School. . .

School has been in full swing for several weeks now and I'm getting to the place I come to every year around this time when I start thinking, "What was I THINKING???"

I had someone ask me for advice the other day about homeschooling and I wanted to say, "Run! Run away!" But I didn't. This is my 10th year teaching my kids so you'd think by now I'd have it figured out. Well, I don't. Not even a little bit! When asked, my advice is usually along the lines of :

1. Let your child lead the way by finding out what interests them and then giving them plenty of opportunities to find out more about it.

2. Understand that kids have WAY different learning styles and the sooner you find out what they are, the easier your job is.

3. Don't feel like you have to complete EVERY subject EVERY day. (This is hard for me because I like to check off boxes)

4. Remember WHY you have chosen to teach your kids and try to keep that in mind on especially challenging days.

5. Most importantly, keep in mind that all parents screw up their kids just a little bit no matter what type of education they choose so just do the best you can with what you have and cut yourself a little slack from time to time.

Some days are definitely better than others and I almost always have a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day but, as the kids get older, it becomes more and more challenging. Mostly because I'M getting older!

Fortunately, I love numbers and even get excited at the prospect of solving a quadratic equation but, more often than not, I have to tax my brain and peek at the answers before I can fully explain a math problem to Zach. Thankfully, he gets it most of the time but occasionally, he asks for my help. For instance, the other day one of his test questions asked him to find the area of a triangle with a half circle attached to it. My first response is usually, "why would you ever need to know this". I try to keep that to myself , though, as we tackle it together. I (mostly) remember my formulas and, between the two of us, we can usually figure these things out, but there were a few square roots in this problem and, even using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the height of the triangle, we still had to find the square root of a squared, square root. No one should have to do that.

To top it off, I'm usually helping Gloria with her math at the same time so I'm going back and forth from percentages, polygons and long division to imaginary numbers, negative vectors and multiple radicals. It's physically painful sometimes.

And then there's Science. My least favorite subject. Gloria is studying the blood and guts of human beings (no dissections, thankfully). . .

While Zach is studying the blood and guts of much smaller creatures. . .

I wonder if my life wouldn't be a lot easier if I made a different educational choice for my kids. And then I remind myself why I do it. . . :

Yep, it's so the dogs won't get so lonely during the day. . .