So, here's some news. We are officially homeschooling. Well, home-and-office-schooling.
This is not going to turn into a weekly rundown of the syllabus, nor is it likely to become a paean to homeschooling. But this is the first chapter, so it bears mention. (And needless to say, as the New Thing Going On, it ate up a lot of my week, so I don't have much else to write about.) I suspect it'll come up again, though I'm more likely to keep it to a monthly roundup, more for my own frame of reference than any sort of interesting reading for anyone else.
The first week went fairly well, despite no long-term strategic game plan. I suppose the long-term goal is "pass muster with one of the ways the county tries to police homeschooling progress." I don't imagine we will have any trouble with that.
I was sure I would have serious anxiety about going off the grid. I still feel a bit like I'm breaking some law, and I have flashes of concern that we lack the discipline to see it through, or are creating a failure to socialize, etc., etc. But those flashes are overpowered by the change I've seen in a week. I'm feeling better about things than I've felt in about five years. I don't sit in my office waiting for the phone to ring and it being the school for one reason or another. I don't grill the Young Prince about what he learned in class because I feel a need to provide an alternative viewpoint or correct misinterpretations. I think in one week, he's learned more history and done better reading exercises than he has so far this year.
And he seems happier too. I asked him if he felt we were going too hard or too easy on him. He said it feels like he is learning harder material but it is not as hard to deal with; he explained that this was because he could spend the whole day working rather than designated times in class, that he could wake up when he wanted, that he didn't have to stop reading in the middle of a chapter simply because someone else wanted him to go run laps in PE. His only negative comment was that we made him do work on the day his friends all had a snow day from school. Frankly, I see that as a positive.
So this week involved:
-- Placement tests in math, so that we knew what books to buy; he will be picking up with measurements and geometric terms.
-- To Kill a Mockingbird; with study questions.
-- American history, starting with exploration by Cartier and Cortez.
-- Online tutorials and quizzes on the states of matter.
-- Grammar and spelling.
He also got in more piano practice, and a fair bit of running around—most of it indoors, though I forced him outside to play catch one day, even though it was about 30 degrees.
I did worry that perhaps we were running away from a problem; the kid does have trouble getting on with others. But when it comes right down to it, being in school wasn't really fixing that. He has his core group of friends, and he will still see them. He can now settle down to learning without worrying about sitting next to the wrong kid in the wrong clique, or bothering someone because he's tapping his pencil, or the other myriad complaints I got wind of, not to mention the countless more I'm sure I missed. He's engaged with the kids in his swim lessons, and was overjoyed to be accepted by a group of boys his age at a bowling league we signed him up for over the weekend.
So rather than running away, I am looking at what we are running toward. Better focus on education. Better opportunities to help him figure out the right ways to get along with people. More desire to get along with people because he isn't forced to do it all the time. And, hopefully, a better human being at the end of it than he might have turned out to be otherwise.
I have no idea how long this experiement will continue. I suppose we will take stock over the summer and see how things stand. For now, I'm quite content.
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