Stressed, stressed, stressed.

This weekend I realized that my stress levels were out of control. One reason has to do with family issues and the other with how we've structured our school schedule this year.

I think it is time to take both in hand before something explodes (that would be me LOL). Three items on our schedule are causing the most amount of stress for me. One of the reasons we homeschool is because we like flexibility. Three things we are doing have totally taken away our flexibility. Shira is belongs to a Nature Girls Club that meets on Sunday afternoons from 3-6 pm. It's a great club. She loves it, her fellow club members love her, the leader is a gifted teacher and truly inspires the children, BUT, if the girls miss three meetings they are tossed out of the club.

You have no idea how stressful it is to have this restriction placed on our weekends.

Shira is also a member of a children's chorus that meets every Tuesday from 4:30-5:30pm. The children's chorus has a policy that children who miss 3 lessons in a semester are either booted from the choir, or are not allowed to perform at their concerts.

This is slightly less stressful than the Nature Girls Club because the semester is only 3 months long. Nature Girls meets every week all year round. However, they hold concerts on weekends which makes life awkward when we want to travel.

The last schedule stressor is this phenomenal history program we're doing. We signed up for the live classes. These classes are held every Monday to Thursday from 1- 1:30pm. I have been very, very surprised at how stressful it has been to arrange our schedule around being at a telephone every day. So many of the extra curricula activities we want to do start at either 12 or 1 pm.

Today the children and I decided that we're going to change our history subscription to the recorded lectures. We'll still listen to his lectures daily, but won't be tied to a clock and phone.

This will do much to reduce our daily stress but we're just going to have to live with the other two. However, I suspect that she may get kicked out of Nature Girls as we, her parents, are not going to let Nature Girls stand in the way of family commitments and travel plans.

Of course, this is causing stress because the child loves this club. We don't have local family. To see family we have to travel. This club makes it difficult for us to get the kids to see their grandparents. This club issue is going to come to a head in the next few months as Shira is going to miss meetings in October because we're going on vacation, November for her great grandmother's 94th birthday party and then two weeks in January while we travel with my cousin.

Part of the family stress has been resolved and I am adamant that steps are going to be taken to reduce the remaining family induced stress.

My parents came to visit us earlier this month. Since they live half a world away, they have to live in our home when they visit. I do not enjoy house guests. I dislike how my routines are interrupted, I hate how I have to have a happy face on all the time. I am a loner, I don't like people in my space (husband and children are exceptions and even then I need time away from them once in a while). Even though my parents are very easy house guests, and we enjoy their visits, it is very stressful having them in our home.

To further increase the stress, while my folks were visiting, my stepdad starting losing his balance. By the time we cut their visit short and sent them back home to their doctors, he was almost unable to walk and was very confused. It turns out that he had a subdural hematoma from a fall 4-6 weeks prior to his visit. Thankfully the surgery to relieve the pressure was a success and he will be out of hospital tomorrow, but the fear was that he was not going to survive. Stress like this is not fun.

While. this was going on, another family member decided that this was the prefect time to start making demands of her own and despite very clear answers from both Marc and me, she decided, in her wisdom ignore our wishes and to continue with her demands.

She took an already stressful situation and made it exponentially worse.

I made a decision yesterday that she's done this to me for the last time. In future, if she questions Marc's or my answers to her demands I am just going refuse to take her phone calls or take the children to visit her. My days of indulging her and putting myself out for her are over. She decided that her wants were more important than my or my parents' needs while we were facing the very real possibility of my stepfather's death. This, to me, shows that she has no respect for me and as such deserves none from me.

How do you all deal with family members who act as if their wants are the only ones that matter and who make the lives of everyone around them miserable until they get their own way? The reality is that I cannot remove this person from our lives, so I'll have to settle for second best. All our interactions will now be on my terms, not hers. None of her wants will be met by me any longer unless she is completely respectful of me and mine.

I just hope that life is going to become less stressful. We're going to do the prerecorded history program, so the daily stress over being at a telephone has been taken out of our lives, I've started preparing Shira for the fact that she may end up being kicked out of Nature Girls and I am taking a stand with a certain family member. No more emotional blackmail. She may get her wants that require my input met, if it suits me.

The biggie is that my stepdad is well on the road to recovery.

