I am a teacher (on paper). I finished my BA last spring and ground out a decent understanding of what it will take to do the job between student teaching and considerable practice in my previous job as part of a preschool teaching team. I like to teach. It makes me feel extremely relevant when a student grows, shares and expands their knowledge due (in part) to my efforts. My early childhood education background moves me toward teaching learners to explore and teach themselves rather than direct instruction, and I thought I might be able to curb my kids' growing apathy toward school.
My kids didn't, and don't, buy it. I am "Mom" plain and simple, and every effort I've made otherwise is futile. When I began, I looked to projects and surveyed my kids' interests. I pulled some standards for integration, checked out what they could already do, and encouraged them to "take off". They didn't. My oldest wanted to know the "right answer", my middle child became infinitely distracted, and my youngest threw himself on the floor and whined at any mention of school work.
I felt like a failure before the end of the first week, but I "soldiered on", hoping to find a spark within myself and the kids and fan the flames of education. This was July of 2012. We were vacationing with family before returning to the Seattle area to pack up and shift the whole enterprise south to Phoenix. Kids start school early in Phoenix (Aug. 1st in our district), and I reasoned that trying half days through our summer would yield a "yes" or "no" to continued home-school and give them a transition cushion while we settled our new home.
We are all students. P's law school is what brought us here, and I enrolled at ASU to finish my Master's. My vision included a mini-learning community, all of us whittling away. I knew that math would have to be less aesthetic, and I leaned on my mom, a middle school math teacher, for resources. By the end of August, the kids were sick of my instruction in math, and I battled my youngest daily to do anything. I realized in horror that most of my motivating strategies were socially based, and I didn't have what I needed - more kids - to use what I knew. Connecting through the Internet to other home-school families busted. I am not religious enough or had the wrong-aged kids for the few moms who answered my online queries.
Half defeated, I looked into an online charter school program. They provided support and resources, and structured curriculum. P remained leery of the local elementary school, and we both wanted some freedom to travel with the kids during the school year. I enrolled the kids after selling them on the idea. My oldest complained that she missed WA daily and thought about trying a new, "real" school, and I felt the delicate balance between granting kids too much freedom in decision-making with their respected opinions. We decided to give online learning a try.
The school sent books, DVDs, paints, science activities and a room's worth of other goodies. Feeling more organized, we dug into it. Using an online shell wasn't new to me, having had to fit my school around kids' schedules for the majority of my college experience, and I reasoned that the girls should learn to navigate a very modern style of learning and interaction.
After each month, I evaluated, fought, cried and decided that the "pros" for staying with it outweighed the "cons". I received the structure and differentiated curriculum I needed, but received a heap of standards-driven, skim-worthy learning days in return. My kids still do not care at all about most of what they learn. Initially, I set up their science and art activities to be as collaborative as possible - rescheduling so that all three were painting at once, or inviting the neighbor kids to assist in the construction of water filters or topographical representations. I planned and modified their lessons, and engaged them in deep questions.
We got caught up in a schedule, but under pressure to finish six-to-eight lessons daily (in a four-hour required attendance window in the case of the youngest) we all learned that we could slack. We skipped math practice problems to get to history, made short cuts out of interactive activities and beat our heads against the wall and said, "forget it" when the computer or the server decided no to load their daily plans.
After a few months, I didn't care. Laziness won out. I focused on making sure the youngest could read and set the girls up to study at the YMCA as part of a "blended learning" opportunity for part of the week. Some days they came home done with their 5-8 daily subjects, and some days they had hours of work for me to lead them through after getting home at noon, but they got to see some kids, and I got a few hours to work one-on-one with my "I hate school" youngest.
There is a helplessness that distresses me about my children at the same time that it drives me to over-scrutinize. In the case of home-school, that war nearly broke me (and possibly them). No matter how much time I invested in encouraging higher-order thinking or metacognition or interest in expanding their understanding of a topic, the inexorable pull of the next lesson coupled with a desire to "just be done for the day" trumped meaningful learning. No matter how I phrased, taught or walked away, someone always wanted me to do their work for them. It's not my work. "Correcting" math tests, a process that results in a good grade for the kids, and a headache for me, began as a formative assessment, an opportunity to see where they had gaps and give them a mini-lesson over the missed problem; it turned into "uh huhs" that represented, "Ok, ok, I get it, can I turn it in now so I can be done?".
I am so disappointed and scared for my children. Like many parents, I feel the temptation to place blame elsewhere, but the "education" and "parenting" red arrow points directly, poignantly, at me alone. I went from helpful mom/coach/patient lady to someone who can barely imagine teaching any kids after this year. My children have been witness and catalyst to this devolution, and I can never apologize enough to them. In the way that "getting it right" burned into my oldest, organization and completing projects skipped my middle one, and I couldn't undo it. I hope that they are inspired elsewhere, or that by my not being responsible for every single one of their educational needs alone, they can hear me and get genuinely excited about something academic the way that I do (my middle will, I think, despite my flubbing this year). Some of my dearest memories are thumbing through my mom's geology, astronomy and anthropology books when I was my girls' age and asking her a million questions about what she was learning at the community college. I want my children to want to know.
We finish up in five weeks. This week is especially interesting because I have to drop the girls off at a testing site to participate in the AIMS. Next year, they will attend a "brick and mortar" ("BM" as the online-learning-coach-mommies I've met sneer in reference). I will miss them, but I will not miss the feeling of near-child abuse that "motivating" my son entails or the bored indifference of my daughters. They are excellent students, amazing human beings and deserve the best out of life. I know that that is not me.
To my children, I love you and I am sorry. I hope you will look back on the year someday and think of some of the good times we had. To other home-school families, I salute you and envy the academic supremacy that many children gain from a good parent-teacher. My kid were so sick of me by the end of the day that they often sped through their chores and locked themselves away from me for the rest of the evening (an awful, awful feeling).
To anyone who reads this, education is a partnership between home, school and the student. We are all a product of what we knew before and the influences that surround us daily. Support each other in this production, and please don't judge my future classrooms by my failed home-school experiment. I only wanted what was best for my kids, and I had to modify what "best" meant daily during the last months.
