Smrt Lernins

Perhaps I haven’t mentioned this yet, but we’re secular homeschoolers. We’re a very research-oriented, science-oriented, “spiritual, but not religious” family. In that spirit, we are using BCE/CE, not BC/AD, for dates on our timeline and other history work.

My mother came to pick up The Tank (our three year old) while we were putting dates on our timeline. I thought my mother, with her background in biology and chemistry, would appreciate our use of BCE/CE, so I prompted Captain Science to explain it to her. He remembered that BC stood for “before Christ,” but couldn’t immediately remember what BCE meant (he guess “before Christ’s era”).

We talked, again, about why some people use BC and others use BCE. When asked why some people would use BC, “before Christ,” he answered, “Because of religion.”

When asked why we used BCE, “before common era,” the Captain looked thoughtful for a moment, and then answered, “Because we’re common?”

Well, yeah…but we’s good people.

I always swore I wouldn’t homeschool.

I actually took a certain degree of pride in being a “crunchy” mom who refused to homeschool. I knew I didn’t have the patience or the energy for homeschooling. I wouldn’t be any good at it. I’d slack off. My kid (8-year-old Captain Science) would hate me. He’d be unsocialized. He’d be (more) weirdly socialized. I would be weirdly socialized. I’d be one of those moms. I liked sending my kid off for part of the day.  It was too complicated, too time consuming, too hippie, and yet, here I am, about to embark on our very first year of homeschooling my rising-4th-grade son.

The thing that actually made homeschooling seem like a good idea was the treatment my child received at the hands of his 3rd grade teacher. My child, who learned to read when he was two, had failing grades in reading. My child, who loved science and received a full-size chemistry kit for this 6th Christmas, had failing grades in Science. My son who had skipped a grade and tested far enough ahead to skip a second one (which we opted not to do) was bringing home a report card full of bad grades. His teacher complained about his behavior and implied that he needed therapy and testing to determine whether he had Asperger’s. He had done remarkably well in his first year of public school the year before (2nd grade — he’d previously been in Montessori), so what was the difference?

The teacher. She didn’t teach, she assigned. She handed out worksheets and sat at her desk while the students finished them. If the whole class wasn’t ready to move on to the next level, none of them did…and guess whose kid was always ready to move on the next level right away? Yeah, my kid, the one who sat there bored, fidgeting, drawing all over his binders, and staring into space because he’d mastered the skills 15 worksheets ago.

The final straw for me, though, was the ice cream party.

This teacher liked to “reward” the children for passing timed tests with ice cream. They “earned” it one piece at a time. By passing the addition test, they could “earn” the bowl…yes, the bowl is the first thing they earned. By passing multiplication 0-5, they “earned” a scoop of ice cream. By passing 0-12, they “earned” toppings.

Captain Science passed his 0-12 and was supposed to have a scoop of ice cream with toppings on ice cream day. He couldn’t find his little coupon thing (a paper cut out of a scoop of ice cream) for the scoop of ice cream, only the ones for the bowl and the toppings, so his teacher wouldn’t let him get the ice cream at first. Yes, even though she administered the test AND the rewards, and had a record of him passing, she wouldn’t let him get the ice cream. Finally she oh-so-graciously allowed him to trade in his useless toppings coupon for a scoop of ice cream instead (but no toppings).

This pissed me off royally. Using food as a reward/punishment like that is uncool anyway, but seriously. To not let the kid get the stuff he earned under her own stupid system was just infuriating.

The full scope of the horror of this was only revealed on the last day of school, though, when my mom said something about all the kids in the class getting ice cream at least. “Two or three kids in the class only had bowls,” my son said.

Yes, you read that right. The 2 or 3 kids who couldn’t pass the multiplication timed tests were given empty bowls and got to sit there watching their classmates eat ice cream while they had nothing. My mom and I were nearly in tears hearing about it, especially since the two kids Captain Science was sure had no ice cream both have some issues (one may actually be on the spectrum and the other has ongoing behavior problems, which often go hand-in-hand with learning problems). Those poor little boys sat there with empty bowls.

Even though the principal of the school was very receptive to our complaints, and even though she promised to implement changes, it wasn’t good enough. That year changed my child. He went from a little boy who loved learning and didn’t understand cruelty to a child who hated being taught and expected teachers to treat him the way this teacher treated him. Even the best public school teacher in the would wasn’t going to overcome that in a year.

So there we were…our options for education somewhat limited by our income (my husband is a police officer and I’m a freelance writer/editor in a market that doesn’t have a lot of spare change for freelancers). Could I suck it up, overcome all the reasons not to, if it meant the Captain could actually learn to enjoy learning again? I think the answer to that is pretty obvious.

Once I started to think about it, of course, it made a lot of sense. Not only would it be great for my son, who could advance at his own pace without worrying about a personality conflict with another teacher, but getting my child out of the school system just seemed so right. After all, I birth outside the system. I socialize outside the system. We parent outside the system and make many systems that aren’t the norm: breastfeeding, cosleeping, delayed/selective vaccinations. After all that work attachment parenting and trying to impart all my hippie, liberal ideals, I had been sending my kid off to a school where attachment and individuality weren’t in particularly high demand.

Here we sit, at the precipice of something huge and life-changing. Tomorrow, our neighbors’ children will wake up at 6:30 and stumble to the bus stop in the semi-dark to start their first day of school, where they’ll spend the day learning the teacher’s classroom rules and disciplinary systems. Captain Science will awaken at his normal 8ish o’clock, go for a run with his father, and then come home to hang up our time line for history and learn why we’ll use BCE instead of BC. I’ll try to fend off his little brother, The Tank, (thank goodness that tomorrow is one of my husband’s off days!) and nurse his baby sister, Babypie, and set him free with books about the Mesopotamians.

I’m confident that at least one of us will be getting a decent homeschool education this year. If I’m really lucky, I might just be able to keep up with him and get a decent one, too.

Maybe.