Rock Hymas

So my wife started homeschooling our older two boys in September after we’d recovered from the summer vacations a little bit. She likes to write about their escapades on her blog, and they’re doing a great job. In deciding to start homeschooling we had planned to have me help by teaching them math, but then decided before our “first day of school” that I was too busy with work, a long commute and Cub Scouts to do that. So for the last two months Kami has been teaching them using a combination of the Saxon Math program and the Khan Academy, and I haven’t been all that involved, other than as a spectator on the sidelines and someone that Kami can bounce her ideas and concerns off of.

She’s not learning math … yet.

Since then, she’s been constantly tweaking things as she goes. She honed how she taught them math over the last couple of months. First, she went back and forth between teaching Reagan and Cade together or separately. Though they can both handle the third grade material fine, she found that trying to teach them together just led to goofing off. They devolved into performing for each other, rather than thinking about and learning the material. So she settled on teaching them separately, but that did take more time. Each day she would take about 45 minutes with each boy and go through the Saxon math lesson for the day, the daily “meeting”, and help them with worksheets, if they needed it. While one boy was doing this with Mom, the other one did some personal worksheets and then got to work on Khan Academy exercises, usually doing whichever ones he wanted to.

While this generally worked ok, there were two challenges that regularly came up.

First, the amount of repetition in the Saxon math curriculum was sometimes boring, both for her and for the kids. Though repetition is good, once the kid is comfortable with the material it can be too easy to be fun. Also, the boys like to brag to Dad at dinner about what they learned each day, and there would be weeks where I’d only hear about math once. And my wife wants you to know that it wasn’t because they weren’t doing it!

Second, the hour and a half of math time was a big chunk of the homeschooling day, and it was regularly interrupted by the younger kids, our three and a half year old Levi and newly-walking Liberty. This wasn’t as bad with other subjects, where it was  usually easier to recover from interruptions, or they didn’t take as long, or they could be done with both boys and sometimes the younger ones too.

Both of these challenges point to deeper issues, which we discussed occasionally over the last two months. Many of you might have responded to the first concern by saying “Throw out the Saxon Math!” or “Just skip the parts that were repetitive!” Both responses discount the value of repetition in learning. Even if they didn’t, you’d have to consider that Saxon math makes it fairly easy for someone who never felt comfortable in the world of math (my wife) to teach her kids. But skipping parts of the curriculum brought back Kami’s discomfort of trying to figure out what was important to repeat and what wasn’t, without feeling like she had a good idea of what they would need later on.

The second challenge doesn’t provoke such simplistic responses. You wouldn’t say “Well, you just got to get rid of those two younger kids,” or “Math isn’t that important, just spend less time on it.” Actually, we could spend less time on math, but only if we felt there were another way to teach them that would be as effective. But the fact is that we’ve got four kids. Life has been getting easier with four over time, as the older kids become more capable of helping and the younger ones get better at playing on their own, but that’s also not an issue that is going away in the short term.

So rather than try to eliminate those challenges, we’re going to sidestep them using an ingenious plan: I’ll teach them math. Ok, so it’s not ingenious. It’s not novel, or newfangled, or noteworthy. But it directly addresses the issues. I’m much more comfortable experimenting with the curriculum than Kami was. I’ll start simply, just doing what Kami was doing, but plan to change things up based on the needs and abilities of the boys. Besides that, I’m curious about how best to teach math, not just in a generic sense (what works for everyone), but also in a specific sense. What works for Reagan? What works for Cade? Why? We will work towards a method that gets them learning, gets them involved, and doesn’t take any longer than our current one.

This also helps with the challenge of homeschooling with toddlers as well. I’ll be teaching in the evenings, after the younger two go to bed. That means the house is quieter, it helps the boys wind down after their active afternoons, and Kami can deal with the interruptions most days. Another awesome benefit is that she and the kids just got an extra hour and half each day. Some of that extra time can still be spent by the boys doing Khan Academy exercises and math worksheets. But the rest can be used to learn about other stuff, play, relax, run errands, do housework, etc. Basically, it gives Kami more flexibility during the day, which reduces her stress level, and it gives us some more structure to our evenings, which is important when trying to get kids to actually go to bed.

Compared to this kid, math is easy.

Of course, it’s not all unicorns and bacon. This new schedule does stretch me a little bit. I’ve sacrificed some of my commute on the train so I can think about the work of teaching math. I tend to be pretty wiped out once the kids go to bed, so I haven’t been able to get as much done on weeknights. And I do still have my other responsibilities: Cub scouts, my job, and finding time to play with my younger two kids. Much to Kami’s chagrin, I haven’t done the dishes much this week. And when I have other responsibilities in the evenings, it can mean we do some schedule juggling. Though Reagan seems to do fine learning math in the evenings, Cade can be a bit more goofy at that time of day. Those challenges won’t just go away, and I’m sure we’ll continue making adjustments to how we balance everyone’s different needs.

All that said, our first week on the new schedule has gone surprisingly well. Since we started on Monday, I come home to a much happier wife and kids, because they’ve all had more time to do other things. The “perfect homeschooling day” is something rarely seen even among experienced homeschoolers, but Kami’s been really happy with every day this last week. She’s also more relaxed about school, which is good for her and for the kids. The older boys get more one-on-one time with Dad, which they really like, and makes me a feel a little bit better about the long commute.

There are certainly disadvantages to homeschooling (it can get expensive), but one of the advantages we have it that we can be way more flexible. I like to think of our little homeschool as a small startup amidst the mega-corporations known as public education and private schools. Our market is significantly smaller – just four kids, two of which wouldn’t be served by the megacorps anyway – so we can understand their needs and meet them much more directly. And we can respond more nimbly to those needs as they change. This change in how we teach math is really just one of the larger changes amidst a constant stream of tweaks to the way we teach our kids. Some of them work, some of them don’t, but it’s easy to see the successes and failures and respond quickly.