Lesson 7: Problem Solving for Success
Parental Bad Days
We talked about our fantasy of being the perfect teacher. The truth is that there is no such thing. We are subject to the same bad days as any other teacher. In addition, since we are working at home, we are also subject to the various surprises and complications of home life. Children get sick, parents get sick, unexpected errands arise and people lose their jobs. How do you keep homeschooling when life falls apart?
Getting through the bad times involves several methods, all of which require advance preparation. You should begin preparing for difficult times as soon as possible. The better prepared you are, the easier it will be to continue your homeschooling adventure.
Build an hour bank to draw on during the bad times. This was discussed in an earlier lesson. Hour banks are especially important if your child has a disability that makes it impossible for him to work alone when you are not available. To do this painlessly, keep track of educational activities you do as a family. Making cookies, visiting museums, watching a documentary or reading stories all count. Eventually you will have a few extra days of schooling built up. After the first summer vacation, you will have weeks of time stored up. When life falls apart, draw on these hours. Simply add them to the running total you keep of your required hours. This is especially helpful when you have medically fragile children who are often too ill to work.
Next, pack an emergency school bag to take with you when you have to leave home unexpectedly. Include items children can do anywhere—workbooks, notebooks, pens, crayons, non-fiction books and so on. You might even create a themed bag that complains a complete set of activities designed to take several hours to complete.
Third, create a one-day and one-week unit study in a box. Complete a lesson plan and place all the materials in the decorated box. Include instructions so simple that your children can do them alone or so that a babysitter who doesn’t understand homeschooling can carry them out. If you have the flu, your part-time job becomes full-time, or you leave town and your non-homeschooling spouse is in charge, the kit can be pulled out and used.
Gradually begin to teach your children to work independently. This is covered in the final lesson. When something goes wrong, they should be able to work quietly on their own.
Teach older children to help younger children. Teaching is a valuable skill for children to learn.
Finally, we need to think about the days when the child is simply out of control, or when we are. If you are in an extremely impatient mood, it is often best to either cancel school or assign your children to do something that does not require your help.
While any child will periodically get on a parent’s nerves, children with special needs often require tremendous energy and patience. Children with ADHD may run around or act silly. Some special needs children are combative. Others can never work independently and need one-on-one attention throughout the entire day. Others require therapy that is tiring for both parent and child. Even the fifteen hours a week required in California, which is brief, can be very tiring for a parent when the special requirements of raising our special children are added to the mixture. You may find yourself too exhausted to think, too behind to focus, or too angry to teach effectively.
Parents of special children need to always have a backup plan. Have your more complicated lessons prepared in advance and know what you will do if you simply can’t teach it. In addition, be prepared to step away if you find yourself becoming angry.
There is no point to teaching when you are angry. You may say something you will regret later. Your child will become nervous and will not learn. At such times, it is better to stop. Be honest with your child. “This lesson isn’t going very well, is it? I think I’m in a bad mood and I’m not teaching it well. Let’s stop for a while and rest. You read your book for fifteen minutes and I’ll take a break and calm down. Then maybe we will both be ready to try again. I want us to have fun. This is hard and I know we can do it.” By admitting to your child that you are upset, you teach her that it is okay to be mad, but that responsible people don’t inflict their anger on others. She will learn coping techniques for her own emotions.
If the child is intentionally misbehaving, you won’t want to let him do something more interesting. He shouldn’t learn that misbehavior leads to reward. Observe him and figure out what he can do alone that isn’t fun, but is manageable when he is misbehaving. You want him to decide that doing his schoolwork is more fun than goofing off. As always, subtract the time he is not cooperating from the official clock and make him fulfill those hours later. Misbehavior is not learning time and only learning time counts.
Teaching is often unsuccessful when the parent feels her life is too far behind. When the house is a mess, it is hard to think. Take fifteen or twenty minutes and make the children help you clean up. Set a timer and tell them they have fifteen minutes to pick up and put away all the toys in the house. While they do that, you can go in and get the dishes started. Older children, or those with more experience working, can be asked to do a specific chore. Even fifteen minutes can make a big difference. During the coming school day, when the children are wiggly, stop for another ten minute clean-up. Record these on your time sheet as home economics. Assign a few independent tasks and use that time to complete some housework. Make a list of chores you can do in fifteen minutes. You may not be able to clean the entire kitchen, but you can load the dishwasher, wipe a counter or clean out the top shelf of the refrigerator. Learn to think of your day in segments.
Remember that homeschooling is flexible. It can usually be done on any schedule that works for you. If you are required to do fifteen hours of work a week, you are allowed to do four hours one day and three the next, or even to skip an occasional day. We used, when the children were younger, a four-day schedule, leaving one day a week for errands or chaos. If no chaos occurred, we took Friday off.
Homeschooling is supposed to be fun. While a certain amount of structure is good, don’t get so caught up in it that you forget the things that really matter in life!
