The Ups and Downs of HomeSchooling

When we started this crazy adventure in homeschooling (reluctantly - it was our third choice), I was afraid of the wide open day in front of us. I decided the best thing to do was to hit the ground running, no, sprinting. I bought text books that matched the state and national standards and we pushed into them at as high a rate as Amalia seemed able to do.

A month went by and we were so outlandishly ahead of any normal standards, that I realized it wouldn't hurt to ease up a little bit. To keep Amalia from getting bored (hah), we added some other goodies into the academic mix. I still have to think about the possibility of algebra by third grade, but I realize that we can certainly take some subjects with a more relaxed pace and can carve out some time for other things.

For instance, today we start a two day exploration of Southern culture. We will focus the lesson around The Hee Haw Collection, Vol. 3 (you could see that coming, no?), which features Geroge Jones and Merle Haggard. We will talk about the roots of the Texas style (taking a look at Bob Wills, of course), and using it as an excuse to talk about the dustbowl, Californian immigration (which might explain to her why some folks still talk kinda funny in the Central Valley), Dorothea Lange, Bakersfield, and how music can move with migrating populations and can change with those populations as they travel. And we can sing along (yes, Amalia has just about perfected "pffft! You were gone")!

Obviously norteno music (with Les Blank's Chulas Fronteras as the centerpiece), Roma music (Latcho Drom perhaps?), and the blues would be follow ups on this sort of multi-disciplinary approach.

Now, this is the fun side (along with the fact that we are now part of a home school/classroom hybrid charter school, which gives us the best of both worlds), but there are those days...

As a parent volunteer at Amalia's old school, I know that those days can happen and do happen in classrooms as well. And if it is bad when one child cannot focus beyond five minutes, it is dreadful when 18 of them have minds wandering off in different directions.

It is just that the whole thing is more acute when we are able to zip through material with amazing speed and thoroughness, and then, the next day we are having to go over the same stuff six times, because we found five different things to distract us in the middle of the same passage.