Homeschooling not just for children

The AP reports:

Kathy Leeds grows animated as she describes the courses she is taking this fall, including classes in current events, art and literature.
But Leeds will never step foot on a campus or in a classroom. The 79-year-old widow has multiple sclerosis, uses a wheelchair and is confined to her Manhattan apartment.
Leeds is one of about 500 people enrolled for the fall semester in a telephone-based educational program for homebound seniors called DOROT University Without Walls, believed to be the largest program of its kind in the country.
The curriculum includes more than 250 courses and runs the gamut from understanding feng shui and poetry writing to discussions on moral, ethical and philosophical issues and a discourse on women of the progressive era. Informational classes on money management, Internet surfing and medicine also are available.

Full text here
More information on University Without Walls

Home Schooling: A family's journey by Gregory and Martine Millman

I received a preview copy of this book to read. I admit to starting to read it with extreme skepticism as I have found that most of the homeschooling books I've read to date to be particularly uninspiring.

This book turned out to be a very pleasant and welcome surprise. The Millman's thoughtful approach to life shines through strongly on every page. While I disagree quite vehemently on a few points, unschooling being one of them and travel another, I appreciated the look into another family's decision process that lead them to homeschool their six children.

The book has something in it for everyone. The beginning or aspiring homeschooler will find chapters on the Millman's own journey towards homeschooling. They cleverly compare choosing educational methods/institutions to choosing stock investments.

They then go on to talk specifically about how they homeschooled their children. Parents whose children have wildly differing learning styles will take heart when they read this section as the Millmans talk about how they used different techniques with different children. One issue they talk about that struck a strong chord with me was that our school systems today expect too much writing, too soon from our children. I've been thinking this for a while and have been loathe to start the kids writing as much as their peers. The Millmans have given me confidence to go with my gut.

Even though this is a book about unschoolers, those of us who prefer a more hierarchical approach to education will still find many gems in this book.

Of particular import, is the section on college admissions. The Millmans have gone through the college applications process with three daughters and all daughters were accepted into very prestigious universities. I am by nature a long range planner so I enjoyed this look into the college application process. Probably the most important facts I took away from this were that homeschoolers must start planning their application process much earlier than traditionally schooled kids and that they need to do an enormous amount of research before they apply to colleges.

I was so impressed by this book that I went out and bought 3 copies that I gave to acquaintances who are considering homeschooling. If you can only recommend one book on homeschooling to someone, this is the book you should recommend.

When and how did you start homeschooling?

Makita over at Twinkling Stars Family School asks the question, "When and how did you start homeschooling?".

I decided that I'd find a way to homeschool, if I ever had children, when I was 14 years old. I was desperate to be homeschooled, but I lived in South Africa where homeschooling was illegal. I had a teacher for exactly one subject. The rest of the time we were in classrooms with substitute caretakers.

There were no other schooling options in my town. If my parents wanted me at a different school, I would have had to ride a train and have a long walk the other side. They felt I was too young so we worked a way for me to still get a good education at the abysmal school I attended.

My father said that since I didn't have teachers, I was to work through the textbooks on my own, ask him questions and then teach the material to my classmates the following day.

I realized then that school was a huge time waster and that I could get all the education I needed without it. The lack of teachers turned out to be a huge boon to me. I ended up matriculating with one of the highest marks in South Africa. (A few weeks ago, I was looking at the newspaper photographs of me at 18. I was such a nerd, it was truly frightening - too frightening to even put on this blog). I honestly believe that I managed this because I had to take responsibility for my own education and because my father made me teach my classmates. I could only teach if I truly understood the material.

Fast forward 3 and a half decades. I was pregnant with my twins when a girlfriend sat me down and gave me the lecture about planning to get my children into prep school. She laid out all the steps that started with the "right" preschool at age 2. She stressed that if I didn't implement the plan, my kids would never get into the right prep school.

All my thoughts of homeschooling came rushing back to me and I decided then and there, that sprogs A and B were going to be homeschooled. It took me another 2.5 years to convince Marc that homeschooling was a good idea. It was only after we bumped into some homeschooling fathers in Elizabeth City that he started doing his only investigating and agreed with me that homeschooling was the right route for us.

I've considered myself a homeschooler since I was pregnant, though I did find it sad that I had to declare my intentions the summer Ben and Shira turned two. Everyone around me was sending their 2 year old children to preschool. When I admitted that we weren't sending our two to preschool at such a tender age, there was much smiling and nodding. They saw that I was one of those people who believed that children needed to be older when they started preschool and it was assumed that we would send the kids to preschool at age 3. I finally had to admit that we had no intention of sending the children to preschool, or school for that matter.

