I should not have asked

In the last few days, I got a pencil and paper and started making some very rough notes about our schedule this fall (which will be officially our, get this, 8th (!) year of homeschooling), trying to figure out who wants to sign up for what extracurricular activity. So far we have Amelia taking 2 ballet classes/week (Tues & Fri evenings), Hugo taking a gymnastics class (Thurs daytime) and maybe some homelearners’ soccer (Fri daytime) (if it ever starts – we’ve been trying to get this class running for a year). This seemed a bit lean and I’ve been gently prodding them to see if anything else peaked their interest. I’ve been getting mumbles from them all summer and it’s time to make some decisions.

Last night while Amelia and I were walking the dog, I thought it was the perfect time to push on this issue, as well as do some academic planning.

"So, anything else you want to take?"
"Mooooom. I’ll be exhausted from the ballet! That’s 2 days a week! I need the rest of the week to do other things."

"Um. Like what?"
"You know, just things."

Mom savvily spots that as a dead-end and switches gears. "OK. What about the academic planning? Anything special you want to put into the school year?"
"Whatever, it’s all boring."

"What?????"
"It’s just so boring."

"But, but, …. history! You like history!"
"I don’t want to memorize dates and the people were just so stupid! All those dumb invasions and wars! What is that??! Why did they have to do that! I don’t want to learn about that! It’s awful. And boring."

Mom gets ever more tentative. "Geography?"
"Well, I guess don’t mind the book but I don’t think I’m really learning anything."

"Math?"
"Mooooom! You know I hate math the most!!!! All those stupid rules and shortcuts and, and, and oh, I just hate it!"

Right. Move along quickly from this one as previous experience shows she can go on for 15 minutes at the top of her lungs and without pause about the evils of math. "Spelling and grammar?"
"Moooooooom!!!!! I can’t spell. I’m awful at it! Why do they make these stupid spelling rules??? And my grammar is just fine. And I’m NOT analyzing stories – that’s a waste of time."

"Latin?"
"No way!! Not with that dumb book!! Maybe Ancient Greek. And French, I guess. And Polish."

"Science?"
"All the stuff we’re doing is too babyish! Hugo just wants to make messy stuff; there’s no point to it!"

All righty then.

There you have it. My poster child for homeschooling.

You know that saying from Yeats about education being not about filling a bucket but starting a fire? Well, this fire doesn’t appear to be burning well. In fact, it’s doing that thing when your kindling is too wet and you pile too much of it and it starts to smother and puts out the dense white smoke which makes you rear back and trip on the axe, and cry, and wonder what you’re doing there at all.

I’m taking all this with a grain of salt. I think part of it is just a role she’s trying out: “portrait of a tween, bored with life”. But, still, I do know that we need to make some changes. The problem is that this is a child who, if you give her something that she perceives to be too babyish, will rip it to shreds, stomp on it, burn it and refuse to speak to you for two days. But if you give her something too hard, she’ll rip it to shreds, stomp on it, burn it and refuse to speak to you for two days. Finding the exact, perfect level, which challenges but doesn’t overwhelm, is pretty much an impossible task but that apparently, is my role as homeschooling parent.

Hope is on the horizon. I have the biggest attack of curriculitis (defined here) I’ve had in years. It’s all Becky’s fault because somewhere along the line, she mentioned Galore Park and I checked out the website, and filled out a little form asking for more information and eventually a big envelope arrived in the mail.

It didn’t contain any information which wasn’t on the website, btw, so I can’t heartily recommend ordering their ‘catalogue’ – it turned out to be just one page info sheets on each book, covering pretty exactly the information on the web pages. But, when the envelope arrived it reminded me of this publisher and how I coveted their books simply because they’re used by British prep schools, and because John Clare declared in The Daily Telegraph that they’re the “…only reliable source of rigorous school textbooks.”

We have to get the fire going one way or another. These books will fix everything, right?

Tags: homeschooling, homeschool planning, Galore Park, insane mother tries to homeschool insane daughter, Hornblower