Public school was not what I thought. There was no giant dance party for all the moms after they dropped the kids off. The house did not magically clean itself nor did it stay clean after I spent the morning cleaning it. I sent my 2 best cleaners off to school and kept the messy 2 kids home. So all my plans of using the time while they were at school to do projects and sanitize the house never materialized. In fact everything stayed the same except that I lost the close bond I had with my 2 oldest kid. I lost a year of having them learn and grow with me watching. Instead a 3rd grade teacher and 2nd grade teacher got to enjoy my children for 6 hours a day everyday. My children will never mean as much to those teachers as they do to me.
My conclusion to the public school experiment is Parenting is HARD WORK!!!! Like my Dad always said "parenting is not for the weak." I will never again think that things would be easier if I put my kids in school or that public school parents took the easier route. There is no easier way. Its a choice we each get to make. Either we are involved in the trenches fighting the battle with our kids until we believe they are strong enough to make it on their own or we are trusting someone else to teach our kids how to fight the battles and we have to be OK with what someone else is teaching them and still pick up the broken pieces at the end of the day. For me its harder to pick up the broken pieces and trust someone else than it would be to jump in and teach my kids myself. Not everyone is going to feel the same way.
When my kids are home all day there is a constant buzz of noise, with some quieter and some louder noises. When I send my 2 oldest kids to school that noise level rises dramatically when they get home. They're each vying for my attention, trying to tell me about their day, get a snack and start on their homework. Neither one of them ever gets enough of my attention and I'm afraid one day, if we continued on this route, they would stop trying to get it- they would decided its not worth trying to get my attention. I would never go back to homeschooling if all day was as chaotic as those after school hours are. I would rather spend all day with my kids then try to deal with them in their stressed out after school behavior.
I am done doing homework with them. Homework is NOT the same thing as Homeschool school work. I hate homework time as much as they do and I spend almost as much time doing homework with them as I would doing schoolwork of our choice. Also I have to help them in the very limited time I have with them and not when its convenient in my schedule.
"Every child deserves a childhood." I know you've heard that phrase before. I don't see where they get much of a childhood in school. They are stressed at school with only a total of 45 minutes of playtime. Hardly enough time for free play or imagination play. I am a promoter of play and believe that play is the work of childhood. Children work out their problems through play. They will naturally outgrow the need to play -- why push them past play before their ready. In our home I have created an atmosphere of play where free play and imagination are encouraged. We keep the TV, movies, video games and tablets off except for a little bit of time on the weekend. When my kids are home they are either working or playing or learning. We "work together, learn together and play together." There is no time for playdates when your kids are in public school. Sure they have more friends and get invited to more birthday parties, but they don't seem to bond as deeply with these friends. There is also always drama of who's friends with who on which day and whose feelings are hurt because their not friends anymore. I just found out my daughter was saving half of her lunch everyday to share with another little girl on the school bus home so this girl would be her friend. What??? my cute 7 year old daughter is "paying" to have a friend. I am not ok with this and this would never happen in a homeschool setting.
I miss my kids while their gone to school. I had kids because I wanted kids not so someone else could raise them. I hate watching them walk through the gates onto the school playground and blend in with 1,500 other kids until I can't see them anymore. I hate that I've had the thought after they got on the bus - "Ok 2 gone I don't have to think about them till after school." I hate that the first few months of school they would come home and I would hug them and kiss them and tell them how much I missed them and now I just have the mentality of now your home lets get the next thing on our list done. Its not that I don't still miss them, its just become normal to not see them for 7 hours a day. I would probably like public school if it was just 9-12 everyday.
I haven't even touched yet on curriculum issues of why I don't like public school. Classics not text books. My 9 year old son can understand Tolkien and relate the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the books not the movies) to real life. Yet he's told he should be reading Geronimo Stilton and The Magic Treehouse. None of which have the deep messages and positive life lessons of Classics. We read together Anne of Green Gables over spring break just for fun. A few days after we finished he said, as if he had been pondering this for a while, "from Anne of Green Gables I learned if you want to be beautiful you should be righteous." I could have never taught him that lesson as deeply as he learned it in that book. If he remembers that for the rest of his life he will pick a good wife one day. I know academically they are progressing far more rapidly than they would be at home with me, but at the cost of extreme stress and social anxiety. I am also more interested in their entire character development rather than their academic skills as projected by standardized tests. The qualities I want to see developed in my children by the time they are adults can not be measured by testing.
I am grateful we tried public school, it was a good experiment. Each of us are guided to do what is right for our family. I truly believe God sent us the kids he sent each of us, because he knew we would guide them the way those kids need to be guided. He knew certain families would choose public school and others charter schools or private schools or a few of us --homeschool.
As for me and my house we choose HOMESCHOOL!!!! I am so excited only 18 more days 'till school is over and I bring my kids home to learn and grow.
