Evening Reflections

As I sit reflecting on today and all the stuff we manage to pack into our days, I have been thinking I can't take home schooling anymore. There is such a fine line in pushing your child to do their work and knowing when to back off. There are bad attitude days, there are really good days, there are extremely long catching up days and then throw sickness or hormones-theirs and mine- and it makes for some pretty challenging situations.

Part of the reason is a lack of encouragement to continue. Even though we have met home school families in the area, they are just like us. They have their activity filled lifestyles too. I haven't tried too hard to get involved in too many activities because we have so much school that needs to be done and the kids really enjoy their free time and don't want to give it up either. I think I was just feeling like life is easier when I am not the teacher. It reminded me of a lesson I just learned recently.

I learned that, "the grass isn't always greener" if someone else was teaching my kids. One of the areas my boys don't do as well is writing, in particular the one whose name ends in "s". There was a class being offered on Mondays from 1pm-3pm. I thought that it would be a great time for grocery shopping or Meleah and Mom time. The boys would have the opportunity to write for a different audience and experience a small group class setting with deadlines and all. It sounded great, they would be focusing on children's classic literature and mixing in some creative pieces as well.

The boys came out of the class the first time telling me that there was a boy in the class that did a lot of cursing. He was a "home schooler" because he was expelled. He told the boys that he spent most of his time at his grandma's playing video games and getting mad when his grandma made him do stuff.  This was a good opportunity, in my opinion, for the boys to experience this type of personality in small doses and for them to step up and be an example.  Okay, we could deal with that. I was thinking this is good. The boys can see that a life filled with video games doesn't look so appealing now. Then, ...

Week 1-The first assignment was due Wednesday. It was a paragraph based on a fable from Peru. Its main point was not to make assumptions or judge people. Okay. This paper took approximately three hours for Travis with great help. The second assignment was to come up with a creative piece to bring to the next class. This one also took hours for Travis. During this process he tells me the teacher doesn't care about spelling because she couldn't live with out spell check. A bit shocking for me who is still working on improving both boys spelling but not as bad as how much time and energy I was spending trying to help him to complete his assignments. I e-mailed the teacher asking whether Travis was too young for the class because of the difficulty it took him to write his assignments but "no" they said. He had great ideas and participated in class. His paper received a B after rewriting it.

Week 2- This assignment was to write a paper based on a fable about a man that blamed Adam for all his troubles. This was an opinion piece about whether you thought all men were naturally sinful.  Travis put off doing the assignment but managed to get it done. This paper received a C after he fixed it according to the teacher's suggestions. The second assignment was to write about a time when you faced temptation. Travis barely got this assignment done after 2 hours of brainstorming, tears, and begging for me to write it for him. The first paper received a D.

Week 3-This week was to write two paragraphs based on your opinion on a writing about a futuristic event and which character you most identified with. The second was to write a current event, speech, poem, or cartoon about the future and exaggerate it. Their example was a political cartoon about OPEC.  Something that was totally unfamiliar to Travis. The idea of exaggerating a current event was just too much for me even though I could see their reasoning but it is just too much like our media today.

That night Bob and I were discussing the last few weeks and it wasn't worth completing the class.  First of all, after the first class I asked the teacher for a syllabus to know when they were going to cover classics instead of these fables that linked Adam and Eve into the fable category. I felt they were getting a teacher who was coming from a totally different worldview. They were teaching from ideas we agree with but they felt a bit off or a bit twisted. I was doing ALL the work with him anyway. He was writing based on things that were unfamiliar to him and was such a chore. They did little or no writing in class, I was hoping for maybe even just the pre-writing help to get them started.  It made both of us crazy. The idea that this class was going to be "better" because I didn't have to teach...not true. I had the same amount of work if not more and the teachers deadlines to meet so the rest of our schoolwork suffered. I didn't want this class to frustrate his writing even more so we dropped the class.

Skip forward to last week and I found out that the teacher, who was a resource consultant for the school we are a part of, was terminated. I don't know why but I felt like I had done the right thing about the situation. 

On a side note, Cody did extremely well in the class and did the assignments on his own. Most of the class were 8th graders and Travis was really an "academically young" 6th grader when it comes to English. Previously, this teacher had taught the class to 9th graders so I think it just wasn't a good fit for Travis at this time but I wasn't about to give away 2 hours just for them to give Cody A's and not challenge his writing skills. Especially when the teacher was trying to compare both their assignments which was totally unrealistic to think that they could both produce and perform at the same level.

Even though the idea is tempting to think that my kids would be better off in the public school setting, no one loves my kids as much as I do and wants to see them succeed and overcome the areas that they struggle. Our curriculum was fine and covered all the same types of papers with a variety of pre-writing  ideas. I do feel that one thing that we did gain from the class was Essay/Paragraph Rubrics. They help the paper to be graded more objectively and they help me to figure out how to grade a paper.  I wish I had know about them a long time ago.  We have taken the time and are doing some really fun projects now that Travis LOVES. That is the whole point is to overcome his dislike or difficultly writing. I believe Cody became the writer he is because he is an avid reader and has better comprehension and an incredible vocabulary. 

Okay, I can do this. We will make it through this challenge. I am not even going to think about the next one. I will just have to remember the hurdles will be worth the finish line.