Chapter 1: Homeschooling and the Supermom Syndrome

from Homeschooling: Take a Deep Breath--You Can Do This! by Terrie Lynn Bittner

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There are many names for homeschooling, but I think the most accurate name would be family schooling. When homeschooling is done well, the entire family learns together. That’s the reason parents don’t have to know everything they are going to teach. It’s the reason homeschooling builds closer families and creates better educated children.

You don’t have to be a professional teacher, a genius, or a structured person to homeschool well. Many people believe they can’t homeschool because they are lacking some magical quality or skill successful homeschoolers have. The truth is that homeschooling can be done, and done well, by most ordinary people.

This book doesn’t present a cheerleader view of homeschooling. Homeschooling is wonderful, but it isn’t for every family. And, while the purpose of this book isn’t to convince you to teach your children at home, by telling you what’s involved in setting up a homeschool, I may help you make that decision.

This is a book for ordinary people with ordinary concerns, who just want to be sure they can do what they’ve decided to do, and who want realistic help setting up their school and getting started.

The homeschooling world is full of ordinary people. You can’t major in homeschooling. You can’t become a certified homeschool teacher. Being a credentialed school teacher with years of experience does not adequately prepare you to become a homeschooling parent because teaching your own child is different from teaching the children of others. The experts are just ordinary people who taught their children and now want to pass on what they have learned to others.

The home is the ultimate education lab. Freed from most of the regulation other schools face, we can do as we please within reason. We’ve tested a tremendous variety of curricula and teaching ideas. Every homeschool is different because every family is different. With this in mind, you should understand just what this book can give you and what it cannot. In this chapter, you will learn who I am, what homeschooling can and can’t do for your family, and what you will learn from the book.

Who are you and why are you telling me how to homeschool?

I’m a homeschooling mom and freelance writer. I was educated in public schools, but would have homeschooled if I’d known it existed. However, I had a head start in understanding the power of learning in the home, because my parents were what we today call afterschoolers.

Every day I went to school, alternating between boredom and frustration. I remember very little of what I learned in most of my classes, except for the years I had truly astounding teachers. When I came home, I did my real learning. My parents filled our days with books, field trips, long conversations most people thought we were too young to understand, and service. We worked in campaign headquarters, circulated petitions, read books by the thousands, and talked…and talked…and talked. I remember nearly everything I learned at home.

 My mother taught me to read as I curled up in her lap, and I taught mine to read the same way. I tried to duplicate the learning environment I had enjoyed as a child, but didn’t think of myself as homeschooling—I was just parenting. It took many years of formal homeschooling before I understood that homeschooling is parenting at its most exciting level.

I played school with my oldest daughter because we couldn’t afford preschool and we were both bored during a long snowy winter. At some point, what was an occasional game became a natural part of her day. I later preschooled her siblings. When the children went off to school, I supplemented their educations at home. But homeschooling? I could never manage that.

I started my homeschooling career with lots of challenges standing in my path. I had several learning disabilities that had made school difficult for me. I wasn’t organized. I loved to start things, but tended not to finish them. I had a tremendously busy schedule, including a new writing career that was just beginning to see success.

I thought those things would keep me from being able to do what I set out to do. What I learned was that very little really keeps a parent from homeschooling successfully if she really wants to. I tell my children, when we talk about their disabilities, that they can do everything anyone else can do, but they may have to do it differently. I discovered that this was true about anything that is hard, whether it’s hard because of disabilities, personality or skills. It was certainly true of homeschooling.

The great thing about homeschooling is that there isn’t a single way people are supposed to do it. There isn’t even a best way. Every family finds its own path and follows it, taking alternate routes and scenic sidetracks as it suits their family’s needs. Whatever our talents or lack of talents, we can find a path that works for us.

The path I chose was right for me. I made plenty of wrong turns and took some much-less-traveled routes, but nothing was fatal. We still got to our destination, which was a strengthened family with a love for knowledge.

