Working at It

I've been promising that I would share more about my homeschool dilemma, but I just haven't known how to explain it. I've been thinking it over, and even found some mothers online who are or have sent their children to public school although they think homeschooling is optimal. That has helped me focus my own thoughts and made me feel braver about expressing this. I have been to homeschooling blogs that say, if you can't homeschool your kids, there's something wrong. It helped to hear from other moms who said, we were having a problem at the time and here's why.

First of all, I am not a very organized person. I find it hard to implement a schedule on my own, although when I was a student and even in the work force, I managed working with an externally imposed schedule. Now I know I can improve my organizational skills, work on creating a schedule, etc. But I still feel my abilities will be below those to whom this sort of thing comes naturally, and I think these skills are important for effective homeschooling.

Also, I just don't feel like my personality as a teacher is optimal for my children's as students. Sure, I did help them learn things throughout baby- and toddlerhood, but in many ways their father, for example, is much better at explaining things to them, getting a point across. This can lead to a lot of butting of heads during teaching which makes things more difficult and less enjoyable. I'm also a real introvert, and I need lots of alone time. The girls are not always good about working on their own, and I am sometimes frustrated about all the direct supervision I still have to give them.

The other side of this is, my daughters, the Scientist especially, did not always thrive in a school environment either. The Scientist attended a Lutheran school from preschool to second grade, and she had the same problem throughout: concentrating on her work. She always had trouble getting her work done on time, and of course the higher up in grade she went, the more important it became. There were other things we were dissatisfied with, but this is the one that would plague her in any school environment. We're working on it with her, but we her parents are much more suited to tackle this than a teacher with twenty or so other students.

Wildchild, well, she suits her name. She finds it hard to sit still. She is not as in to learning for its own sake as the Scientist; she needs to have an extra bit of interest, such as the book we went through last spring about princesses. She likes princesses, so the stories kept her attention. I can't always make it "fun" for her though, and when she doesn't want to learn something, she fights me tooth and nail. And some things just can't be put off. Like say, reading. I'm not sure how she would do in an outside school environment. Probably get in trouble all the time for talking too much and not sitting still.

The teaching content part is not actually that much of a problem! My husband and I balance each other well in that regard. He is a computer science geek and mathematician; he also thought of majoring in physics and was a lab assistant in high school chemistry. I studied German and Spanish in high school and college, I was good at English, I've written copy and proofread text, I've studied a little piano and art, and I come from a very artistic family. Oddly enough, I feel I could probably teach them through most of high school with my husband's help, and there is a community college right down the street to fill in the few gaps. It's just our personalities and styles that are an issue!