The Messiness of Homeschooling
While routines and some degree of planning is helpful, the reality of homeschooling is pretty messy. Despite all our best-laid plans, there will always be interruptions and unforeseen incidents to derail them! As homeschoolers, we can’t expect our school days to be as ordered and predictable as in a traditional school setting.
To start with, there are the planned and necessary interruptions that happen, such as doctor and dentist appointments, grocery shopping and other errands (library, post office, hardware stores, clothing shopping etc etc). I find it works best to plan these for the afternoons if possible, but often we seem to end up with doctor and dentist appointments right in the middle of prime learning time! Lowering expectations for these mornings is a good idea, and I sometimes get the kids to bring some school work along, if only to keep them occupied and prevent fighting! I moved to doing my grocery shopping online a year or two ago, after a particularly nightmarish experience at Pak ‘n Save that left me vowing NEVER AGAIN!
Tradesmen coming to fix things at our place are definitely objects of curiosity – I always feel sorry for them having an audience of 5 fascinated kids, and I usually tell the kids to please not stare at them the WHOLE time! It can be quite a distraction from their usual work, but by watching, I figure the kids are learning something useful as well!
Then there are the unplanned interruptions and distractions such as phones calls or people at the door. When your kids are in a good routine the odd phone call doesn’t matter too much, as they can just carry on without you for a bit, but with visitors to the house, they are often curious to know who’s here and tend to all go charging noisily down the hallway to open the door (leaving me with no option but to actually open it!) However, usually it’s just a matter of pausing our work and picking it up again when the visit is over.
Having a toddler and/or baby constantly throws spanners into the works, since you never know when there’ll be a stubbed toe emergency, toileting accident or poonami! Babies don’t necessarily sleep for the allotted school time and toddlers get bored easily and demand attention. Having a few preschool activities on hand is useful, such as threading cards, colouring in, jigsaws and magnetic story boards. For babies a jolly jumper, bumbo and playpen with fun toys can be helpful.
Homeschooling is literally messy – books, paper, pens, toys and clothes usually end up strewn about everywhere. Unless you declare ‘tidy up time’ (several times a day) it just gets worse! My kids very rarely take it upon themselves to do a clean-up! Sometimes we use food or treats as an incentive, e.g. “Before you get morning tea / before I read to you, this place needs to be tidy, which means…”. Specific instructions are useful for younger children, and I find separating them into different areas of the house to tidy reduces laziness and fighting (there is always one child lolling around while the others do the hard work!)
Finally, of course, we are dealing with individual personalities and temperaments (including our own), and the mum-child relationship, which is very different from the school teacher-student one. I often feel extremely frustrated when my kids moan and throw a wobbly over doing some minor thing asked of them when I know they would sit there and behave like perfect angels if a teacher required the same thing! As parents, we see our kids at their worst, and that can be tiring and discouraging to experience day after day. Julie Bogart, a well-known home education speaker, mentioned in the AHE conference last year that this is (apparently) our privilege! To provide our kids with a safe place where they can be themselves is important.. although difficult. Siblings fight and niggle each other, and it can be hard to put on the patient teacher hat while yelling at them to stop fighting and listen! Being both mum and teacher is a real challenge, and uncooperative kids can sometimes disrupt the learning process hugely. I often have to remind myself that it’s my job to train my kids, and if they were perfect I wouldn’t be necessary!
Most days will involve a fair amount of messiness, and unfortunately, some days can be a total write-off. At times like these, we need someone to vent to! It’s also true that chocolate helps! I’ve learnt not to evaluate our homeschooling based on these days, or on how it compares to a traditional school, but on the bigger picture. By remembering why we’re homeschooling in the first place, what our long term goals are and by celebrating what they’ve learnt over a month or year – both in terms of academic and life skills – we can take a step back, relax and persevere through the mess!
