Imagine a spreadsheet...

...with time down the left hand side, divided up into fifteen-minute blocks, for a whole day.

Not every day, just Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And imagine across the top, column headings for me and for Hannah and for ten children.  Ages 13, 12, 11, 9, 9, 8, 6, 5, 3, and 1.  (No, they aren't all ours.  That is a somewhat long story.)

Scratch that. Imagine a dining room table. And a whole lot of index cards. And some post it notes. And clothespins to hold some of the cards together.

That's how it started.

+ + +

You may remember that I co-school with my friend Hannah, and her children, and two or three extra children, two days a week.  We don't cover all our school subjects on those days, just some of them:  Latin, English, history, and some assorted craft and art and music.  

Monday-Wednesday-Friday, separately, we teach our own kids all the other subjects.  Math and such.

Four of our kids were off visiting various grandparents, and the remaining ones were mostly playing happily, so we started off listing every subject and every kid.  Then, while I made lunch, Hannah transferred the information to index cards.  "I thought of cutting them up into different lengths to represent different time blocks," she said later, "but then I thought, 'That's insane.'"

Later we decided:  insane is sometimes more useful.

Cut to the long dining room table.

Time runs from left to right across the table.  We commence moving index cards around. 

There are constraints, of course:

• The same child cannot be taught two subjects at the same time.
• Each child can only be trusted for so long to sit and work independently.
• I am not, personally, capable of teaching two of my subjects simultaneously.    
• Someone has to be responsible for the toddlers at all times.
• If you row to the other side of the river with the bag of grain, the fox will eat the chicken. Or something like that.

 We can loosen things up by deciding to teach some stuff on Tuesdays and other stuff in the same block on Thursdays.  Hence the clothespins:  if these two things are each done once a week, and they each take 45 minutes, and they entrain the same children, they could occupy the same time block.  So they move around as one.

Eventually the cards and clothespins stop making intuitive sense to me, and I am worried that a child will disperse them, so I start trying to freeze them in place in a spreadsheet.

At this point we realize that we have failed in our first attempt:  In two places, both Hannah and I are focused on intensive teaching at the same time.  This means that the preschooler and the toddler are, hypothetically, running feral for an hour and forty-five minutes (although to our credit, we did plan to feed them lunch in the middle).

We have tried the "feral preschooler" solution before.  It ends badly.   We shuffle things around again.

It turns out that we cannot -- literally cannot -- free up one of us at every hour of the day to care for the preschoolers.  We cannot even free up one of us to "keep an eye on them" while teaching something less intense.  So we do our best to minimize the overlap, and assign simultaneous responsibility for teaching and preschoolers where necessary.  

So, for example, I have a half-hour block where I am reading history books aloud to three elementary-school kids, but because Hannah is teaching middle school English and she needs to concentrate, I must also be responsible for the two preschoolers.

I'll figure that out as I go along.  Maybe I'll give them some playdough at the same table, maybe I'll be reading a picture book and I'll have them listen, maybe I'll put on a DVD for them, maybe I'll assign an eight-year-old to entertain them while he listens to the reading, maybe I'll strap them in a chair and feed them chocolate chips one at a time.  I'll do something.  But what I won't do is assume that Hannah will take care of them while she assumes that I will. 

Hannah has a similar time block later in the day, where she has to teach elementary-school Latin and I have to go over history homework with middle schoolers.  So at least it's fairly fair.

Finally we had a spreadsheet that made sense to me.  Hannah had to absorb it and check it over for a while.  I left her alone with my iPad and some tea.

.

And I think we have something that will work.  We have to start school by 10:15, which gives us time for a vitally important cup of coffee together before we start.  Everyone gets an hour for lunch (and this year we will be rotating "server" assignments among the bigger children so that Hannah and I can actually sit down and eat our lunch instead of fetching cups of water and slices of bread).  The elementary school kids finish at 3:45.  We're done teaching at 4.  The middle schoolers have until five to finish up their independent work.

Are we going to follow the schedule slavishly?  Is that the point of this exercise?

No, the main point is to find out if our ideas about all the things we would teach next year were even possible.  Are there enough hours in the day?  How many times a week can we do such and such a thing?  What do we think we will have going all at once?  

So, we have a plan.  We even have a "what if we start an hour late" plan.  We can be flexible, but we have to start with a plan first.

Comments

[Barbara C.]

That's basically the MOTH system, designing a schedule that lists what every person is doing at all times.

Have you considered putting older kids in charge of preschoolers at some point or are they always busy with work?

[bearing]

Yeah, I have been through MOTH. It was overkill for my family, then three kids, but I can definitely see how necessary it is with larger families now that I have scheduled the co-schooling a couple of times.

This year we will be putting bigger kids in charge of helping more, especially for lunch, but occasionally during teaching times.

[Hannah]

a MOTHy system was made more necessary by the fact that though we have four basic "classes" 1.The 13,12,11 yr olds 2.The 9, 9, 8 yr olds 3.The 6 and 5 yr old and 4.The babies (um, preschoolers), some of the kids younger than 10 shift around between groups, depending on the subject. Kinda "one room schoolhouse" without all the enforced sitting down and associated hickory stick.
This many children makes MOTHiness worth the work, so we don't lose track of anyone or consistently give any one of the kids short shrift.
When I tried MOTH with just 3 kids, I was "making up" stuff for us to do! With this, we are working with types and duration of teaching we're already quite familiar with. For instance, we both had a clear idea of how long it took us to teach a given child a given subject on the average day. So the boxes fell together much more easily than trying to work out a sunrise to sunset kind of schedule does.

[Amber]

Wow, I'm impressed. And I think my head hurts a bit just contemplating all this! And I didn't even have to do anything...

[Dorian Speed]

I love coming up with systems like this. I don't think I could stick to one on a daily basis and I am very impressed by what you two accomplished; I think that's going to work great for you.

I did a similar dining-room-table-and-index-cards session to assign students roles for a seating chart and group project.

[Dorian Speed]

Hmmm - can I not include HTML in my comment? Here's the link, featuring photos of my dining room table and index cards:
http://scrutinies.net/2010/09/catechist-chat-assigning-seats-analog/