This is a hard thing to write about. I wish that I could say that homeschooling is always working out perfectly for our family, that we are constantly learning, that my children love learning, that they are eager about growing with knowledge and following their passions and ecstatic about this whole lifestyle. But today isn't one of those days. I'm feeling pretty stressed about how things are going at the moment, so stressed that I'm wondering if I am making the right choice having them home and not having them in the more competitive environment of a school.

I won't make any bones about it--a major goal of mine for my children is that they will attend college. Yes, I also want them to be happy, to find the things that make them excited, to be good people. But I also have always implicitly assumed that going to a good college would be part of their life and that one of the goals of what we do with regards to education is to prepare them to be competitive applicants. When they were not yet in kindergarten, I felt much more lax about this--oh, sure, they might choose to do something else when they reach the "end of course" as far as our homeschooling or their high school education goes. I suppose what I had in mind was something like travel, a major project they were carrying out, some kind of community service, extra exploration of some area of passion. And when they were really young, I always wondered, both to myself and aloud, whether they were going to grow up to be people who could go to college. Here I am, with 11 year olds, and I know that isn't the end of the line, it isn't their full pinnacle of development, but I'm still wondering, and I'm not at all certain that they are going to be able to complete the level of high school work that would be necessary even for a less competitive college, nor that they are going to have the determination, the organizational skills, the listening skills, and basic cognitive skills necessary to do college work when the time comes.

Right now they are doing especially poorly in their schoolwork, and what's most distressing to me is that they just don't care. I have started keeping grades, especially in math, and right now Ollie has, if I'm being generous, a C-, and Walter has a B-. I'm just not satisfied with that, and I know that something needs to change. Many of their errors are pure carelessness--adding when the sign says subtract, not actually answering the question asked in the problem, copying things incorrectly, mixing up what is meant by prime factor and factor and multiple. Things just seem to be slipping, and they aren't putting forth much effort. I can appreciate that some of this doesn't feel relevent, but all across America and the world children are doing math or writing or history work that they don't love. And there's this part of me that hears other homeschoolers saying that this is why we homeschool, so that they don't have to endure meaningless drudgery. But you know what? I'm just not on that page any more. Right now, with them in 6th grade or so, I'm simply not that flexible. If they are going to be on track to be college bound, now is the time to take the work seriously and not just do what we feel like doing which, even for me, is pretty much nothing but lying around playing games.

I've given ultimatums--start taking the time to check your work and get it right or ask when you don't understand something, or you'll be over at Tomahawk Creek Middle School in two weeks. I have no idea if the extrinsic motivators of shame and teacher pressure and fear of punishment from home would be enough to make things any different there, and surely they would struggle because their writing skills are so weak, but it is disturbing to me to hear them talking about how they can drop out of school at 16. In that little fantasy world of homeschool philosophy and apologetics, my children are supposed to be on fire for learning, pursuing their passions with a fervor that no public or private schooled child could possibly muster, and realizing their life's direction. They should be getting along with one another because they have had so much unfettered time to develop family relationships. Instead, I'm wondering half the time whether I even want to be with them and the constant sniping and disrespect for one another. And I'm thinking that they have it so good--comparatively very few hours of actual work each day, no "homework" after they have been in classes for 6 hours, not needing to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus. Plenty of playtime, including during hours when other people their age are in school.

I've tried to take the perspective of the person I'd be complaining to--someone in a homeschool group with me, or even a "normal" person in the mainstream world. And I'm trying to see what I could change to get us back into a better place and get them working efficiently and accurately. Several things have jumped out at me. The first is that we need to start getting up at a regular hour. I'm getting up regularly, but Walter and Ollie are staying in bed until 9:30 or later most mornings (except Mondays when we have to be at RES at 9:00). This means that it's 10 or later when they are really getting down to work, or they're trying to get their math done while they are also up foraging through cabinets and pantries and refrigerators looking for something to eat, something else to eat, a refill of this, reheating that. Things like this don't happen in school. Yes, it's an advantage of homeschooling that you can eat when you're hungry, but it creates some serious divided attention challenges. If everyone was more or less ready to go by 8:30 a.m. (having eaten something, awake, kind of dressed), I think that psychologically we'd probably be in a better place to do decent work, and we'd also be able to take the best advantage of Rutledge being in preschool.

