Tales of a Failed Homeschooler
I tried….and I’m going to try again
When I had my first child, homeschooling was something I dreamt of. It was not a matter of pushing back against politics or a matter of adhering to a religious framework of education, nor was it a worry about traditional school curriculum at the time. Homeschooling felt like something that could be a natural extension of my role as mother to my daughter. It felt like an opportunity to share with her what I found important and beautiful. To be educated at home, given one-on-one attention and the ability to follow whims of interest and delight without the constraints of traditional school seemed like a great gift to a child.
I remember very distinctly looking through the pages of the Oak Meadow Waldorf-inspired curriculum samples I had sent to me in the old, drafty farmhouse we rented back when she was my only child. I ordered those samples despite knowing that homeschooling wasn’t very realistic for us at the time. I was working full time overnights at a hospital nearby and my days were spent sleeping or recovering. I never adapted to working the night shift, despite doing it for three years, and it made me forgetful, crabby and disorganized. My body struggled and my mind followed suit, and thus it was not a responsible choice for me to try and educate a child in that state.
I sent her to daycare, then Montessori preschool, then the school system I worked for. I had gotten hired as a school nurse and I felt that at least we could drive back and forth to school and work together and have our evenings, weekends and summers together. It worked for a bit, until I gave birth to her younger brother halfway through her second grade year and a month and a half prior to Covid shutting all of the schools down. The convergence of Covid and maternity leave meant that homeschooling not only was possible, but was necessary.
The Fairy Tale Art Print By Walter Firle
I had complicated feelings about this. I was about two months postpartum and had planned to take the rest of the school year off and then would have the whole summer as well, being that I worked at a school.
I did not have “impromptu second grade teacher” in my maternity leave plans. I believe the education of the child is ultimately the responsibility of the parents so I don’t want to be perceived as entitled in mentioning the change in my maternity leave plans. This said, home education, as I have now learned, needs to be well prepared for and carefully considered. Some may disagree and honestly I myself may have back then, but this is something I have come to learn is generally true. I was not prepared but I was enthusiastic, being that this was my long lost dream, after all.
Like most of 2020 for (I’m willing to wager) most people, what followed basically feels like a fever dream now. I stumbled through the worksheets sent home in packets we had to pick up at the school district admin building. I ended up telling her not to worry about doing a lot of them, as they were busy work. We read a lot of books, me reading aloud to her while my new baby boy kicked the book out of my hand or fussed, her trying to listen and getting annoyed with the baby’s baby antics. I made YouTube playlists about topics she told me she was interested in and then had her write reports about them for me. We watched educational lockdown zoo lives on Facebook (not sure exactly what to call these? I’m sure many of you know what I’m referring to) where zookeepers fed lemurs and explained their behaviors, live from a strangely empty zoo in a city far away. It was disjointed, isolated, and thrown together. Homeschool was really just “regular school at home” and it was boring for both of us.
Let’s call that lesson number one: I cannot replicate regular school in my home, nor do I want to.
Summer came and we took a break. As I began to realize how grim the political situation we were in was I started questioning her going back to school despite the fact that they would be in session. The contact tracing, masking of children, no-touching-allowed-paranoia-state was not something I was interested in sending her back to. I decided to homeschool and to do it in a more prepared way.
I spent hours reading about curriculums, and set up notifications on eBay for a used set of that same Oak Meadow curriculum I had spent so much time wishing about in the past. I spent a fortune on fancy German beeswax crayons and various craft supplies. I read the parent’s guide. I was excited and inspired. Then, about 2 weeks into trying to find our rhythm with it, I found out I was pregnant again.
Nausea hit, exhaustion took over, and apathy set in. I was still nursing my 8 month old and keeping up with his needs was demanding on my body as well. Doing involved lessons that required what ended up being hours of prep on my part in addition to my household tasks felt next to impossible. Lesson number two: curriculums that require hours on hours of prep work are not practical for mothers of more than one or two children (I know some will disagree, and that is fine!).
We did make some friends via a weekly homeschool day at the local roller skating rink, friends we still have today, and for this I am grateful! The next four years were spent chasing the often elusive and always sought after “socialization”. Homeschool skate. Homeschool gym. Homeschool acro. Homeschool 4H. Homeschool hour at the library. Co-ops where drop-offs were not allowed and thus spent with me chasing around a tired baby and overstimulated toddler in a church auditorium trying to keep them away from the worship jam-sesh drum set. Sometimes these experiences were wonderful, other times I was left feeling mentally exhausted with a distinct feeling of “this ain’t it”.
