Home-School?

 10.02.07

 

Quite a while back I received an email from someone I had met once, very briefly, in a casual setting.  The letter exhorted the beauty and potential of my daughter and begged me to think about home-schooling.  This person knew nothing about me, my life, or my values and beliefs, and yet here was a letter telling me that God wants me to educate my child at home.

 

Now, I am one of those people who believe that if there is a God, He knows all our hearts.  Therefore I’m pretty sure He created 4K just for me.  He knew I was struggling with my smart and busy daughter who has the attention span of a butterfly, and that the day sometimes has more hours than I have patience.

 

Introduce the Kindergarten Readiness program known as 4K.  Five days a week my darling gets up, gets dressed, and goes to school, and I have a blessed 3 hours alone.

 

Home-schooling might very well be the most attractive option for some families.  When I picture it in my head for our family, however, I can feel my blood pressure rising.   For one thing, if she won’t let me teach her how to put her pants on, how on earth am I supposed to teach her how to read and write?  We love each other to the moon and back, but we get frustrated with one another on a regular basis.  And I already find it exhausting to keep her busy for a whole day – I can’t imagine that schooling her at home would be an improvement.

 

By the time she was 2 and a half I was doing the countdown to school.  And by the time she was 3 she was counting down with me.  “When can I go on the school bus with the big kids?  Mom, can’t I go to school?  I’m big enough, see?  I’m THIS big!”

 

All the way around this 4K program is a beautiful thing. 

 

And this is where I have to say… thank goodness for people who love to hang out with little kids and can teach them stuff.  Because lord knows, I’m not very good at it.  For me it goes like… “Oh, you want to have a picnic?  Cool, let’s make a picnic lunch and eat it on the picnic blanket!”  My daughter is all for the idea, go mom, you came up with a great idea, yay! 

 

Sure.  Only while I’m making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slicing and peeling apples she gets impatient.  “Mom, can I have my sandwich and start without you?”  “Mom, I’m taking the apples, please can you put some apple dip in a bowl for me?”

 

By the time I’m ready to eat, half of the meal has been removed from the tray and consumed.

 

I carry the tray to the picnic blanket in the dining room and set it down.  She says, “I’m done eating.  Picnic’s over,” and she’s off to find a new activity.  I can’t keep up.  I eat by myself.  Then I clean up the mess I left in the kitchen because I was trying to hurry.  I’m not designed to switch gears at full throttle 35 times a day.  It makes me tired.

 

Daycare provider is so far down on my list of career choices that it’s not even on the list, which is why I am so thankful that it’s much higher on other people’s lists.  If it wasn’t for the wonderful, caring, and accommodating staff at my daughter’s school, I would be a basket case.  I’d also be living with a little person who has terrible table manners.  And worse, I’m sure.  As it is now I just give her the “mom eye” and ask, “What happens at school when kids eat like Cookie Monster?”  That’s all I have to say because the power of the naughty chair follows her home.

 

I’ve learned other tricks, too.  Like, do you know how important it is for a kid to be the line-leader?  All I have to do to get my daughter moving from point A to point B is to say in a song-song voice, “I’m gonna be the line-leader,”  and bam!  There she is racing past me screaming, “NO!  I get to be the line-leader!  Me, it’s me!”

 

That one is useful to me every single day.

 

Some people probably should home school and are very good at it.  For the rest of us, the school district could make it a threat to ensure we carry out good discipline techniques in the after school hours.  Think about it.