After this declaration I had a delegation of fellow Jewish moms come and explain to me that I was "letting down the community" by keeping the children out of Hebrew Day School. I was truly annoyed that they tried to pressure me over our school choice and secondly, it irritated me that they assumed we would choose the day school. The day school was never on our horizon. I don't hold with mixing academic education with religion.

We're hardcore philosophical homeschoolers. Politically we could never put our children into public schools as we question the constitutionality of government education. We also believe that no one can educate our children better than we can. Our intention is to homeschool our children until they go to college.

How and when did you start homeschooling?

Homeschoolers Tell All

Tammy, over at Just Enough, and Nothing More is gathering stories of how homeschoolers all over the world educate their children.

I feel compelled to take part in the project, especially after my post earlier today about that homeschooler who wrote the article that makes us all sound like clones of each other. We're a diverse bunch, let us trumpet this news out loud. The sooner the population at large realizes that we are not all religious fundamentalists or survivalists from Montana, the better.

Tammy suggests that to help show our diversity, we answer the following questions from Alasandra.

Here are my answers.

Why do you homeschool?
This is such a difficult question to answer. My reasons are myriad and depending on the day, different ones may be more important. I'll give it a bash, but remember, what I say today will be slightly different from what I say tomorrow.

• Educational excellence is probably the overarching reason we homeschool. We want an education that is rigorous and that is taught hierarchically. We could probably get the education we want for our children at one of the local prep schools, but to me, the cost is far too high. Those children live in a pressure cooker environment with values that often are at odds to those of our family. I don't want Ben and Shira to have longer "work" days than their father. I want them to have a slow, gentle childhood. When you homeschool, you can give them the rigorous academic education and a slow gentle childhood at the same time.


• We're of the opinion that government schools are unconstitutional and as such will never use them


• I enjoy teaching my children.


• I love spending time with my children and watching how they change from day to day.


• Ben and Shira find people extremely tiring. They love them in small doses, but find it exhausting to be around them all day long. I understand this as I am the same. If I can homeschool them and save them a dozen years of having to be surrounded by people all day long, I will.


• By homeschooling Ben and Shira, I can work at their speed. We don't waste time on crowd control, so all our teaching time doesn't take 6 or 7 hours a day.


• We have flexibility in so many areas of our lives because of homeschooling. We can change curricula as needed if they aren't working. We can vacation while the other children are in school. We can drive up to DC to visit their grandparents in the middle of the week when traffic is lighter than on the weekends.


• I don't have to worry about Ben and Shira getting safe food because I make it all myself. No worries about school cafetarias.

What technique or curriculum do you use? Do your kids work above or below grade level (or both!)?
This is a very difficult question to answer. I'd probably have to classify myself as an eclectic homeschooler. We use curricula but I cherry pick ones that work for us.
I don't choose curricula based on grade level. I choose it based on whether I think my children will enjoy it and be slightly challenged by it. I find they become bored very easily and need to be challenged. My memories of school induced boredom are still very vivid and I don't want my children to ever have to experience it.

• We use Prof B for math. The kids are probably 2 grades ahead of grade level right now (we're working in the 3rd to 5th grade CD and B&S have just theoretically finished 1st grade). I've been holding Ben back so that he and Shira can work at the same speed. This coming year I am going to let Ben work at his own speed because I feel that Shira is now confident in her math abilities. It's such a difficult balancing act, she's well ahead of grade level and he is even stronger in the subject than she is. They both have delicate egos and for a while Shira was insisting that math was "too hard" because Ben was grasping subjects faster than she was. She now realizes that she's good at the subject and that it doesn't matter how she compares to her twin brother. Now the trick is going to be to help Ben come to terms with the fact that Shira is a much better pianist than he is. Oh, the joys of raising competitive twins.


• For Language Arts we are using Michael Clay Thompson's books from Royal Fireworks Press. The books are supposedly for gifted 3rd and 4th graders. We're also using the third book in Jessie Wise's First Language Lessons.


• We're doing ancient history with Scott Powell of History at Our House. I'm very excited to be doing his program this year. He's a very gifted and engaging teacher who will do a far better job of teaching history than I ever will. Ben loves anything that allows him to communicate via Skype. We'll call in for the live lecture every day at 1pm. Ben can't wait.


• Latin will be covered by Latin for Children. This is our first exposure to the program, so I can't comment on how well the kids are doing with it yet.


• Championship Chess takes care of teaching the kids (and me) chess.


• We'll build the foundations of scientific understanding together with Dr Bernard Nebel.


