"Should I, Shall I, Can I, Will I?" Part One
© Joan Archer
On the lighter side of the issue is whether or not you personally can stand to be with your children for the entire day, week, month or year with very few breaks. Many parents welcome this interaction, while others would rather be on a more formal basis with their children, possibly finding their children a nice maximum security Military Academy. Three states away....
There are quite a few other factors to weigh when deciding whether or not home education fits you and your family. For example, does your child agree that he wants to be home educated? While I feel that the parent is the head of the child, I also equally feel that the child needs, at the earliest possible moment, to make decisions for their own education. As the parent, you have already had your education. Now is the child's turn to learn to set goals. An eye to the Big Picture will help you and the child to stay on track when focus is lost. Also, they will learn to deal with success and disappointment in a rational manner. In and of itself, this is a valuable skill.
If your child is not into the home school idea, before you decide to Pull Rank, try really listening to the child. A child may be apprehensive about leaving his friends, while another child is just worried about not getting a lunch every day. For teens especially, looking "different" to the outside world is horribly embarrassing. A tactic I have found useful is to give them a time period to try out homeschool, say for an entire school year. Nine times out of ten, by the end of that first year they are hooked. Everyone likes to feel they have a choice in what happens in their lives, and children are no different.
I was not prepared for many of the things that happened in that first year of home school. For one thing, I was totally unprepared for the fact that it would take nearly a year to get my son Jasper on track. I had this whole fifth grade curriculum worked out for him. I had no idea he had not been taught how to multiply in fourth grade! I thought the coloring pictures he brought home were "busy work" for kids that had finished their other work early. (The sort of pictures that said, color the 9's green and the 8's yellow) I had no idea that this was the actual school work! We had just previously moved and his other school, less than a mile away, was teaching multiplication basics by second grade. I was clueless then at how disparately equipped schools could be, in the same area and funded by the same tax dollars. It was a rude awakening. We had to go back to the kindergarten-type writing paper and start from the beginning with every subject. I also found out we had not been informed he was dyslexic. A footnote here, always go to the head office and look at your child's folder. Do not rely on what you see at Open House or at Conferences to be a true evaluation of what your child can do. Even though his handwriting improved dramatically in the first six months, it would have helped a great deal to know what we were up against.
