Smrt Lernins

Homeschooling has its many obvious upsides: customized curriculum, flexibility of schedule, ability for students to advance at their own pace. I have also discovered many benefits I hadn’t expected, however. These are some of the benefits that have revealed themselves over time.

1. Fewer lice scares. What public/private school student hasn’t brought home at least one “We have lice going around! Oh no!” note at least once during their school years? This isn’t much of an issue w/ the homeschooled student. Sure, they could pick something up at co-op, but where are those kids going to get it? With smaller groups (and, admittedly, the hippie homeschool tendency to wash hair a little less frequency) in a carefully controlled setting, lice isn’t going to be spreading through the homeschool community like wildfire.

2. No (social pressure-laden) fundraisers. I know that some co-ops or homeschool groups do fundraisers, but not like public/private schools do fundraisers. Fundraisers are serious business in public and private schools. Wrapping paper, candy, cookie dough, frozen pizzas, flower bulbs: the list goes on and on. Note after guilt-inducing note letting you know all the prizes your child will be missing by your failure to adequately pressure your friends, neighbors, and relatives into buying multiple items from your little darling. You don’t want your baby to be the only one who didn’t get the key chain and teddy bear, right?

3. Ever-ready errand boy/girl. There’s something to be said for having a child in the house who is big enough to respond to, “Go grab the whatever-it-is-I-need from the car.” Sure, this isn’t something you, as a homeschool parent, should abuse, but it’s nice to not constantly be running up and down the stairs all the time. Besides, it’s lots of extra physical activity for your child. Mark it down as P.E. and you don’t even have to feel guilty.

4. Also, ever-ready manual labor. The kids are home during the time of day that I’m doing chores or running errands, which means I’ve got extra sets of hands when it’s necessary. Sure, doing the grocery shopping may have been easier with just the baby, but that meant balancing both baby and bags of groceries to get into the house. Homeschooled kids are there to help you carry in those bags! If you haven’t figured it out yet, household chores are also a great way to break up the monotony of the school day and to drive home the valuable lesson of the careers to which one may aspire without finishing a decent education. In other words, kids who pitch a fit over doing math or writing can scrub a bathroom or rake a yard to get the full experience of why we pushy parents think learning is so important.

5. Fewer birthday party invitations. If you don’t realize what a blessing this is, you have never had a child in public school. The obligatory birthday invitations mean hundreds of dollars spent on impersonal gifts for children your child doesn’t even play with outside of school or risking the possible social ostracism that comes from failing to appear at all the right parties. The other upside of this is that you are equally freed from the obligation of inviting 19 near-strangers into your home or rented bounce house facility once a year. The controlled social sphere of homeschooling means smaller, more intimate parties. Be happy about that.

6. You do not, in fact, gotta catch ‘em all. A controlled social sphere also means your child’s exposure to the “kid crack” phenomena of Pokemon, Bakugan, Yu-gi-oh, and all other collectible card games is significantly more limited. Few parents really want to get their kids started on these games (Which the kids don’t even know how to play. It’s just about the having), but they’re aware that knowledge of games like these (and ownership of the cards/toys) is like currency in a public school, and they don’t want their kids to be the socially impoverished ones, begging for little Pikachu scraps off the elementary lunch table. As long as you keep them off of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, homeschooled children don’t have the same exposure to these games, and aren’t as likely to get caught up on the frenzied need to have them. Homeschooling, I choose you!

7. Minivan Expectations. No one will make “oh, you poor, unhip thing” faces over your choice to drive a minivan. Everyone knows that homeschoolers drive minivans, even if they only have one or two kids. Homeschoolers are not expected to drive SUVs, Camrys, or muscle cars. If anything, there might be some confusion as to why your van is a mini and not a conversion.

8. Floods. Not the natural disaster, but the pants length. By the end of the season, pants are hanging a few inches above the shoes and shirts are cutting off a few inches above the wrist. In a public or private school setting, this means either replacing the garments for the few remaining weeks of cold weather or dealing with the disapproving looks and comments directed at your slightly bedraggled-looking offspring. When you’re homeschooling, no one cares if your kid is wearing floods. Being slightly ill-dressed is part of the social expectations for homeschoolers, so you’re disappointed nobody by meeting those expectations and rising above expectations if your kid is wearing pants that fit come March. It’s win-win.

9. Never again be perceived as idle. While a stay-at-home-mom may be perceived (incorrectly and unjustly) as “not working” or “doing nothing all day” or “getting to stay home and play with the kids all day,” a homeschooling stay-at-home-mom is perceived as undertaking a momentous and time-intensive task, one that most parents of public/private schooled children believe they could never, themselves, manage. Fewer people will make assumptions about your availability (“Well, you don’t do anything all day, so you can do this favor for me!”). Lackadaisical housekeeping will be viewed, not as a sign of laziness, but as a natural byproduct of the tremendous effort expended planning lessons, directing learning, and grading and filing papers. Don’t disavow anyone of that belief; You’ll ruin it for the rest of us.

10. An excuse for weirdness. When your child does something unusual, socially awkward, or just plain bizarre in public, you can easily soothe observers’ distressed looks with a slightly dismissive hand wave and an, “Oh, don’t worry. They’re homeschooled.” This also works pretty well to explain weirdness in homeschooling parents. A woman muttering to herself in the aisles of Borders book store is creepy. A homeschooler muttering to herself in the aisles of Borders book store is just planning for next semester.

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.

You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but if you pick your nose and end up with pinkeye, you can’t see your friends at the co-op.

A bird in the hand probably has mites. Put that bird down.

Anything worth doing is going in my homeschool blog.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and I’m sending you back to public school.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll be asked which curriculum you used.

A friend in need is a friend who will ask you to loan them your vocabulary test booklet.

Many hands make Mama harried.

If at first you don’t succeed blame it on flaws in the curriculum.

If Mama ain’t happy, you’re probably dawdling.

The early bird gets done with his work in time to go to the park.

There’s many a slip ‘twixt the planning and the implementation.

Two wrongs don’t make a right angle. 90 degrees do.

The road to hell is paved with evolutionist science materials, apparently.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man has 100% more sight than those blind guys. That’s 1/1 or 1.0. He also has 50% fewer eyes (1/2 or .5) than me.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Roman history can be covered in 8 weeks.

Out of sight, into something they probably shouldn’t be.

What homeschool adages do you us?