse and save the day. (I was just talking with my mom this morning about the crusade to redefine marriage. If marriage eventually is redefined, then perhaps the Church should come up with a new name for marriage, something to indicate its sacramental and procreative nature. A question of semantics, but semantics matter.)

I've also been catching up with blogs, after a respite from reading them because of travel and school.  Lots of mother-issues under discussion, provoked by Time's nursing toddler cover and CNN's Mother's Day  anti-mothering defense. Both seem deliberately delivered to provoke controversy.  The editors probably love the backlash, so I won't add my two cents.  

Along similar lines, Clare Coffey’s article about the glorification of domesticity and mothering (in response to political jabs that I missed) also generated some interesting discussion.  I probably don't need to comment on this either, but to silence the circulating thoughts, I'm writing them down. I read Coffey's article after I read Sally’s remarks, which seemed convincing, and then the comments, which was probably a mistake, because my reading was a bit biased.  My impression was not so much “what naivete!” but “what a difference a generation makes!” I know few real women who claim to find complete fulfillment, or a sense of glorious martyrdom, in being a mother, but blogs may give that perception. It also seems to me that a lot of men are doing a lot more parenting than they used to do.  And does the generation just below mine perhaps put more emphasis on doing things "right"?  

Most of the women I grew up with had good paying jobs lined up to begin after they picked up their college diplomas, unless they were going to spend a year or two doing service work (seeking cheap adventure as well as global peace?), going to graduate school, or traveling. I was the first of my college friends to get married, and my wedding was a whole year after graduation because my future husband was still in school and I was going to grad school. Being a stay at home mom was a little counter-cultural and crunchy, but none of my immediate acquaintances said anything of praise or blame when I left my parttime, stopgap job to have a baby nine months after we married.  Most of my small group of college friends married, had children, and now are raising their children, some while working either parttime or as volunteers, and some full time.

Being a liberal arts major, I never anticipated having a high-paying career, nor believed that fulfillment was to be found anywhere but in the search for Truth.  Nor have I ever cared enough about fashion consciousness to put effort into looking cute at the playground where I might be critiqued by other people's nannies.  I've probably perpetuated the stereotype of the frazzled mother, but if I weren't the frazzled mother, I'd probably be the frazzled schoolteacher or librarian, or whatever. I have that kind of hair.

Admittedly though, I have glorified the idea of motherhood to a certain extent, but this glorification, and ideas about education and fertility and nurturing, were based a good deal on books like Love and Responsibility and Familiaris Consortio, which made my decision to stay home seem noble rather than sacrificial. I’d had a lot of babysitting experience, too, like Coffey, so I thought I knew how to take care of kids, but babysitters don’t have to stay up nights nursing or calming sick kids or worrying about all the ways they are messing up their children psychologically. Plus, I had my brief taste of graduate school and working life, and then happily settled in at home. It wasn’t until a couple of years into it that I realized how hard it was to give up worldly things, like work that wasn’t undone within 2 minutes, adult conversation, reading late into the night, etc. But I never really completely gave up those things, so I've never really felt like a true martyr. And a part of me suspects that the internet artificially inflates the number of people who actually fit the mold that Clare describes.

Since I’ve had paying jobs and I’ve sent my kids to school at different times, I don’t exactly fit the stereotype that Coffey seems to be rejecting.  Have I missed out on something by not working regularly? I’ve made sacrifices, but I’ve also been able to do a lot. I’ve loved being able to take field trips and spend time volunteering and hanging out at parks and libraries.  I’ve also loved my little parttime jobs. I’ve always kind of assumed I’d go to work when the kids were older, but to be honest, I’ve gotten a little lazy. I like being able to volunteer, and workout, read, go to daily Mass, grocery shop during the day, bake every once in awhile, take trips without taking leave, - all those humane perks that make being a stay-at-home mom less of a martyrdom. Working fulltime doesn’t sound so appealing any more.

I don’t suppose it’s surprising that Coffey’s generation should start to backlash against the “it’s good to stay home” mentality.  I am practically old enough to be her mother. Homeschooling/staying at home are no longer new and unusual. What was counter-cultural to my generation – rejecting our mothers’ rally to join the women’s lib movement and be career women – is now what the youth are rebelling against.

The other essay Pentimento linked to was the Charming Disarray one about homeschooling. Again, what a difference a generation makes. When I was datable, most guys my age had never heard of home schooling, let alone thought about asking their potential wives to do it. Granted, I didn’t exactly hang out with the orthodox Catholic crowd back then. It was still pretty fringe movement-ish.

