By Missy
A long, long time ago, I was a teacher. I didn’t quite believe in the confines of public education, but I thought I could work within those confines, elbowing a little extra space, a little wiggle room. Instead, the perimeters narrowed even more and I learned that administrators got really grumpy when you tried to give your students a room to breathe. And, we’d started a family. I became very resentful of the time I was spending away from my daughter, advocating for other children and getting nowhere. It was exhausting and I was carrying my frustration home.
Eventually, after our third child was born, we decided to take the plunge into financial instability. I fled the classroom for good. By that time, our daughter was in second grade, our doubts about public school were growing, and the ever-present whisper in the back of our minds, the one that kept hissing “homeschool”, was getting louder. But, it was clear that our baby had serious health issues and much of our energy went to making sure he survived his first year. We spent so much time going between doctors' offices, hospitals, and school and we didn't feel emotionally or physically or practically equipped to pull her out yet. In retrospect, we could have and should have, but we were overwhelmed.
We finally pulled her out after her third grade year and started deschooling. I thought we’d eventually huddle together around worksheets; instead, learning started naturally, without a schedule or a plan or a curriculum. We've watched the joy return; we've seen her interests spark learning and seen her day-dreaming lead to creating.
My daughter, now 11, enjoys reading, creating plays and short stories, and writing cartoons. She loves art, and, in my unbiased opinion, is gifted with an eye for color, texture and medium. My 6-year-old son aspires to be a scientist, a builder/designer and president. He's quick with numbers, but claims he can't read (although I've heard him reading to his little brother.) My 3-year-old is aggressively pushing for equal independence, which is difficult to offer freely since he has severe multiple food allergies and an auto-immune deficiency. Strangely, he is addicted to the food channel (particularly Rachael Ray) and cookbooks. We’ve had amazing opportunities together that would have been lost if my children were inside a classroom all day.
I have given into peer pressure (hehe) and started a blog: caffeinated jive to give me a place to gather our thoughts and our experiences, to vent, to celebrate. In my spare time, I write, I hold myself back when my children forget that they love each other, and I listen with a strange sense of contentment when the three of them, regardless of their age differences, play and giggle and plot and create.
Missy's homeschooling journey began when she realized that the walls surrounding her daughter's classroom were too narrow; there was no room for exploration, no space for stretching. Now, she and her three children stretch and explore the world together. My blog: caffeinatedjive.
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