Our Homeschooling Approach

The Parent-Teacher Conference
(A humourous look at "schoolish" expectations and homeschooling)

With gratitude to Gina Rozon,
homeschooling mom in La Ronge Saskatchewan,
for the idea which inspired this essay.

Other Tidbits
Our Approach to Homeschooling

It's parent-teacher conference time at the schools, so I figured I'd take some time this morning for the same ritual myself. While the kids were happily engaged in building complicated designs with the wooden train track, I sneaked off to the bathroom to have a chat with myself in the mirror.

I entered the bathroom with some trepidation. All parents are a little nervous, I guess, about what the teacher will say. We always fear any negative comments, yet we really want the answer to that big question "how is my child doing?"

Fortunately my kids have the same teacher, so I was able to streamline my interview a little. At school I would have a fifteen-minute conference for each child, but I figured twenty minutes was probably just about right for a combined conference dealing with both of them.

"Hello," said the teacher. "Come on in. You're Erin and Noah's mom?"

"Yes," I smiled nervously.

"Well," I told the mirror, "I have to tell you that I really enjoy being their teacher. In fact, I love them both to death. They are incredibly special to me. I'm so grateful that I get to spend the better part of each day with them. I wouldn't trade my job for anything."

Gosh, I thought, this is wonderful. I glowed inside. My kids are really special to this woman.

"But," my reflection continued, "I do have a few concerns."

Here it comes, I thought, my heart leaping to my throat.

"Well, for one," said the woman in the mirror, "Erin doesn't seem to understand proper classroom decorum. She never raises her hand before speaking or asking a question. She thinks she can just go to the bathroom whenever she pleases. When she needs some time to relax or run around and burn off some energy, she just goes! She doesn't wait for recess. And she feels entitled to eat whenever she's hungry. I can't believe her attitude!"

Oh, I thought, a smile beginning to form on my lips.

"And Noah, I realize he's much younger, and it's not as much of an issue with him yet, but he seems to be picking up these worrisome habits from his sister. He watches her and imitates her and I'm afraid he's going to follow her down the same path to ruin. Already I see that he is asking questions when he's interested in something, and not during 'question time'. And if he's excited about something he's made, he'll come running right away to show me, instead of saving it for 'sharing time'.

"I'm also concerned about the lack of structure and routine. Erin, for instance, often gets busy reading or drawing and carries on for as long as an hour or two at a shot. She almost never stops after the twenty minutes I alot on my schedule. I find this kind of disturbing. She also seems to feel she is free to stay up late practising the piano and learning American Sign Language. And then next day she's not ready for school at 8:45. And neither of your children follows instructions well. They skip past the directions to get right to the activity in question if they already know what they want to do. Sometimes they have their own ways of doing things. And they seem to think that their main job is to play. Erin says that she learns when she plays. Such insolence!

"Of course, I think she's picking a lot of this up at home, and that's why I'm delighted to have the chance to talk to you today. For instance, I've noticed that when the weather is conducive to nature walks or there's the chance for a family trip to a music conference, they're often allowed to skip 'school' for several days. I think that Erin is picking up on her parents' attitudes, and that's at the root of the problem. She tells me that sometimes she is up late playing mathematical games with her mother or father, and that's why she sleeps in. The messages she's getting from you are of considerable concern to me."

"But," I offered tentatively, "is she learning what she should?"

"Well," said the teacher, "that's not really my point. My point is that she's not doing what I expect in a classroom. But since you asked, no, she's not learning what she should. She ought to be doing a unit on the life cycles of plants and instead she's doing what she claims to be interested in right now, which is music theory and ancient history. It's the same thing in math, too. She hasn't mastered all her addition facts, yet she's already playing around with multiplication. She says it's 'neat', but she oughtn't to be doing it for at least another couple of years. She says she first got interested in multiplication while counting cookies on cookie sheets with you."

"Um, well, I didn't think... I just answered a few questions," I muttered apologetically.

"But that's just my point!" the teacher shouted. "You're allowing her to lead her own education, and now she no longer fits into the prescribed sequence of learning outcomes."

"But we just made some cookies...." I whimpered.

"What do you mean, you just made some cookies? It looks like she's learned the concept of multiplication while baking cookies. To me, that smacks of education, and as I say, it's undermining my attempt to get her to fit into the list of prescribed learning outcomes. And that's just one example. I could go on all day. She showed absolutely no interest in art with tempera paints, and wanted acrylics instead. That's a Grade 3 medium, I hate to say. Kindergarteners get tempera. She doesn't understand what a dipthong is, yet she says she can read. She hasn't learned anything about rocks and minerals, but she spoke a French word to me the other day, and French shouldn't start until Grade 4. It looks to me like she's going at things all backwards, and I can't help but think that it's going to catch up with her at some point. Learning outcomes must be important, or they wouldn't be there!"

By this point I was feeling terribly defensive and wishing I'd never stepped into the bathroom. I could hear Erin and Noah in the living room, unloading imaginary wheat from their wooden train to feed the imaginary inhabitants of their imaginary town. I took a look at the woman in the mirror. Here I'd thought this twenty minutes alone with myself would be a rare treat, and suddenly the teacher half of me had turned all schoolish and paranoid. I decided to cut my losses.

"I think," the parent half of me told the teacher half, "that our approach is working just fine. I appreciate your input, but you're coming at this from your own school-oriented background. Don't worry yourself. Just look at these wonderful kids. How can anything be that wrong?"

And with that, I walked out of the bathroom, shut the door, and went off to help the kids bake some cookies.