I can understand her objection to it being a marriage criteria.  I probably wouldn’t have dated a guy who asked me to home school either. But I might have dated one who wanted to live in a tent. I like camping.  So I have to disagree with her argument that both home schooling and camping are emergency-only options, because some people, like myself, actually enjoy both of these pursuits.  (And I had an "Ideal Man List" also - created sometime in early adolescence, which included things like "Likes outdoor activities".)

I suppose my own decision to home school took root in small increments – starting with a sense of disappointment with my own education, moving on to idealistic solutions based on reading classic novels and conservative books and periodicals of my grandfather’s. And I liked the people I met who homeschooled. I liked their kids. My college theology teacher’s kids were probably the biggest influence on my decision to home school. I loved that family.  Finally, in our early marriage, my husband didn’t make a lot of money for private school tuition, nor did I think many private schools were worth the money. 

Now that we’ve had a chance to experience a variety of educational options, I have to say, I can see comparable goods in all of them. Thus, my decision about next year is hard.  The number of things I like about home schooling and about regular schools are pretty close to equal. There are also a nearly equal number of things that I don't like about both options.

Both young bloggers are good writers: a part of me felt tempted by their arguments to chuck my ideals, put the kids in public school, and go back to work.  But there are no easy answers. I don’t know where we’ll be living in two years, let alone what my career plans are.

I do know I’m glad I’m not in the dating scene. Yikes. It all seemed so much simpler before the internet.

Experiential Learning in Practice

Tuesday was an unusually busy day for our house. We began the morning with a super sprint triathlon. My 7 year old did the whole thing: a 200 m swim, a 5 mile bike, and a 1.5 mile run.  He is a bundle of energy and was determined to complete it, after trying the event once before and not quite going the whole distance.  One of the wives has been organizing these practice triathlons for the past 9 months, and their popularity has grown from a group of about 8 or 10 participants to groups of 30+.  It’s a form of fellowship I enjoy a lot more than going out to lunch or shopping, and it’s been a great morale builder for some of the ladies, I think. The lady who organizes these events does nothing more than send a message on Facebook and invite people.  She measured the course and occasionally alters it because of construction or traffic on base, but for minimal effort, she has spread a lot of good cheer.

After a quick shower, we loaded up to head to the local university.  It was celebrating its 60^th anniversary with an open house and fiesta.  I was sorry to forget my camera because there were multiple photo opps.  The main quad was crowded with kids from area schools enjoying local music and dance performances and shopping at the booths for trinkets and food.  Many of the college clubs had set up tents and were earning money with carnival games and crafts. The education department had a tent set up with sensory integration games.  The nursing students had their medical dummies out on tables and demonstrated how to detect lung disease, how to insert an IV, and how to cleanse bedsores.  Inside the science building, the biology students had a lab open house where they displayed some of their specimen oddities: a conjoined fetal pig, a 1000 lb sea turtle head, a large flash frozen brown tree snake, and various other bones, shells, and bodies in formaldehyde. One student was skinning a dead cat, and a few others were answering questions.

After admiring all of the dead things, we went up to the planetarium to cool down and relax.  We were treated to a star show called “Chamorro Sky Legends.” After being antsy for a few minutes and asking questions, the kids finally settled in and enjoyed the slower pace of this program. My favorite line was from a story about an old fisherman who told his grandson that the sky was his television.  They would seek falling stars and make up stories about the constellations.

From the Guam Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources website

Our next stop was the agriculture department where the kids could admire one of the 40 or so surviving ko’ko birds, then study their predator, the brown tree snakes, and next watch rhinoceros beetle maggots decompose a piece of dead wood. From the botany department, I bought a couple bromeliads for 1/20 of the price at the plant store, and at the entomology department’s display, we identified some sphinx moths we had hatched from cocoons a week or so ago.  We had thought their wings were deformed from forming a cocoon in a pickle jar, but it turns out they are naturally narrow-winged.  Perhaps I should have known about sphinx moths from the years when my brother used to collect insects for 4-H competitions, but I had forgotten.

