Smrt Lernins

Let’s just put this out there. Compared to other homeschoolers, you are woefully inadequate.

I’m not speaking to any specific “you,” because it would take too long to address each of you to whom this applies individually (as it applies universally), but to the general “you,” which also includes me*. You are a woefully inadequate homeschooler, and if you didn’t realize that, you haven’t talked to enough other homeshoolers. You may feel pretty good about your current course load or you may, like Earnest Mom here, always feel like you’re doing slightly less than you ought to be, but one good conversation (or forum thread) with a pack of other homeschoolers will make it clear to you: compared to them, you are doing it wrong.

I’m sure we all have our categories of homeschoolers towards whom we feel slightly superior academically. I confess, when I see people writing about either “unschooling” (especially “radical unschooling”) or using certain “Bible-centered curricula” from certain publishers, I have a brief moment of feeling our academics are rigorous enough by comparison. That is the crux of it, though, isn’t it? It’s always “by comparison.” Whenever I feel good by comparison, you can be sure that someone else is going to come along and by comparison make me feel like I’m trying to educate my children with three crayons, a wet dictionary, and a broken sliderule.

Part of it’s financial. Most of us aren’t Pioneer Woman, with our very own one-room school house and nigh limitless money for curricula and craft supplies. At the McLernins home, we’re raising three children on a police officer’s salary, with a slightly-below-the-American-average-but-still-too-high-for-comfort level of debt and student loans to pay off for a Smrt Mama who doesn’t work outside of the home. I will always wish I could afford more curricula and supplies than I have. I want to buy the best books and the workbooks and teacher’s guides that go with them. I want full color, full content, all the volumes. I want to buy books at least a semester, and preferably a year, ahead of time to better prepare. I would like to have the full scope and sequence in my possession so I could be sure that I’m covering everything I need to cover, not discovering in 11th grade (or the 11th hour) that we missed something crucial all because I didn’t have all the curricula together in one place at one time. It could happen, ok?

I often feel inadequate about my space. I will always long for a dedicated school room, not a school room/office that used to be a dining room. I want more storage and a better filing system, both of which are limited, not by Officer Daddyman’s ability to containerize (which is, let me tell you, simply magnificent), but by space**. Space is also constrained by money, because we can’t afford a bigger house or to build an extension on this one just for the sake of having a large school room. Filthy lucre. Dirty luck.

Then there’s the time issue. Even with a color-coded schedule, I can’t find the time to fit in everything some of these homeschoolers are doing, because (back to the money issue) we’d have to travel for some things (which takes away more time) and we have to eat, sleep, and teetee sometimes! I guess if I were willing to wake my children at 6 and have them working by 6:30, we would have time for music and art every day, for more regular field trips (no, wait! that pesky money thing again!). We do unexpectedly find ourselves with an entirely empty Tuesday, as our secular homeschool co-op went to pieces this morning, so I’m hoping to shove some art in there, along with creative writing and Patchfire’s class on the human brain, for a little mini co-op of sorts.

At the end of the day, all I have to do to feel like I’m failing miserably is to log on to the Well Trained Mind forums, especially the accelerated learner board, where if you’re doing two advanced math programs with your 8-year-old, they’re doing three more advanced programs with theirs, and where if your child is reading five grade levels ahead, theirs is reading Dostoevsky in Russian by choice, and where their children are all enrolled in five extra curriculars, put in seven hours a day in academics at home, and still have time to write their novels, finish their cross-stitched pillow cases for charity, and make inlaid mosaic murals from glass tiles they made themselves using self-taught glass-blowing techniques (which the do in their specially-designed-for-homeschooling school room, with built in shelves full of the entire set of curricula they’ll use between now and their early enrollment in college at 14).

I have two options: wallow in my feelings of relative inadequacy or decide that they’re just making it all up to cover for their own crushing sense of inadequacy. Who’s with me on option #2?

*In fact, it mostly means me, but if I say “you collectively,” I feel better about myself, because I have company.
**Next week’s “Ask a [Smrt] Homeschooler” question comes from Officer Daddyman, and is, “Are you going to keep all of this?” with a frantic gesture at the pile of last semester’s papers.