Wants

As a mother-teacher, I tend to feel put upon. In a general sense, it's somewhat like choosing a lifetime career that you think is vitally important, but you're not wholly sure you like. The career of teaching my children is highly important to me--I know in one case my child would end up labeled and put on medication in a public school scenario, and I want more for both them, academically, than what I feel is possible in that same scenario--but that doesn't mean that I always feel like I'm personally fulfilled doing it.  

I take these great 30-minute walks each morning. These walks are very enlightening to me, mostly because I talk aloud to myself about what's bugging me, or what's currently on my mind. Since my neighbors are mostly cows (literally, that's not a dig on my neighbors), nobody much minds a solitary woman musing aloud to herself. I play a game of "What If?" with myself on these walks, and the questions have run the gamut of "What if I were a millionaire?" to "What if I wasn't quite as cranky as I currently am?" The answers might surprise you, but on this current morning, the question was "What if I weren't a mother?" the corollary being, "What would I do if I weren't a mother?"


I was stuck for the longest time. The question was sort of foreign to me. My kids are so much a giant hunk of my life that I started to ask myself what I was when I subtracted children from the equation. If you take out the "wife" chunk too--there's not a whole lot left! Or, at least I thought at first. I added "wife" and "mother" back in, but thought of the kids being in a high-quality classroom somewhere (the idea being that they would be in an ideal educational situation, be that public, private, or whatever).  At that point I could breathe somewhat again, and resumed thinking about the core idea, "What do I want for me?" 


When I was in college, I thought I wanted to teach. I went through the ropes of becoming a teacher, and made it within a year of graduating before I realized that I detested it. I disliked what was happening in public schools, I disliked all of it--except tutoring. So when our family decided that we'd homeschool our kids, I looked at it as an opportunity to practice my love of tutoring, while not being a part of that public school scene. 

But it hasn't exactly worked out that way--tutors, in general, don't have to plan lessons--they just help you to understand the fundamentals of whatever it is you are already learning. Tutored people are also, usually, invested in the process--they want to be there for a reason. Also, most tutors are experts in one or two areas, and you see them for those areas alone. You may see where I'm headed here.


No matter how much a child may love to learn, they aren't generally thoroughly invested in their learning. They don't see the point to learning how to tell time, count money, or understand history. These are things that we, as a adults, understand intrinsically. To be ignorant in these areas (and many others) seems ridiculous. So as much as I explain to Boo about why telling the seconds on an analog clock are important and valuable to learn, she resists because her understanding of why it's importantfor her to learn hasn't happened. Her resistance leads to a standstill of learning, frustration for the "tutor" and her. 

Also, my understanding of all the various areas of learning for a second-grader and fourth-grader are not whole. So there are times where I'm flailing for answers to questions I haven't answered for myself. Why did slavery exist? Good question, and I have no idea why...or why it still does. Which kind of triangle is that? Um.....OK, after a bit of thinking, I can figure it out...but the point is that they see the hesitation and sometimes (not always) that makes me lose credibility. Sometimes it leads to a discussion of how nobody knows everything about everything...but with Boo, that also leads to, "Well then, why do I have to even try to learn it, if there are adults out there (her mother included) that can't remember it? My answer is not awesome: because at some point I had to learn it, even if I can't remember it. Is this a failure of "education" as a whole? Do we put too much emphasis on things that aren't totally necessary, unless you are going into a specific field? 


So, in practice, homeschooling is a lot more like being a teacher in a multi-age classroom. There's some finagling, some bribery, some strictness, and sometimes tears. There's less camaraderie, because there's always the sense that "Mom knows-it-all and I don't"--there's hierarchy, or anarchy when it turns out that Mom doesn't know-it-all and why should we have to do this stuff, anyway? In tutoring, there's less of that. Surely the person in need of tutoring is coming to the tutor---but that's exactly my point--they are coming to the tutor to learn. 


Where does that leave me, with the question of, "What do I want for me?"


I want to love this. I want to be the mother-teacher that goes cheerfully into her career, works for 18-20 years, and retires knowing she did a job well.  I want to stop feeling like this is just a resting point--that I'll get my life back once the girls graduate and move on with their own lives. After all, it's my chosen career, and I think it's vitally important. I would rather that I didn't have to search for that perfect educational opportunity elsewhere--I'd rather that it was right here in my own home. I want high-quality curriculum that helps me explain the things that I'm not awesome at explaining, and backs me up on the things that I'm better at doing. And that, folks, is what this one mother-teacher wants.