Sphinx moth hatching

The kids were ready to go after all this learning, but we listened to the endangered plant guy give us a spiel. I couldn’t tell much difference between some of the species. Nor did I take a free ironwood tree, because I have several sprouting in the eaves. Finally we strolled past the only dairy cow I’ve seen on Guam and a couple carabao, before stopping for kettle corn. The kids discovered they still had energy to jump in bounce houses, but when I found out the book sale at the library had closed – unfortunately, I had saved that stop for last, knowing it could be a time-trap – I corralled them for the drive home.

It was well worth the break from the school books.

In which we take up homeschooling

I might have mentioned awhile back that I was thinking about home schooling again - well, here we are. The older two are going to school, eighth and ninth grades. But the 11, 9, 7, and 5 year old are staying home with me. They asked for it.

I couldn’t bring myself to commit until we actually arrived here. “I’m thinking of home schooling” I told anyone who asked. But really, the fact that I didn’t research schools before we left means that I already was committed. And I packed home school books in our advance shipment, so we could start as soon as we set up housekeeping.

My ambivalence about admitting we were going to home school may be partially rooted in a fear of the work. I knew I’d have at least one student who would rather read than practice math facts. I knew I’d be saying no to a lot of things I’d like to do. But I also didn’t have a lot of confidence in the schools here. I don’t have any basis for that, other than repeated testimonials from other Navy spouses about the problems in the public schools. But I haven’t met anyone who sent their kids to the Catholic schools, so I don’t have any first hand insights.

Now here we are homeschooling. And so far, other than one reluctant learner who regularly threatens to run away if he has to do anymore writing and one student who likes to claim to have done work that she hasn’t, school is going relatively smoothly. The older kids leave for the bus at 7:30, so everyone is up and mostly dressed by then. On the days when I jump right into action, everyone seems to cooperate better. But the days when something happens to distract me – a phone call, a late alarm, a message to respond to – we have a hard time getting on the rails. As soon as a moment arises for someone to slip away to play Legos, it’s had to return to learning.

So a peek into our days: Rise early to exercise and make lunches for the older boys. Shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast before the younger kids are awake enough to start playing. Then get their stack of books from the closet and start the day with a little reading aloud. If I can catch them while they are still half asleep, they’ll sit and do school for much longer.

That last sentence reveals we are not unschoolers. I make the kids do worksheets and coloring pages, even though at heart I would like to dismiss these as unnecessary and have the kids do more experiential learning and more writing of their own. To my dismay, I have yet to birth a child who likes writing.
It’s interesting to me, if not to anyone else, to note how my approach has shifted since we home schooled last a couple of years ago. Much of what we’re doing is the same: We’re still doing Saxon Math for the 4th and 6th grader, although I haven’t been keeping up with mental math and the timed drill sheets. For the younger two, we’re using MCP, as we did last time around. It seemed to work, and I’m too intimidated to try a new program. I’ve got the books; keeps it simple.

Along those lines: I’m trying to avoid looking on the internet for home-school ideas. That was one of my pratfalls last time around. Too many good ideas translates into too little consistency. Focus, focus, is my mantra.

The biggest distraction: History and science materials. When we homeschooled in Virginia, we did a lot more subjects together as a family. I read history and science out loud and the kids illustrated what I read or answered questions. We went to art classes and science classes at a co-op and at museums. Here each kid is a little more spread apart, so the 6th grader works independently, while I follow up more carefully with the 4th grader. I read aloud to the 2nd grader and kindergartner, but they distract each other and don’t want to illustrate scenes from history.

So my approach to history and science needs a little more structure. We’re sort of taking a classical approach to history – we just finished a spending about 4 weeks on Egypt, and now we’re moving to the Ancient Middle Eastern cultures. But I have all these good materials: The Story of the World book I, A Child's History of the World by Virgil Hillyer, the Seton Before America book, the Catholic textbook All Ye Lands, Usborne Explorers books, Eyewitness books, Greenleaf guides, historical novels, etc., etc, etc. My own bookshelves are a distraction. I keep looking at all these books, but the kids ignore them. Although I have in my head a trajectory of what we want to cover this year, I really need to cull through my stuff and figure out what we’ll focus on, and then try to figure out how to make it interesting to my younger kids.

Here’s another shift: My older boys were verbal learners; they could sit and read and absorb the material. My younger kids need a more kinaesthetic approach. They love crafts and projects. Some of the Story of the World/Greenleaf ideas like making relief maps from salt dough and playing dress up appeal more to them than listening and making timeline illustrations, whereas the olders found crafts unnecessary. Since I’m not naturally crafty, I have to put more thought into this.

