When I first looked into the whole homeschooling concept—what it is, how you do it, what are other people’s homeschooling experiences—I was struck by how overwhelmingly positively homeschooling mums (yes, it’s always women) talk about it. The words blessed, fulfilled, and joy filled the pages. Special, magical moments were apparently shared between the mum and the kids on an hourly basis. Now, I had my suspicions that that would not be my experience: I’m just not the sort of person to even use these words very frequently. 7 weeks in, what has been our homeschooling experience?
First, a couple of words about why we decided to homeschool. When we decided to come to Portugal, I researched international schools in Porto. Local schools were definitely out. We felt strongly that it wouldn’t be fair for the kids to attend a Portuguese-speaking school when they only knew how to say obrigado and count to ten. While there are some international schools in the area, they were out of our price range. We were also hesitant about having the kids adjust to a new school with its rules, systems, and people for 6 months.
Do we have time to homeschool?
So homeschooling was the only viable option. I read up on homeschooling experiences; there are tons of people homeschooling their kids and posting about it. I was most interested in how much time people spend on homeschooling on a daily basis. Quite practically, I needed to figure out whether, even with an au pair, we’d have time for it. But I noticed that people were really reluctant to talk about this, as if it’s something you will get caught on.
Finally, I found an Australian mum who said that she only spends 1.5–2 hours per day on schooling her kids. That sounded doable! Being a Type A personality, I then ordered books and materials for the key subjects of maths, English, and Finnish. I put together a spreadsheet with all the weeks of the spring and divided the book contents evenly per week. Happy planning days!
We’ve now been homeschooling for 7 weeks, and, as I suspected, the words blessed and fulfilled have never featured in the vocabulary when I talk about homeschooling. Instead, we have good days, bad days, and very bad days. On good days, you get to help your kid figure something out; like the other day, when A(6) was practicing subtraction for the first time, I could see the moment he understood how it works. And that was pretty magical. But for that one moment, we have many moments when we’re sort of able to power through. Then we have plenty of those moments when the kids are just focused on completely wrong things and you feel like you have no tools for getting them back on track.
Reasons why homeschooling is hard for us
So I confess that the homeschooling experience has been mentally and emotionally harder than I expected—at least so far. There are probably a whole lot of reasons why, but here are a few I can come up with:
- In the end, I’m their mum, not their teacher. And we at least tell ourselves that the kids behave better with strangers than they do with you.
- They don’t have the group pressure of their class around them to induce them to follow orders.
- A(6) had some preschool in Finland, but I don’t think they did a lot of formal school work. He lacks the routine and discipline to sit at the desk for any length of time. N(8), who already had 1.5 years of regular school, understands the concept of school and school work much better.
- Most homeschooling parents don’t have day jobs. I’m sure this would be a lot easier if I didn’t also worry about that content analysis I’m working on for my next academic article.
- How we’ve all slept and how the morning has been has a huge effect on how the school “day” (short as it is) goes. If I sit down in the teacher’s chair feeling tired and irritable, I can guarantee you it’s not going to be a magical session. The kids need a lot of motivation, praise, and encouragement while they work. I have to have the energy to muster up genuine excitement about A getting 1+2 right or N remembering those pesky double consonants in Finnish.
Fortunately, we’re only homeschooling for one semester, so this is a temporary solution for us. It was also the only reasonable solution for this period of time. And we’re already one-third through!