When They Don’t Want To Learn (and You Don’t Want to Teach!)
Clearly it’s not all good. Being responsible for your child’s education on top of all the other parental responsibilities is quite a weight to carry, and there are inevitably going to be bad days as well as good. I’m not a person naturally given to self-consideration, so I didn’t make it a priority to give myself breaks from the children (by breaks, I mean REAL breaks, whereby someone else is looking after them). On reflection, this was not a good move. However much you love your kids and want to be with them, it is imperative that you give yourself time to be a grown-up and an individual – go out for an hour into the town, or for a walk, or for a cup of coffee. Trust me – even though you think you might be doing really well being on call 24/7, there will come a time when it all seems to fall apart.
Such a time happened to me during the sixth month of our home schooling adventure. It was the first time I had ever considered sending them back into “the establishment” for their education – I genuinely didn’t know whether or not I wanted to carry on teaching them. At the deepest point of my despair, I came to the computer and wrote about what was happening. Although it’s a bit grim, I have decided to leave it in, unabridged, to give other parents an idea that we can get through these dark times …. And we are not alone!
Okay, so it’s not all champagne and
roses. There are definitely times,
sometimes weeks, when the whole home-schooling thing seems like a dreadful
struggle. It’s a major effort every
night to make sure you have the work ready for the next day; on top of that you
only too aware that it will probably be met with groans and grumbles and, even
worse in my opinion, the ultimate challenge of “…can’t we do xxxxx instead?”.
They get very clever at this, actually, and ask you if they can do other
options which they know will impress you, but which clearly don’t follow your
intended plan for the day. The fact that
the things they request happen to be the favourite, most interesting
activities, is no coincidence!
One of these times happened to me and mine
our first September, when we had not long started back after the summer
break. I felt sure that after a pretty
active, very unstructured few weeks off we would be
able to start back into our routine as we had in the previous term, when
everyone was keen and interested in all we were doing.
I think not!
Despite my best efforts to get myself ready
for the term, I found myself constantly worn out already. This does little to help motivate the
children, let alone yourself.
Nevertheless, I marched onwards (and upwards, so I hoped) with what I
thought was a really good programme of work for the kids.
Something just didn’t click. Everything was an effort. They remembered very little about much of the
basic stuff we had covered in the previous term, and showed even less interest
in doing anything else. All our dynamism
and motivation seemed to have been lost.
It really was quite depressing.
I came to the (difficult) conclusion that I
must be doing something wrong. I knew
that at the end of the day, it was down to me and my teaching methods. If the current system wasn’t working for the
children (or me) then I must do something about changing it until it did
work. I sincerely don’t believe that we
should sit the children down and ram facts and figures down their throats
whether they like it or not. The whole
idea of home-schooling to me was that we could learn all together in a pleasant,
enthusiastic environment, and I was clinging on to that during this difficult
time.
If I was honest with myself, I had a sneaky
feeling that I was giving the children too much. I think I had got a bit carried away with the
success of our first couple of terms, and was consequently piling on more and
more work, expecting them to deal with it and understand it all. I realised I had to go back to basics. The difficulty I had with this was finding
the balance between wet-nursing them and over-extending them.
The other particular problem I had to face
was that whilst one of my two was more than happy to give work a best shot (for
the most part), the other was most definitely a reluctant learner and prone to
laziness. If this one could get away
with doing less then they certainly would (you will appreciate my lack of
specifics in this description!). If I
were to lessen down our workload, my worry was that this child would just take
advantage of the situation and become even less motivated.
In the end, it was going to be a
gamble. I consoled myself with the fact
that if it didn’t work, I could always re-assess and start again. It would certainly have been unsatisfactory
to continue on as we were.
Did this
particular issue end happily? Well, I
shan’t try to kid you that it was easy.
The day after I wrote that, I had a complete meltdown. Fortunately, Gary was at home that day, so
the children didn’t witness my tears (although I later found out that they had
heard my sobbing).
The biggest issue for me was that I felt really let down by the children. I felt (as you can probably tell by the previous excerpt) that I was trying so hard to provide the right sort of educational environment, and the children were not showing any appreciation or effort whatsoever.
[The rest of this chapter remained unwritten, so I can’t say exactly what happened following that particular incident. However, the fact that four years’ on I’m still here, and still homeschooling must mean that we got through it!]