back to school

For most normal people, the arrival of Labor Day is met with mixed emotions - summer is winding down and in Minnesota, that means winter is about a month away. But, on the positive side, it also means that the kids are finally going back to school.
I’m sure there are a few half-insane people who anticipate winter, and there are probably a few sentimental types who are actually sad that the kids are leaving.

I however, am not maudlin. I would welcome the quiet that would come with three out of the four kids heading out each morning, leaving me with the only one who seems to know how to play by himself. I would not mourn the noise, the mess and the begging for snacks. I think I might actually dance a little jig if Labor Day meant that my boys were going back to a school that wasn’t at home.

As it is, we are a homeschooling family, so this time of year means much more than popping kids on a bus and packing lunches.
It means tears and whining (from me), planning and purchasing (again me), discipline and maybe even a little sisu. (For those of you non-Finns, sisu is a bit like moxie – super guts is how we always translated it.) And this is just for starters.

It will take approximately a month to settle into a routine that looks a bit like this: endless questions like “What do I do now?” when the schedule clearly says math, an hour’s worth of nagging to get a half hour of language done, begging for recess and two kids who will somehow disappear when Mom is working with the third.

I can guarantee that we won’t be even that far into the school schedule when two boys will have lost every pencil that was purchased for them (all 27.) The third will have scribbled his name on someone else’s workbook. One will hide his monthly schedule and claim he doesn’t have to do any school. And at some point in the first month or so, someone will pull out brand-new markers (the non-washable kind because Mom forgot to buy those) and tattoo himself and his little brother.

And to make matters worse, the littlest one - the one who doesn’t have to do school - will be the only one begging for a school book.
The bright side is that when they do disappear on me, they’re likely to have a book in hand and I will find them in some random spot, hunched over reading How to Eat Fried Worms or some other delightful tale. Last year I measured my success as a teacher/mother not in test scores, but in the fact that boy #2 wanting to read his library book during his traveling team’s wrestling match. Anything else that happened that year was gravy.

All complaining aside (and mostly from me), homeschooling is not much different than parenting. It involves focus and discipline and consequences and love. I need to have a keen eye for how my children learn so that I can best know how to teach them. I need to have the will power and strength to maintain a schedule and not back down from their challenges. I need to be able to enforce missing football practice if schoolwork isn’t done. And I need to do all of this with mercy and love.
So, it’s not any easier than parenting.

But, the rewards are there, just as they are in parenting. Occasionally you’ll get a glimpse of a job well done or a lesson learned or even a new skill acquired. And that’s just on my part. They probably get much more out of it, although I doubt they’d admit it.

Knowing all of this, I probably shouldn’t dread the approach of Labor Day. Every year, it’s the same thing - a bit of anxiety in the planning stages (what curriculum should I use? Rosetta Stone costs how much? It’s how many days until Christmas break?) but the end result is usually worth it.

This is not a journey for everyone, and sometimes I question if it’s the right journey for us, but so far, one year at a time, we’re doing our best to follow the path God has laid out for us, even if it doesn’t mean orange school buses and the local elementary school.

Who knows what I’ll learn this year...