A Return of Sorts
I knew she was ready when she garbage picked a fifth grade curriculum guide "just in case."
I’m not going to bury the lede here, and if you follow me on social media you already know. After two and a half months (a short time or a long time, depending on how you slice it) my family is back to home education full time.
I am not here to tell you the reasons, a lot of them are specific to my child, and my child is an individual who deserves privacy. This isn’t her newsletter, and I don’t think she’d thank you for oversharing here. I will tell you that over the last two months, there have been many times when I thought, “oh gosh, this is going so well, we’ll never homeschool again!” and other times that I thought “we can’t possibly last another day.”
In the end, it wasn’t just my choice, it was a choice we made as a family. That means that our child was a big part of making the decision. And it was hard. Like, hard hard! There were so many pros and cons on both sides, and it isn’t without some sadness that we made the call. But it was the right decision. In this life, with this child, we are better able to meet more of her needs this way. And so far everyone is adjusting well.
What I did want to write about, more than the reasons for the switch, are the things I’ve learned from enrolling a kid in school, and being able to look at the educational system from both sides of the fence, so to speak.
A lot of these things are good. You do not have to hate something to know it isn’t the right thing for you at the moment.
1. Most teachers and administrators care deeply about children and are trying their very best, even if you disagree with their tactics or ideas.
Look, you know things, and then you know things. Over the past few years I have been in a lot of homeschool groups, and a lot of homeschool parents love to talk shit about schools. They don’t care, they are “just in it for the paycheck,” they see kids as numbers, they want to create robots. I have heard it all. And because I have always known teachers and they seem like nice people, I’ve always countered with something like “I don’t really think that’s true.”
Actually having a kid in a school is different. I was floored by how much every single adult I interacted with seemed to care for my child, and all the children! That is a lot of caring to do in a day. And I could see how they made decisions based on that care, even if I didn’t always agree with their conclusions. Not only the classroom teacher who had the most time to get to know my child, but the music teacher, the art teacher, the principal. Everyone knew who my kid was, and everyone cared.
Now you could say that I just got lucky (and in some ways I did), but I also have seen lots of evidence of teachers caring about kids. Are there exceptions? Probably, yeah, that’s why I said “most” and not “all.” But frankly, it’s not like the pay is good enough to just be in it for the money. And I bet even the educators who deeply want kids to conform (aka “become robots) want that from a place of caring. Maybe it’s misguided. Maybe the systems are flawed. But teachers, man, they care about kids.
2. Having a child in school full time can be an awful lot of work.
There’s a meme that goes around in homeschooling circles that is something like, “oh I could never have a child in school, I don’t have the time/energy/patience!” It’s obviously a jokey reaction to the comments home educators often get. People who haven’t done it and don’t want to (which is fine by me, by the way) imagine homeschooling will exhaust them. You have to teach math! You have to get your kids to do lessons! Yeah right, they say, my kids don’t listen to me.
Here’s the thing. Parenting is a lot of work, it just is. And if you want your kids to have a decent education, that is also going to take effort. And maybe on some level outsourcing the lessons to schools makes that easier for a lot of people. Cool! But for me, it was just as much, if not more, work.
There’s the waking up and getting going, convincing the child to physically get in the car (in our case, way harder than convincing the child to do a quick math lesson), dealing with more frequent illnesses, assessing which illnesses are legit and which are not, picking the child up early if they need it, keeping track of the schedule because there are off days and half days, communicating with the school, dealing with feelings related to school, helping with homework… The list goes on and on. And most schools would also love parents to volunteer.
The work of having a child in school is a totally different kind of work than the work of home educating! And it’s cool if you are more comfortable with that kind of work. But it sure is work.
3. No matter how great it is, all schools have imperfections.
We loved our school. We still love our school. It is great and we will probably always miss it and be a little bit sad that it didn’t work out. But schools are run by human beings, and human beings are complex, and there is no such thing as a perfect human. When humans get together and make an institution, like a school, there are bound to be imperfections. And people will have different opinions about what those imperfections even are!
Of course the same is true for homeschooling, nothing is ever perfect. The difference, for me, is that addressing problems can often be done much more quickly with a smaller group of people. So if something isn’t working, it can potentially be quicker to address.
4. Children’s social lives matter, and they are incredibly and unbelievably complex.
You knew it was coming! Homeschoolers love to say that kids don’t even get to socialize at school, so what’s the point? Plus, is socializing that important?!?! One homeschooler I otherwise respect once told me kids only need one or two friends, so as long as your kid has two buddies they see from time to time you can pat yourself on the back and forget “the socialization question.”
Listen to me speak carefully for a minute. All of that is bullshit.
Kids in school socialize. They talk, even when they aren’t supposed to. They do group projects, they have recess and gym, they annoy the kid sitting next to them, they interact in a thousand different ways every single day. Just because teachers sometimes say “it’s not time for talking” or whatever does not mean that kids don’t socialize at school, they are definitely socializing at school.
And yes, it matters. All of our human relationships matter. And our social needs vary and that doesn’t start when we become adults. A one size all approach to what kids “need” in the social department doesn’t make sense, whether you are on team “they need to be in a classroom with 20-30 kids the same age as them” or “they need one or two friends.”
That said, kids social lives are complex. They aren’t necessarily all sunshine and roses, and they aren’t just playing together either. School isn’t the only way kids can socialize, of course it isn’t, but it is one way! One thing I liked about school socializing is that I was not there. In homeschool meetups and groups, I’m always in the background, ready to help if need be. But at school she was learning how to navigate social relationships with chilren and adults that she didn’t know, many of which came from very different backgrounds than her, without me there for backup. That was cool.
It’s also cool that she has awesome homeschool friends and that we have other options for meeting social needs than having to go to school all day everyday. But when people talk about schooling decisions, I am very suspicious of anyone who just shrugs off “the social question” like it isn’t a thing.
5. “Learning all the time” means ALL THE TIME.
Homeschoolers love to boast that kids are learning all the time, no matter what you do! The better ones are mostly expressing their amazement in how much their children learn in a given day or week, and the many different ways kids can learn different things. The worse ones (and we all wish they didn’t exist) are using that phrase as an excuse for educational neglect.
The good news is, it’s true. Kids do learn basically nonstop, wherever they are, whatever resources they have. What they are able to learn may vary based on a lot of factors (a lot of kids won’t learn how to read if you don’t teach them, no matter how “literature rich” your enviornment,” for example) but for sure kids are just always learning stuff. It’s cool as hell.
They even learn… if you put them in school!
Barring situations of educational trauma where kids shut down and come to dislike learning, the “learning all the time” rule doesn’t only apply to outside of the classroom walls. I was frankly shocked at how much my kid learned in her short time in school! Her math skills flourished, she discovered a passion for geography, she learned how to play football in gym, and she learned a bunch of cool playground songs and games from her new friends! Did she also learn that apparently every other eight year old on earth plays minecraft? Sure! It’s fine.
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As we move into the next season, I’m grateful for our experience at school, the many friends we’ve made, and feeling more solid in our choice to handle education a different way.