The Reality of Homeschooling

Yesterday I delegated my homeschooling responsibilities to someone else. I was out the whole morning driving this new family to the health department, Education Center and school to settle their children's schools. So in return, their eldest son agreed to take over teaching my kids for the morning. I laid everything out for him the night before.

I got back home at around 11:30 am. He was still busy teaching the kids. The events of the morning included punishing H because he bothered his sisters(as usual). N was riled up by my notes that mentioned she tends to dawdle, and in turn, completed her work in record time. S did her work quite intensively late because she was busy helping their new teacher sort things out. All in all, they did pretty good.

M, (my replacement) said that he realized it wasn't easy to homeschool, and he just did it for that day! He told me that he had organized a tutoring session three times a week back home. But he admitted that homeschooling occurs everyday and he realized what a big feat it is to undertake. He then went on to tell me about his experiences going to a public school in the UK and his sister's. His sister apparently still hadn't adjusted to the changes and was quite affected, but he wasn't. He attributed the cause for his sister's resistance to the age and length she was enrolled in the school.

I had sent my kids to theri house to play with their kids. They had a game that employs the use of dice. I had taught my kids not to use the dice because it is so close to gambling, even if it's not gambling. The parent then told me that my kids, all of them in fact, had told them that they couldn't use the dice because "it's like gambling."

I have long realized the reality of homeschooling, and have in all honesty battled with it all this time. Am still battling, but being gradually assured that it's the right choice. We received S's test results and she scored 445 out of 550. She doesn't have to take the test again and in fact scored at Advanced. However, she only scored proficient for processing informational texts. That's the lowest she got, so I guess we have to work on extricating information out of informational texts. I had focused so much on literary texts that I had forgotten about informational texts. A good wake up call.