Challenges we'll face

Not everything about leaving school is easy for me to face. There are some challenges I can anticipate from my current vantage point:

• Deciding how/whether to set/enforce bedtime, once mandatory early wake-up isn't motivating it (and the corollary, getting time alone with UnschoolingDad, which up to now has mostly happened once kids are in bed)
• Ditto for naptime
• Getting time to myself -- P and T do often play together more peacefully, which gives me some breaks, but when they'll come and how long they'll last is unpredictable. The same currently goes for T's naps, so this may not be that much of a change.
• Helping UnschoolerDad draw good boundaries when he needs them for work time (he works at home), without school giving us a built-in structure for our week
• Being the main person in charge of facilitating P's learning and exposure to the wider world. 

This last one feels like the biggie to a lot of people contemplating home schooling in any form. New music, historical information, new art techniques, civics lessons, the three R's, and so on -- she'll learn them all, at least for a while, from resources I provide or help her get access to. Some homeschooling parents choose to use a set curriculum, to make sure their young ones get exposed to the prescribed range of information about the world. We'll be going more free-form. I really think that a lot of curricula, while they may get across the desired information, do so in a way that deadens the innate desire to learn that we are all born with. And I suspect this happens whether the curricula are used in a school or at home. Whether's its doing math drills, reading books that are chosen more for which phonemes or sight words they contain than whether they have anything interesting to say, writing spelling words and using them in sentences, or learning history or science from some of the deadly-dull books I've encountered in my own educational journey (as student and teacher), the way it's done in school doesn't seem like the best way.

But the rub here is that no one can package "the best way" for my kids in a way that I can use. There's no short cut. I just have to strew interesting stuff in their path, be alert to what they want to do, and help them do it. A lot. From my current vantage point, this seems both infinitely simpler and far more complex than trying to follow a course of study with P (and eventually T).

I think it's possible to get bent way too far out of shape, worrying about this aspect of things. One of the most useful things Sandra Dodd has to say (for me so far, at least) is, "Read a little, try a little, wait a little, watch." So, no more agonizing. Starting now, I just have to face any demons that get in the way of connecting awarely with my kids, as much as I can figure out how to do.

Unschooling could be my precious and thus-far-elusive ticket to the present moment, and thus to my kids having a more real connection with me than any so far. Rather than focusing on the challenges or difficulties we may face, that's where I want my mind to be.

And I recognize that blogging is not being in the present moment. But I do want to keep you, my interested friends and family, in the loop. And I do want to assuage any anxiety about what I will have to refer to if the district asks for documentation of what we've been doing. Soooo... present moment first. Blogging to savor and reflect on it afterward. A little compromise I hope will be worth making.