The same thing goes for science. I’m trying to keep it simple by using the Abeka science books for 4th and 6th grade that I already owned. Although I like the classical idea of focusing on one discipline at a time, this more traditional approach makes it easier for me, although since we are on a tropical island, doing some of the suggested activities like collecting leaves and flowers is a little more difficult because our varieties are so different from what is in the book. No seasons here. But I think the days are shortening. I was wondering if that would happen here or not. I guess we are enough north of the equator that we’ll notice a little solstice shift.

Since science was one of the subjects I taught at our co-op, you’d think I’d jump right back into that curriculum I had come up with. But it was geared toward a group setting with a short lecture, a demonstration and then an experiment. (I taught physics for middle schoolers, even though that was my weakest discipline. I had to do a lot of relearning. Same thing with Latin – even though I came up with all this stuff for the classroom last year, now with just 2 students, one ahead of the other, I’m finding it difficult to make things interesting.)

With the younger two, we had been reading one of those Little Nature Readers for science, which bored even me, and supplementing with library books. I have to admit I prefer Magic School Bus. Thorough for the age group and entertaining. More hands on activities for science are something to add to the plan. But I know in school they would be doing very little science in kindergarten and 2nd grade, so I don’t feel quite as driven as I did when my older kids were learning.

Ironically or not, for my favorite subject, language arts, I tend to rely on workbooks. I want to find or devise a unified language arts program, and I know some of them already exist but I’m falling back on pre-existing material. I like the Charlotte Mason idea of narrations and copywork and dictation, so I sometimes have the older two read and retell a story, but I’d like to work out an arrangement where I come up with spelling words that have a phonetic relationship or are enrichment vocab words that come from the reading selection for the week, so that one lesson could be a dictation from the reading that includes spelling words as well as an illustration of the grammar lesson for the week. My sixth grader does Lingua Mater, which I like for the most part, although it’s not enough reading material, and the grammar seems basic for a middle school text. I also bought him a diagramming book that we both like – makes grammar a game almost and brings out language’s structural beauty. I treated myself to Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey, which I just started. It’s not quite as fun as Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but I’m not far into it yet.

Religion is the one subject that seems to be a more natural learning experience. Since the kids are doing the Faith and Life books at CCD, we’re paying more attention to the liturgical year at home, looking up the saint for the day or reading from a book like My Path to Heaven by Fr. Gregory Bliss, with the intricate illustrations by Caryll Houselander, and stories about how you can be like the pilgrim who tries to take the cart across the bridge and gets stuck or like the pilgrim who sells all his attachments and crosses the bridge with ease. It’s religion class for me, too - and more time to pray. And we even do crafts: the second grader is making a ten commandments book, the fourth grader is making a rosary book, and the sixth grader is illustrating the creed.

The rest of the day we fill with piano practice, quiet reading time from an assigned book, trips to the pool and the library, occasional geography lessons. Some days we do a little art appreciation or look up pictures that go with a history subject or the saint of the day in one of my art history books. This is a Charlotte Mason addition that I didn’t do with the older boys. I also just bought Mona Brookes’ book about teaching kids to draw, but we’ve only done two lessons and neither time did the kids seem interested in trying. I love the image of all of us sitting down to draw with quiet music playing and the kids focused and trying their best, but this remains a figment of my imagination.

In fact many of my home school plans remain imaginary. Most days the kids either rush through their work just to get done, or disappear to go play before their work is finished. My second grader especially despises anything that resembles work. I wonder if home schooling is the right choice for him. He didn’t have behaviorial problems at school, but at home he throws temper tantrums and threatens to run away and throws things as soon as he is frustrated. My biggest daily challenge is trying to remain calm in the face of his storms. I don’t succeed often. This takes a lot of the joy out of the whole project, and makes me question whether or not I should be doing this at all. We’re all miserable when I have to argue with him all morning. Everyone else gets whiney waiting for me. Then I get whiney waiting for my husband to come home.
The other challenge is saying no to invitations. I keep getting email and facebook notices about spouses’s club events: boonie stomps, book club, dive club, lunch bunch, events to raise money for charity, Bible studies. Since most of the military wives don’t work, and everyone is far from their families, the military community plans a lot more social events here. I probably wouldn’t go to most anyway, but I have to admit that there are a lot of days I’d rather go diving or on a boonie stomp than stay at home trying to keep a seven year old from losing control.