• Let's not forget lots and lots of books for reading pleasure

What is your educational level? Do you feel this has an effect on your teaching (both limits and abilities)?
I have a bachelor's degree and Marc is an MD. All my beliefs about education and the knowledge that I use to teach my kids comes from the past 2 decades of living and reading. They have little to nothing to do with my college education.

What does your daily schedule look like?
We like to start school by 7am at the latest and like to be done by 11am-12pm. We take lots of activity breaks. I find that the children need a fair bit of physical activity interspersed with seat learning. We'll do one seat activity, then we'll do something that requires movement. I try to include movement with as much of our learning as possible. When we learn parts of speech, they like it if I assign actions to the different parts of speech. I'll then call out a word, they'll tell me what part of speech it is while doing the assigned action. We like to learn poetry while swinging or walking. We work on word roots while cycling or doing jumping jacks. I'm sure you get the idea.

Our goal is to keep the afternoons free for extramurals and socializing.

Are your kids always polite and ready to learn? (*snicker*) Do the kids (or you!) get frustrated?
LOL, of course they are not always polite and ready to learn. However, I am getting better at understanding the triggers that cause them to get squirrelly and I try to control for those triggers. My kids need to keep to a whole food diet, Shira needs to stay off soy, they need lots of sleep and exercise and I need to back off when I see them becoming frustrated.

I become very frustrated when Ben becomes even more fidgety than normal, or when he just refuses to shut up. He will stop talking to me and will instead start narrating every single thing that he is doing. It drives me batty.

Shira frustrates me when she shuts down when she hits roadblocks. This last year of homeschooling has been a very enlightening year for me. I never used to have patience with people who shut down like she does, but she's my daughter and I want her to succeed, so I've had to learn how to circumvent her lockdowns. It's been a challenge, but I'm slowly making headway.

How has this affected your parenting?
Homeschooling has made my parenting calmer and more nurturing because being with them every day, all day has allowed me to see how my actions impact their behavior. I'm convinced that there are no unruly kids, just parents who aren't parenting their kids the right way. If I'm stressed, the kids are stressed. If I'm happy, they are happy. They are little mirrors of my emotions. I never, ever, thought I would have the amount of patience I now exhibit with my kids. I still don't have any patience with anyone else, it's all used up by my children.

How much free time do they have? What do they do during their free time? What hobbies do they have?
They had too little free time last year. We're fixing it this coming year. They will have at least 5-7 hours of free time a day. Ben and Shira play a lot. Their play is incredibly creative. They build sanctuaries, caves, skyscrapers, fairy glens, if you can think about it, they have probably built it. They spend hours a day drawing, painting and sculpting. Shira is also starting to do a lot of embroidering. Right now their bikes feature prominently in their lives, as does the pool and their cameras. They love to talk walks and photograph what they see.

What difficulties and challenges do you have with homeschooling? What makes homeschooling enjoyable?
I can't say that I have come across anything difficult or challenging about homeschooling. It's such a pleasure to spend my days with my children and share in their exuberant quest for knowledge.

How do you get involved in the community? When do you have opportunities to interact with public or privately schooled children? Would you like more of these opportunties? How can they be created?
We interact almost exclusively with the homeschooled community. It's just a matter of practicality. Homeschooled kids have time to play whereas institutionally schooled kids don't.

What is your least favorite homeschool stereotype?
The large family, right wing, religious family with the subservient wife and socially maladapted children who never interact with the real world. Let's also not forget the assumption that the HSLDA speaks for all homeschoolers.

No time for school

I came across this link to a video about homeschooling made as a senior project by a photojournalism student, Dave Londres at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

I appreciate how he makes homeschoolers look like normal people. More importantly, I appreciate the comment by the father towards the end of the movie about how his twelve year old twins are just 12, not 12 going on twenty. He also talks about how he hopes his children are working to their full potential but that they are not any smarter than any other twelve year olds.

That touches on one of my biggest bugbears about homeschoolers. There is this tendency to try to prove that homeschoolers are better and brighter than their institutionally schooled counterparts. It drives me crazy. Homeschoolers fit onto a curve, just as all other school kids do, some are brighter than others, some are average and some are not as bright as the others. Perhaps the bell curve for homeschoolers is slightly shifted to the right, but perhaps it isn't. Frankly, while I am very impressed by some homeschoolers, I am not at all impressed by others. I often find it amusing that it's those homeschooler who I think would probably be better off sending their kids to someone else to be educated who are often the ones who sing the "party" song the loudest.