more reading for me

While waiting for our newest Magnolia baby to arrive, I've been doing quite a bit of reading. Selection 1, acquired from our local library: Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie. Basically, it's a memoir by a mom (who is a writer anyway) who homeschooled her daughter for the 5th grade year as a "sabbatical" from public schools. The jacket of the book talks up the strong relationship that the two of them built through the year, which is why I got it. I could use some concrete suggestions on that part of home education.

It was an easy read and interesting, but honestly, I didn't see the bonding thing in the narrative. It just wasn't there. What I read was - despite trying to do the right thing for her daughter, the mother did not seem to ever give up her own priorities and plans for their homeschooling year in favor of what could have been much better for the child. A lot of times, she just doesn't seem to get it. Case in point:

The first 100 pages of this book detail the daughter's educational history leading up to the decision to homeschool for 5th grade - a consistent line beginning at age 3 in Montessori school of hating change, zoning out during class, fighting for hours at a time about homework, despising the structure of sitting in a classroom all day, the awful pattern of public schools teaching to the test and having all teacher (and student) creativity squashed, etc ... School and schoolwork have not been a happy thing for this poor kid from the word Go.

On page 112 (chapter 5), for Day 2 of homeschooling, they started off with Mom assigning Daughter to write a short essay about Fahrenheit and Celsius while Mom goes to take a shower. She comes back 20 minutes later to find 2 sentences done and is shocked - shocked! - that Daughter instead read a fantasy novel while she was unsupervised. From the book:

I had been counting on the idea that she would be an independent learner - that after a brief daily math lesson she would concentrate on thirty minutes of practice problems while I graded my college students' papers. J would draft book reports while I wrote my novel, and our house would be unusually clean because of my extra time at home folding laundry, scrubbing pots, and occasionally answering questions. Now I glimpsed the truth - if I was not nearby to constantly prod, push, and cheer, J would get nothing done. My annoyance grew as my visions of freedom ebbed away.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? What on earth gave her any idea that her daughter, after a whopping 24 hours of homeschooling, would be an "independent learner" of any capacity? She'd just spent 100 pages telling me how difficult it was for her daughter to concentrate and focus in school. That was about as stupid as it got.

And "visions of freedom" ... that's just laughable. Really. From the beginning, I've known that my own goals would have to be put on hold while I educate my children. I'd like to be a writer - I'd love to get my political blog going again, I have an idea for a series of children's books I'd like to write before my children are too old for them, and I have an awful lot of family and personal history writing to get caught up on. I'd like to spend more time sewing, any time at all getting photo albums done ... the list keeps going. I have lots of personal projects. But homeschooling puts all of it on hold for an indefinite amount of time. Homeschooling is not about "freedom" for the teacher-parent. It's the opposite, actually.

In the end, I got nothing about bonding with my kids. What I did come away with was a reminder to make sure I don't do this same thing to my own daughters - force my visions of an ideal education on them no matter what is working or not. We're still at the very beginning of our homeschooling venture (4 months now) and experimenting with what works and what doesn't for our girls. I really like the classical method so far and have been gradually acquiring a number of the books recommended in The Well-Trained Mind. But if classical doesn't work for my kids after giving it a fair shot, I need to be willing to change and look for something else that meets their needs, not my fantasies of an ideal education. Ideal is what works for them, not what works for me.