In a post I never thought I'd be writing, we have entered Season 3 of "Homeschooling as a Working Single Parent." Yes, we've made it to high school. When I started this, I literally told people it was an experiment. "We'll just see how it goes," I said, trying to remember how to act nonchalant about something, "It's just an experiment...if it doesn't work, he can always go back." Ahem.
I've neglected this little blog to death, but I haven't forgotten about it. My dreams of having a widely-read blog (with a companion podcast?!) that brings me a couple hundred dollars here and there may never be fully realized, but I've been persisting for 37 years and I'm not stopping now.
One pattern coping mechanism I've adopted each year is to outsource just a little bit more. Despite my desperate attempts to Do It All™, I've realized that I'm not any less of a homeschooler just because my kid uses an all-in-one curriculum, or just because he is enrolled in an online school (oh, the humanity). I'm still the principal, assistant principal, superintendent, school nurse, janitor, counselor, teacher, hall monitor, school psychologist, and most importantly...mom. The buck stops with me, and his education is 100% in my Biogel size 7 hands. The difference is that this year I don't have to cry every time a lab report or essay comes across my tiny desk as I agonize over a rubric and wonder if I'm being too hard or too easy on him because he's my kid.
The deprogramming we've experienced has made itself very known as we have come across silly things like requirements to send your teacher an email so that the teacher knows you know how to email (as someone who was born post-Millenium, no less), fitting into someone else's calendar, and introductory discussions. "This is dumb," I was told, and I found myself saying, "I know, but we're back to a time where you just kind of have to do dumb things because...you just do." We're trading some freedom for peace this year.
We've been deprogrammed.
After I told him, multiple times I'm sure, not to spend too long on said introductory discussions because they're only worth 10% of the grade and nobody really reads them anyway, the young man told me that he was looking up an author someone mentioned is her favorite in her post. Almost immediately after the words, "I told you not to spend too much time on those" left my mouth, I realized that the child was demonstrating something I've always read about on the blogs and heard about on the podcasts. The Spirit of Inquiry.
I have been trying to look for this elusive Spirit of Inquiry in him for the last couple of years. I've always read about homeschooled kids being hungry for knowledge - they obsess about topics for days or weeks and pull and pull at the tread until they move on to the next thing. Homeschooling is perfect for them because they can nerd out all they want, even turning one topic into entire unit studies that go on until everyone is sick and tired of hearing about dinosaurs or the solar system or Abraham Lincoln all the time.
He is just not that way, I've thought, and we are going to have to go through the rest of his school career kicking and screaming (both of us). When you ask him what he likes learning about, his answer is "Nothing." What does he like about school? "Nothing." There's never any spark and all the learning is perfunctory, just something to do to get to the next year. He would never obsess over dinosaurs or the solar system or Abraham Lincoln.
But here he was. Something caught his eye and he decided to pursue learning more about it, so I quickly corrected myself and told him to learn about this author to his little heart's content. "This is what homeschooling is all about!" I practically yelled. "The SPIRIT OF INQUIRY!" He looked a little scared.
It didn't take but a few minutes for him to get the ick and figure out that Colleen Hoover looks like one of those "sappy romance novel writers," but this is so significant to me that I had to resurrect my two-year-old blog (had to search my email to remember what platform it was even on, just being honest) and record it for posterity.
We've come a long way, baby.