The second thing that I think we need is a more regular spot to do the work. It is one thing to be curled up reading history on the sofa. It's another thing to be lying on your back with a laptop up on your legs and glancing sideways at a falling grammar book and expecting to get things typed correctly. Sure, desks are confining, and I'm as lazy as the next person, but when you're doing the more writing intensive work or work that requires a lot of concentration, it's just hard to do that when your body isn't at least halfway at attention. The instructions for the Visualization Puzzle exercise with Learning RX really stressed this--if you see the student slumping in his seat or leaning back, then you need to start moving more quickly and upping the pace to keep the student at full attention. Every minute of schoolwork doesn't have to be edge of your seat full concentration, but certain parts definitely benefit from this if you want accuracy.

Lest I feel like I'm only griping about what is going wrong, I will say that while I still feel like I'm not spending the amount of time with Frances that I need to to feel like I am doing right by her with homeschooling, she is making amazing progress and is a rather eager learner. Now she's not going to come begging to do schoolwork, and she's as apt to negotiate as much as any of them, but she gets her work done at such a lightning pace that I feel like I maybe should be giving her more just so that we're working for a longer period of time. With her, I'm having to reevaluate the resources I've chosen for this year because she is already finding many of them too easy. I think what i really need is just to push her forward and determine what we can reasonably skip, since there's no point in belaboring things that are too easy. But just two months ago I was thinking that Saxon 2 was going to take us a while to get into. Now she is blowing through the first half of the book at the rate of 5-7 pages a day, and this is still not taking any real time and effort. I want to make sure that she has been exposed to all of the concepts that they are presenting, but since the curriculum is a bit behind some other programs, I do feel like we're fine dropping what seems too easy. We had also been working through Explode the Code 3, which focuses on long vowel sounds made in various ways. She flipped to the back of the book this morning, took the posttest, and said she wanted to be done. I figure that makes some sense, though there's some argument for the value of learning some spelling tips by doing at least a bit more of the book. I also skipped her from the Horizons Reader 1 to Reader 2, and she is having very little trouble. Suddenly she is reading things everywhere, and she has more than made up for being behind in reading this past summer. Now I have no question that she would be just fine in a 2nd grade class, which is where she would be if she was in school. In fact, she would probably be a little bored. I wish I could have that rapid surge forward with the others that I'm feeling with her.

And then there's dear little Rutledge. He's a hard nut to crack. Preschool is going well for him. He loves to go to Miss Missy's class, and he loves his Joy Preschool class at RES on Mondays. He begs for us to take him to church more than just on Sundays because he loves Sunday School. This is the kid who was crying through Children's Chapel and Sunday School all of last year. He is learning to write his name (I'm kicking myself for not naming him something simple like "Bob"!) and asking for more of his name to trace. I don't know that he is picking up all that is going on in preschool, which is a bit more academic than the program the twins were in at his age. He isn't the most chatty responder during the debriefing at the end of class each day. And he has been getting some time outs for not staying in his seat during activities. But I'm hoping that he is picking up some of the letters and sounds they are covering, if not the sight words. As his speech has improved, his entire vocabulary and sentence structure has become more sophisticated. He still seems much younger than more 4.5 year olds, and much younger than any of my older three were at his age--he has playing the baby down to a science. So I am hoping that he is learning and processing more than he is letting on. I have a hard time imagining him in kindergarten in a little less than a year because he is so much less mature and "with it" than his peers. But I guess that's part of why he isn't going to go to school....

So this is one of those less than rosy homeschooling periods. Maybe it's just a disguised version of so many people's unease, letdown, or freak out when their mental image of the schoolyear before it starts jars into the reality of the end of the first month. The moments when you realize you've only been at it for a month and you're already behind. Or where you had these grandiose plans for all that you would accomplish and how perfect these books you chose would be. And then you have to face your less-than-enthusiastic pupils, who are not acting out the fantasy schoolyear that you had envisioned. I think that's the primary issue going on here, and I should know better, because I've been there and done that. Maybe in the end, what I really need to do is acknowledge that a lot of the dissonance I'm feeling comes from a change in my own expectations this year, a change in expectation that the kids may not have had themselves and don't own. My orientation is much more serious now than it had been in the past, but I can't expect them to have read my mind and seen that I've bumped it up a notch and they should do the same. Hopefully this little phase will pass and we'll make the changes we need to to keep everyone moderately content.