"Five things I hate about homeschooling" at Simple Homeschool.
It's not just a laundry list of gripes. It's an honest look at parts of the job that aren't so fun, and an explanation of how she copes with them.
I can really relate to "Being with my children 24/7" and to "The overwhelming responsibility I feel for their education." I cope in some of the exact same ways.
Besides those two things, I would round out my own "5 things I hate" thusly:
3. I hate that I can never quite get the house clean. I don't mean decluttered, because I am pretty good at keeping the stuff at a manageable level; I mean grime and fingerprints and unmentionable smears and crud in the corners of things.
I cope with this by hiring a cleaning service once a month. Frankly I wish I could justify the expense of twice a month. We spend the evening beforehand thoroughly picking up the things on the floor and clearing the counters so that the cleaner can work quickly and we get our money's worth, and then we stay in one room to do school while the cleaner is here. This has given me so much peace of mind, because I know that however bad it looks now, in less than a month we will be sure to have it all looking great... for a few hours. And at least the grime won't build up more than a month's worth of layers.
4. Homeschooling reinforces one of my worst character flaws: I am a workaholic. I am one of those people who doesn't know how to relax, or rather, who has to be doing SOMETHING all the time. And the nature of homeschooling is that the work is literally never done. Even when the teaching is over for the day, you could always get a head start on dinner, or on planning the next week, month, or year, or on fleshing out your philosophy of higher education, or researching college requirements online, or re-organizing some corner of the schoolroom. Look at me: I am sitting down enjoying some leisure right now while the children unload the dishwasher, and what hobby am I engaged in? Blogging about homeschooling. Hmph.
I haven't learned to cope with this very well, except to go along with my husband when he says, "It's Sunday afternoon and we are going to do something fun whether you like it or not."
5. I get extremely tired of the sound of my own voice. I talk and talk and talk and talk to the children, because that is my job, since I teach them. There is so much I have to tell them today, and so much concentrating I have to do to work out what I am going to tell them tomorrow, that it's hard to take the time to listen to them instead.
No, I haven't figured out how to cope with the sound of my own voice. Maybe I should ask my husband how he does it.
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