The Big Update

I dropped out of my master’s program! (we’ll get to that)

It has been about six months since my last update on this blog. There were many days when I thought I should write something but never got around to it. A lot has changed and I have needed to adapt in response. It honestly hasn’t left much room for any discretionary activities like blogging.

We went back to homeschooling the teenagers. They were excited to go back to school and were going to one of the best public schools in our area. They made friends right away and were trying out things like sports teams and making after-school plans with their friends. However, the academic situation was pretty terrible. I guess there were a lot of defiant students who were disruptive in classrooms and invective outside of class. The school wasn’t doing much to manage this situation because the misconduct was so rampant that they lacked the staff, resources, or facilities with which to respond.

This was supposed to be their freshman year. We all thought it would be exciting and fun and a new phase of their lives. They wound up only spending the first few months in a brick-and-mortar school and were asking to be homeschooled for half of that time. We wanted to have them finish their first semester and see how they felt when Christmas break came, but we wound up only making it to Thanksgiving. I tried not to pry, but my understanding is there was some amount of bullying involved.

We bought a curriculum and signed up with an umbrella school to help us keep things on track, since following the rules and having something to show for it starts to matter in high school. Now, we’re planning on adding tiny-home building to the schedule. They were asking for more hands-on experiences and more parent participation, and we’re hoping to provide them each with an asset at the end of their education. They will each have a house that they built and know how to maintain and they can either live in it, or rent/sell it.

M, who is now twelve, is doing well in her magnet school. We’ve struggled a lot with math, but not in the way that you might think. The trouble seems to be that M is actually quite good at math and picks up on concepts fairly easily, but her ADHD and autism get in her way. She struggles to pay attention in the busy classroom and often forgets (even at home with one-on-one attention) that she is in the middle of doing a math problem. Additionally, she still falters when faced with talking to people who she sees as uncomfortable authority figures… like her math teacher. I get to see her take on new ideas with ease at home, but her teacher worries about her and her math grade suffers because she forgets about worksheets and homework.

She has also had an excellent care team at school this year. She has an academic interventionist who takes her out of class to work on topics that are otherwise difficult for her (mostly math), and a social worker who manages her needs and communicates with teachers on her behalf. Her interventionist is leaving the school for a new position elsewhere and we’re still not sure what that transition will look like, but M is taking it pretty well so far.

Then there’s Cub. He also started over at a new school this year. At the beginning of the school year, he was having all sorts of trouble. He made friends but was also picked on for things like his long hair. We got a lot of calls from the school about his refusal to do writing work and his inability to sit still. He would frequently refuse to return to class and ask to come home, so we went to his school and talked him into returning to class several times.

Ultimately, his teacher decided to try giving him higher-level work to see how he would respond, and things got a bit better. However, since he was the only kid in class doing that work, it was hard for him to stay focused while the teacher was busy with other kids. So, now he’s in a gifted class with other kids like him. He hated it at first because he missed his friends from his original group, but he’s made new friends in the new room and no longer asks to come home instead of going back to class.

There was one incident after school, when he was on his way to an afterschool lego activity. He encountered a kid who had misgendered him on the playground sometime before, and, having no filters, said, “I remember you. You misgendered me.” Which, in retrospect, I think he realizes could have stayed in his head instead of being verbalized. The kid punched him in the face. Cub came home instead of going to his activity that day, but I think his spirit is reasonably intact.

All of this led to my dropping out of my master’s program to some extent. When I applied to the program, the pandemic hadn’t started. When I was accepted, it hadn’t arrived in the US yet. When I started classes, everything was remote, which made attending to my kids’ needs much more practical. Then, when my school and all of theirs decided we should attend classes in person again, their needs actually increased while my availability plummeted. That was a huge source of stress, but there are other reasons for my leaving as well.

My thesis, which I had been working on for about a year, had gotten nowhere. I spent months collecting data just to find out it was useless because something went wrong with the collection methods. One could argue that it wasn’t a total waste of time because I learned from my mistakes. That’s what I told myself. I ran tests to rule out possible problems with the equipment, but those tests did not rule out those possible problems. So, I was looking at more time spent doing more exhaustive tests.

Ultimately, if there were problems with the equipment that were resulting in the irregular data, I suppose my advisor would have needed to fix the equipment and I would need to start over on data collection. If it turned out that the equipment was not to blame, that would show that the equipment was not a good fit for the study. In that case, I would need to come up with a new study design using different equipment and start over with the data collection. Either way, I was facing a “back to square one” situation and I wasn’t feeling especially good about the amount of work I had put in while making no progress. But I probably could have continued treading water for many more months before giving up on that project. Frankly, I was downright thrilled about my thesis and I’m disappointed to be walking away from it.

The final nail in the coffin of my time in this master’s program came when I signed up for the university’s career services and realized that I no longer want to do any of the things that this program would have prepared me for. While I do believe in the value of education for education’s sake, I entered this program with the intent to prepare myself for a career. At the time, I wanted to go on to get a PhD and become a professor at a research-focused university so I could do fieldwork forever! I think the pandemic has changed my priorities.

When I discovered that I no longer wanted what I was working (and paying) for, I assumed I had been wrong. I believed and said things like, “I thought I wanted to do fieldwork forever, but I realized I don’t.” Now I think that mindset wasn’t giving my past self enough credit. I did want to do fieldwork forever, and now I don’t. That’s okay.

I want to be present for my kids. I don’t want to feel like I’m on a thesis treadmill. I don’t want to do fieldwork forever. I imagine I will still get a master’s degree in the near future. Having worked my tail off and achieved the best GPA I’ve ever had, I think (and hope) many of my credits will transfer. Maybe horticulture would be a better focus for me, so I can work locally at places like the zoo or botanic gardens or for the city. For now, I think I’ll just work on improving my house, teaching and loving my kids, and knitting.

I recognize that I am privileged to be able to make that choice: the choice to be present for my kids and manage my house – a choice we should all be able to make.