Lesson number three (this one is distinct to my personality maybe more than the other ones): endeavoring to provide socialization for a child as a parent who is introverted is very hard and requires very intentional effort and planning and commitment.
And four: living in a rural area, not being a member of a religious community, and existing in a society where immediate family members are encouraged to leave their place of origin means this socialization piece is harder. We don’t live in a neighborhood, our children’s cousins all live far away and we were not attending church. This reality means finding and keeping friends for your children requires driving around a lot, sometimes paying for things, and talking to people you likely don’t have much in common with. This may sometimes be annoying, but you have to get over it.
We made it through third grade and going into the fourth grade year, I told myself I would do better and that this would be possible because I was going to switch curriculums. I chose “Earthschooling” that year, another Waldorf curriculum. I even printed the curriculum into two beautiful hardback books using the Barnes and Noble printing service (they really were lovely). I read Steiner’s lectures. I listened to the “Waldorfy” podcast (also very lovely really and I still would recommend it if this is an area of interest for you, see below). I was all in on anthroposophy. Until I wasn’t.
Waldorf is truly a beautiful approach to education in so many ways. The crafts! The wooden toys! The softly painted walls! The handmade dolls and festivals and little peg dolls with acorn hats! It also is very “airy”, for lack of a better word, in my opinion. I am a very literally “earthy” person. Not on a hippy-dippy sense, but more in a grounded-in-truth sense. I prefer education to be rooted in a foundation of practicality and grounded in material reality. Waldorf feels very dreamy to me, Steiner is way too New Age-y for my taste, and while this may work well for some, it did not work well for me.
Lesson five: resist the urge romanticize any specific pedagogy. Pick one or pick a few, utilize what they have to offer, but make space for nuance and questions.
With another baby on my hip, making fancy chalk drawings of verses and attempting to teach a smart but stubborn 9 year old girl about the “head, heart and hands”, with different days of the week assigned a certain color and a certain type of bread to bake (I love baking and I love bread, don’t get me wrong!) was HARD. And not the kind of hard that is ultimately worth it in the end, the kind of hard that felt pointless and resource-sucking in the end.
Lesson six: pick curriculum your child finds interesting, not just what you find interesting. If you don’t, you are setting both yourself and your child up to fail.
We switched curriculums again after a few months. We settled on The Good and the Beautiful and we stuck to it this time. I found their curriculum easy to use, as it has minimal prep time and the extra supplies needed were often things we already had around the house, and if not they were typically cheap and easy to find. The curriculum itself is also fairly affordable.
For those who are curious and may be considering using this curriculum, the materials are well made and I appreciate the fact that they use real works of art as the illustrations in the Language Arts materials and also tie in geography and social studies into LA. Their math curriculum isn’t overly complicated and includes some games and extras but not too many (we also tried Right Start at one point, which was okay but which required a ton of game-playing that proved difficult with the younger children trying to grab at things and interrupting). Their add-ons like their various science units are well made and can be worked on slowly throughout the year at your leisure. Overall, it is a good foundational resource for your basics and my daughter did find it interesting.
Between the extracurriculars we found which worked for us and this curriculum, homeschooling worked okay for us for a few more years.
Now to share something that is vital to this conversation but which feels very vulnerable. In this time, I let my choice to have her at home be poisoned by political interests and fears about public school curriculum pushing these interests. My choice subconsciously became more about controlling the uncontrollable than it was about teaching virtue or life skills or allowing her to pursue her interests. Her basic educational needs were always provided for, but the intention and inspiration behind my choices were not in alignment with my true values, and this fact paired with the large age gaps between her and her younger siblings proved to be a recipe for relational disaster.
Lesson number 6: limiting ideology is the enemy, but it can exist on both sides
I sent her to a Catholic school this past year for seventh grade and learned that no matter the location, the student population, or the curriculum, she will be exposed to ideas I find stupid, silly, annoying, ignorant and problematic. I really loved her school and her teachers and the framework of much of what she was taught but there was still talk amongst the kids about all sorts of nonsense (I learned what “therians” are this year, do you know what that means? Because I sure did not and sure wish I didn’t now). No matter how idealistic the setting, the world creeps in.
This is an essential lesson of parenthood in general—we must let these precious parts of our hearts manifested into walking, talking lives distinct from our own out into a world we may not trust and may even at times condemn. Our duty is to protect, yes, but at times this means protection via allowance. Allowing them to shape their own armor and sharpen their own swords while we are still there to assist when needed is a sort of protection.
