As I sit on the couch, putting my thoughts into a blog, my 7-year-old is watching Magic School Bus across the room. In their respective rooms, my other kids are programming, writing stories, and doing math. Today, everyone seems happy to do their work. Yesterday, however, the youngest was literally yelling about wanting “just ONE day off!” as though I’m some kind of tyrant when in reality, they’re getting weekends off and every day is a half day as long as they do their work when they’re asked to.
In spite of the fact that the older kids have avoided doing math work and the youngest has fully cried about having to write a paragraph twice a week, I’m hearing requests to continue homeschooling from all of them. They all say they’re learning far more and they’re less stressed and generally happier doing things this way.
It’s not surprising. We homeschooled them all when they were younger because we felt we were better equipped to teach them than the local schools, and one of the older kids had medical issues which gave us pause when considering sending them off to someone else’s care. We know it can work. In fact, I continued to homeschool them while I was working on my undergrad degree for a while. That is, until they requested public school.
But, at the time, we had my mom, sister, and niece living with us. My mom looked after my kids while I went to school. Also, the kids were all younger. I was teaching the twins about money and my middle child was just learning to read. Now they’re doing pre-algrebra and multiplication, respectively, which we are equipped to teach but seems like it will require more dedicated work… and we don’t really have any help.
My partner could work from home on the days I need to be gone, but he’d be busy. At least there’d be an adult here in case of emergency, but that doesn’t help much in the education area. Our budget doesn’t really have room for that much babysitting or a nanny. I’ve heard of some families expecting their older children to take charge of instructing the younger kids at times like this, but I’m concerned about relying on that.
To make things even more complicated, I haven’t been able to register for classes to start my masters program because of some kind of technical problem that no one else seems to be able to see or fix. I’ve spent a few weeks emailing and virtually meeting with various representatives of the university and getting nowhere. In fact, the emails I get in return from the registrar’s office seem to just repeat the questions and advice of previous emails as though whoever is reading them has never seen the dozen or so I’ve sent.
So, I don’t even know what my schedule is going to be. If I can take all the classes I need for the semester on two days and then have three week days off, I think we could manage to get everything done on the days I’m home, and the kids are self-motivated enough that I could probably get my own school work done at the same time. I just can’t know yet. And since I can’t register for classes or get any good advice to solve my problem, I might not even be going back in the fall… in which case, I might as well just homeschool them.
I really want to figure out how to make this work. So I’ve requested to join a forum for a local homeschooling group where I hope to ask some questions and get some insight into how others have gotten through similar situations. Hopefully I can find some kind of solution.
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