My qualifications for writing this book are that I homeschooled and had fun doing it. My oldest child is married and employed, my second oldest is in college, and my youngest is starting shortly. Homeschooling has been a deciding factor in how our home worked, and we are still evaluating the results, but we had a fascinating journey, and most importantly, we took it together. Those challenges that I thought made homeschooling impossible turned out to be nothing more than interesting perplexities that required creativity to overcome. The difficulties gave successes a significance they might not have had if it had been easy.

What will this book teach me?

When I first started homeschooling, most homeschooling books were “rah-rah” books or “Harvard at Twelve” books. They usually insisted that homeschooling was easy, that anyone could do it with little or no effort, and that homeschooling always produced geniuses and perfect children. This might have been because the only people who could write homeschooling books were parents, and in a time when homeschooling was ridiculed, looked at as a subversive activity, and at best was questionably legal, those parents who chose to fight the system were cautious. They constantly had to defend their choice. Admitting that everything hadn’t gone perfectly was risky and could mean the legal end of their homeschool if their admissions were used against them by a truancy officer.

Today, there is a growing group of parents who have “retired” from homeschooling. Their children are grown and they have nothing to lose by being honest. Homeschooling has enough success stories to make truthfulness less dangerous. This book is not going to tell you that homeschooling is always wonderful and perfect. As you’ll see, there are days when you will hate your job and your kids would rather go to public school seven days a week than spend one more day with a tired and frazzled mother. But there will also be exciting days when none of you can imagine any other life and, over time, there will be more of those than of the other kind. It will never be perfect, but someday it will be natural and generally fun.

This book will not teach you how to get your child into Harvard at the age of twelve. Many homeschoolers are ahead of their peers, because their education has been tailored to their needs and abilities and they have been able to progress as rapidly as they are capable of progressing. Homeschooling is efficient because each child is the entire class. This might mean they can be ahead of their peers, but it might also mean they just won’t fall behind. It might mean that a child with serious special needs will make more progress than he might have as a student in a large, diverse class, but he may still never catch up. Homeschooling can guarantee your child will learn as much as he can learn and as much as he is willing to learn, but it can’t make him a genius or push him further than he chooses to go. No educational system can do that. It’s okay for homeschoolers to be average or even behind.

Instead, this book will show you some of the ways homeschooling can work. We will explore the subjects children study and think about the ways they can be taught. We’ll discuss lesson planning, problem solving and scheduling. This book is just a starting place for your ideas. My methods aren’t the only ones, and may not be the best for you. However, they may spark ideas of your own, or give you a method to start with. Most of us change our homeschooling methods regularly.

The additional resources at the end of each chapter will give you a few places to seek ideas. Some promote ideas similar to my own, and others have very different ideas, to show you the range of possibilities. I don’t necessarily agree with each resource, but I do find them interesting. Please keep in mind that Internet resources often change or disappear, so approach them with caution, although I’ve tried to select pages I suspect will stay online for a very long time.

Homeschooling isn’t just about the children, however—it’s also about you, the teacher. Teaching is hard work, whether you teach one child or forty, and your own needs must be addressed. We will spend time talking about you, too. What are your fears about homeschooling? How can you overcome your own inadequacies in math and writing so you can teach these skills to your children? How can you take care of yourself when you are so busy? What will you do on the days you can’t possibly teach?

Homeschooling is also about other people. As much as we’d sometimes love to conduct our school on a deserted island with no outside pressures, our world is filled with friends and relatives, and even spouses, who aren’t too sure about this brilliant idea we’ve come up with. We’ll talk about how to get them on our side, and what to do if we can’t.

Over the years, as I’ve written about homeschooling on the Internet and in print, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from parents who homeschool, parents who are thinking about homeschooling, and parents who are worried because their spouse wants to homeschool. I’ve become aware of the range of concerns and hurdles these parents face as they take on an intense new way of life. I’ve tried to address these concerns in the chapters of this book. I’ve attempted to be as honest as I can manage to be, because I longed for someone to tell me the truth when I started out.

There are hundreds of books for Supermom and Superdad homeschoolers. This is a book for everyone else.