Not only this, but within this allowance they also sometimes are better able to find their way back to us. I may balk at some of the things my daughter tells me she has heard or learned about via other kids, but she is coming to me and telling me about it. She isn’t hiding it and she wants my opinion on it. I may not like some of what I hear but I do like that I am hearing it because she trusts me enough to tell me. This isn’t something we had the opportunity to do much when she was homeschooled, and it has been another lesson for me.
Lesson number seven: trust is a foundational part of what makes education effective and also, this can look different at different ages and stages.
My son turned five in January and my second daughter four in May, and the decision on their schooling looms over me. I again have a new little baby as well. This brings up a lesson I failed to add in above- when teaching children and simultaneously caring for infants and toddlers, one has to be SO intentional with their time.
This means being truly structured with time and routines, having self discipline, and focusing on eliminating distractions. I cannot eliminate the distraction that younger children can create but I can eliminate time on my phone, the tv being on, literal clutter in the space we choose to do school in, and mental clutter due to not having tended to certain things or failing to have written down what I cannot forget.
Essentially: make lists, immediately write down ideas I don’t want to forget, tidy daily, turn the TV off, and have designated times for when I write and respond to comments here.
What I failed with the most with my eldest child was instilling order in my home and in her home education. Order provides peace and that was the key quality lacking in our homeschooling experience. This created tension, and this is why we both eventually decided that it would be better for her to go to school, and now a year after that decision, I can confidently say it was the right decision and I know she would agree. So, I suppose another lesson would be to know when to allow the other options in.
I do plan to homeschool my younger children, hopefully at least up until they are middle school age. In finding Charlotte Mason and Classical education I feel I have found pedagogical alignment. These approaches both focus on themes I really value while being grounded in goodness.
I also will be involving my husband more, particularly with my boy. I truly have came to believe that boys need male figures teaching them and while I will be the one teaching him to read and write, his father will be teaching him more practical skills and likely will be taking him to any extracurriculars he may do. This will also help create order.
I have learned that order is an expression of love. Order is what precedes calm and a sense of calmness is the state where we are actually open to learning. Being firm enough to uphold order is a skill I am still learning, and it one I have learned mostly through my relationship with myself.
And so, my vision for this next endeavor into the realm of home education is one where I remember my old dreams where homeschooling was not about avoidance or control nor about the perfect pedagogy or ideology and instead is about instilling virtue and excellence into my children via love, time, focus and structure whilst allowing them to follow their interests without constraint and work on practical life skills.
The home is but a mere little wooden box but within it can live a whole lot of wonder and I endeavor to nurture that wonder.
***I know many of you on here homeschool, so I am curious to get feedback on how you choose to do it, what curriculums you use, and what your motivations may be.***
My youngest of three just finished high school. My older two were in school, one for kindergarten and one through third grade. My oldest is four years into the work world after graduating from college with a BFA, my middle child has a year to go on her BS and works on an ambulance. My youngest is heading to a state school in a month.
I hate to tell you, but I think for most of us, what you describe with your daughter *is* home schooling, not failing at home schooling -- even the returns to a school setting. It is inherent in the choice, this back and forth, up and down, in and out scramble. It's the feature and the bug, being able to pivot when you learn one thing to the next situation that you will learn from, and in a lot of ways that is one of the big things home educated kids can get good at by watching -- change.
It's not that I don't know folks who went Bob Jones or Seton K-12, I do. But they are the exceptions and they definitely don't stand out as the ones whose kids are best served by the schooling they got.
Am I happy with the turmoil and ups and downs, the inconsistency and shortfalls, the mistakes and "what was I thinking" moments? Really very much not. But I remind myself that I didn't get to pick between several different ideals (public, private, home), I got to pick between three imperfections. I got the good and bad of the one we picked, as did my kids.
I hope homeschooling goes well for you if you try it again. I was homeschooled for many years; I have mixed feelings about it and can’t really make generalized statements as a result.
The friends I made as a young adult think I was enormously lucky to “skip” middle school (they suffered there) but I don’t know; I struggled a lot at home at that age too. I attended high school for my last two years, then post secondary after that.
As a parent I would prefer my children go to school but if something really awful was going on at school that would obviously change the picture.
I have a very unromantic view of education. I think in the early grades children need to learn how to read, do basic math and interact with other children. If they can read, they can teach themselves a lot. If they can do basic math, higher level math will be more accessible. If they can get along with other kids, they can build positive relationships.
I may have this view because my homeschool background, I don’t know. It seems to me if you set kids in the right direction with some basic, healthy skills, life develops in fractal, beautiful ways.