My elementary school still had big windows that let fresh air and light into our classrooms, George Washington framed on the wall by the Stars and Stripes, and young, pretty, happy teachers who often would retire as soon as they started their own families. There was time to do all kinds of art. We got great stories read aloud to us everyday after lunch recess with our heads on our desks to rest. A music teacher came in once a week to lead us in the glories of choral music. Thanks to a great phonics teacher, reading, writing and spelling were a snap for me so I got affirmation there. Everyone seemed to value me at school.
In the mid 70s, I had a part-time job as a hall monitor in the new junior high in the town where I grew up. School was very different now, thus my job had been born to help keep order. The kids were disrespectful of authority, smoked pot out back with the principal's knowledge, trashed the lunch room everyday and some bullies intimidated others from being able to use the restrooms. I decided right then my children, should I have any, would not go to public school.
It wasn't until the mid 80s I discovered the concept of home education from a Focus on the Family program with Dr. Raymond Moore. Married now with two young children, I was thrilled to find a way to teach them that did not require the expense of private Christian school. I plunged in and read everything I could find, implemented everything I could, bought into the belief that education begins at birth.
But as my children grew in number and age, it became increasingly difficult for me to do what I wanted and needed to do in their home education. I missed the affirmation of the teachers who had liked me and my fellow students who had valued me. That was all I knew experientially about school; all my homeschool knowledge was theoretical. I lacked maturity and discipline to do what was required of me as my children's teacher without any outside affirmation. My empty, valueless feeling was strong. Also, my working-outside-the-home mother had not been an at home model for me. I didn't even know how to be a stay at home mom, much less one who educated her children at home!
The discontent I experienced, the lack of value I sensed, the absence of feeling accomplished and successful at what I was doing did not make me dig in and work harder. I needed to learn how to motivate my children rather than to control them. I needed to work hard at overcoming my lacks in hands-on home education so they could learn to work hard. Instead, I figured I needed to be developing myself, my writing, speaking, singing, sewing, etc. I thought I just had a thankless job and needed to find value somewhere else, in some loftier aspirations where others would affirm me.
Of course, that just made everything more difficult and caused me to do even a poorer job at mothering, home making and home educating. I eventually drifted into doing those things much as my mother had lived, as busy, tired and unhappy, even though I was not working outside the home as she had! Perhaps the worst fruit of all was I taught my children by my example to be discontent with whatever they were presently doing, to always long for time to do what is really important and valuable but out of reach, because what you are doing now isn't all that.
In God's mercy, He gave me a son with Down Syndrome, who will never be done learning and will not move away. I am slowly learning to do hard things, to be content, to be affirming instead of critical and controlling, and Arthur is slowly blooming. I have moments, hours, even days when there is nothing else I'd rather be doing!!! Home school never stops.
