HOMESCHOOL, UNBOUND PERSONAL ESSAY words and photography bt Jennifer Townshend
We started phonics when my son was three. It was successful in that he read words at three, but not successful because he did so reluctantly. When he began resisting books altogether, I dropped the push to read even though I knew he could read if I forced it. A couple of years later, he picked up a basic reader and read the whole thing in my lap. The day before he wasn’t reading and nothing new happened in our lives, but apparently something magical happened in his brain, and he was willingly reading. He’s had his nose stuck in a book ever since. I walked away from that experience unable to shake the questions: What if his moment for reading was meant to happen at seven? Would he have endured a year or two of pressure that created a world of anxiety around reading instead? Would he have missed out on this love of reading altogether? After my son’s first semester of second grade, my husband and I found ourselves with a list of cons about my son’s public school experience that greatly outweighed the pros. Both of us experienced a mix of homeschool, private and public school growing up. We felt that the homeschool years were the ones we were most ourselves and grew in well-roundedness that enriched our lives even into adulthood. We didn’t struggle with stereotypical worries about homeschooled kids, as our experience showed us homeschool could mean freedom, not isolation. We took the plunge. I found the first year adjusting to homeschool, after time spent in the traditional model of school, to be a little like the newborn year. Suddenly my child was with me all day everyday again; that seven or eight-hour window of solitude and uninterrupted work wasn’t mine anymore. Some people questioned our decision out loud. I tried to be an expert, but I was truly just winging it some days – a lot of days. My little angel wasn’t as easy to teach as I thought he would be. I struggled with not living up to the fairytale image of homeschooling I had concocted in my head. It was just an awkward year. In addition to the personal struggle, I fell straight into repeating some of the issues we set out to avoid. I tried to replicate the standard school experience at home. We drowned in workbooks, lesson plans, disconnected ideas, and an exhausting schedule of disjointed programs for “socialization” as we made the public school our standard of comparison. My son wasn’t thrilled to wake up to a new homeschool day as I’d hoped, and I had missed my ambitious mark of inspiring lifelong learning in my seven-yearold. I needed to reset, but I wasn’t finding clarity by diving further into education theory. Looking back, there were a few main ideas that set us on the path to a restful place where confidence grows and learning happens.
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