Now that I've written this, I have to admit that our current home schooling experience isn’t so different from our previous experience. Our routine is similar, but with the two girls now fully involved, we are much more organized. They do school like it’s a game, which actually is kind of nice. The biggest thing we lack is the great community of Catholic home schooling friends we had, although we’ve met quite a few other homeschooling families who attend one of the evangelical churches on the island. They’re all very nice, but since they don’t let their kids read Harry Potter or trick or treat, I fear they might consider my kids a bad influence. So we miss the friends we’ve had who have been almost like family who encouraged us in our trials. But people are always coming and going, and we’ve only been here a short time; we’re sure to find a community of friends soon. In the meantime, my goal is to try to forget the tantrums and record in my memory the pleasant moments on the couch when we all are reading and pouring over illustrations, when everyone is happy and engaged.

Small talk

On Saturday night we went to a party held by one of my husband’s co-workers. I hadn’t met 90% of the people there, so I spent most of the time feeding my children and myself. I would’ve fed my kids more, but they eventually found the game room where they became happily ensconced playing air hockey, foosball, video games and Nerf basketball (do I want one of these rooms?), so I had to make conversation. Although I’m not naturally a socialite, I have learned to chitchat about weather, food, Christmas shopping, vacation plans…

Just when I was looking at my watch, my husband introduced me to another co-worker who looked more socially awkward than myself. After brief introductions, it came out that this guy was a math major who wanted to return to academia after getting out of the Navy. At first I thought this was where the conversation was going to stall, when it turned to favorite teachers. And then we found common ground, sharing stories of teachers who had made uninteresting subjects seem fascinating with the talent of drawing perfect unit circles, or passion for obscure military battles, or gift for telling stories and making connections between esoteric math concepts or obscure literary figures and the way of the world. These memorable teachers had another gift also, I think, of connecting with their students as individuals.


At one point in time, I wanted to emulate these teachers, but I’m not sure I have that gift of sharing my love of a subject with my students in a way that inspires their curiousity. Certainly I didn’t inspire a love of Latin in my Latina Christiana classes at our homeschool co-op, since they started a KAL club (Kids Against Latin), although I think they had fun trying to compose a play with their limited vocabulary. And I’m afraid I forced my British Lit class to swim in excess information, so they ended up nearly drowning. When I taught the physics for middle schoolers class, I had the unfortunate experience of having about 75% of the experiments we conducted not turn out as planned. (I have the consolation of remembering that my ESL physics-for-liberal-arts-majors professor in college had a similar outcome.)



Lately, I’ve been trying to decide if I want to take a few classes to get certified to teach in a regular school, now that my kids are in school. But while subbing, I was reminded of how much policing school teachers have to do. I’m happy to report that I subbed for one of those teachers who will be remembered by his students as a favorite, but that may be because he is good at incorporating media into his class.

Periodically, I wrestle with the little voice that says “get a job, get a job.” I wonder if this voice is a relic of the progressive feminist mentality I’ve subconsciously absorbed, or a sincere desire to do something more productive than blogging. It’s only compounded when I read articles like the one in Sunday’s paper that cited a study saying that the mental health of children whose father was deployed was better if their mother worked outside the home, than if she were a stay-at-home mom (presumably because she has adult interaction and occupations to make time pass quickly).


At any rate, I haven’t any immediate desire to add complications to an already busy schedule next semester when el esposo is in Afghanistan. And I have a long list of books to read.

Thankful for sickness

My kindergartener stayed home from school the other day, after I was shamed by his teacher for sending him in with a cough the day before. So we had a little home school time and discovered a treasure: Crepes by Suzette by Monica Wellington. Suzette owns a little crepe cart she pushes around Paris. Mixed media depictions of famous places in Paris (Notre Dame and the Louvre, of course, and also L’Opera and the Tuileries.) are the background to Suzette’s day as she serves crepes to cartoon copies of personages from famous paintings: Cassette’s mother bathing her child, Mona Lisa, Degas’ Little Dancer, Seurat’s circus performers, and Chagall’s Bride and Groom. I love books like this that combine history and art into a new story.

So after we finished reading we followed the simple recipe in the back of the book for crepes. They would’ve been better with Nutella, but melted chocolate chips tasted awfully good.
Add crepes to my lovelist!

And add sick days to the gratitude list. Nothing like a day at home with a schedule cleared by germs for enjoying a stack of library books.

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.