Porn and the Homeschooling Mom
September 23, 2008
(Whoops, comments are turned on now.)
For those who are uninitiated in the world of homeschooling, there are catalogs come in the mail. Gigantic catalogs filled with things to learn, books, crafts, items that promise to make my children smarter while they do little more than eat their Pop-Tarts, organic of course. Ahem.
The catalogs? I love them all. I have a stack of them on my bedside table, which I peruse nightly.
The hefty catalogs are my porn. I sit down with the catalogs, various colored highlighters, those sticky post it notes, and my fantasies. Oh and what fantasies they are. When the enormous Rainbow Resource catalog comes in the mail, all life as we know it in my house stops for several days while I drool over each and every one of it’s 1200+ pages.
“Ooooooh, I’d love this,” I say, my breath catching a little in my chest. I imagine my children and I making an authentic mummy out of a roaster chicken, various spices, and some salt. What a great learning experience that would be. And I am sure I can find a place to store that in my house for a few months. Reality = NOT.
“Oooooooh, look at this,” I say. I imagine constructing the entire war of 1812 out of paper mache, dryer lint, and pipe cleaners. Who would NOT want to do that? Reality = Uh, me.
“Oh my word!” I harass my husband while he pretends to be asleep because he knows better than to discuss my crazy world with me. We can construct DNA chains out of gum drops and toothpicks! Maybe using those disgusting green ones to show various mutations, or something. Clearly I need to learn this too. Reality = Step away from the candy.
Luckily I am not crazy enough to have lost all rational thought and reasoning. Usually I can pass these types of things over. Not that these types of projects are inherently bad things to do, if you enjoy them and more importantly your children do.
It’s the smaller types of things now that I have trouble with. They promise great things and I have trouble not falling for their insidious promises. The things that promise to help your child “see math in a new exciting way” or promise to make your child love studying grammar, without them even knowing they are studying it. Or the huge magnetic wall chart where we can track our daily weather for the year and feed the budding meteorologist in us all. When really, how many ways are there to make memorizing your multiplication tables exciting? And a notebook, pen, wall thermometer and eyes are all you really need to track the weather daily.
At this point though, nine years (HOLY COW WHERE HAS TIME GONE??) into my homeschooling journey, I realize where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I realize that everything that sounds cool and educational to me, might very well not be to the children. And that lots of these so called educational projects are a huge pain in the ass and time suck.
People ask me all the time, “How do you make your kids do _____?” (fill in the blank) The thing is I don’t make my children do anything. I don’t think you can. Their education is very much theirs, not mine. There are things that I want them to accomplish, obviously, but I consider it my job to make it interesting enough that they do not balk at doing it. If there is a concept or a subject that my children are bored with, the onus is on me to change that. It means that I am not doing my job properly and need to approach the topic in a new way.
That doesn’t mean I do not embark on projects that I really should know better than attempting by now.
cough ::building an Egyptian pyramid out of sugar cubes:: cough
It’s just that now I can usually distinguish between the things that would be beneficial for my children, and those things that are better left to my bedroom, my highlighter, and my active imagination.
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I am addicted to Rainbow Resource. I knew as soon as you said porn and homeschooling that HAD to be the catalog you were talking about.
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:10 pmWheew! You sure are brave and I’m sure the kids are having a blast, with the sugary pyramids and all.
On another note I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your blog. I recently ran across it from Daring Young Mom’s and have spent the past few weeks reading every post that I could still see from 2005 till now. Keep up the hard work, you are a wonderful mother and person and I’m thankful that you are sharing a little piece of your life. You’ve made me laugh out loud and that isn’t really easy. :o)
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:12 pmI am no longer homeschooling but I still consider ordering the “fun” educational items with the thought that I could do some “homeschooling” after school…Not. And, I still drool and offer suggestions to my kids in case there is a subject that we MUST study more. My kids just mostly want to play so I leave the “school teacher” in me on the side lines for now. You are right about it being like porn though. I totally relate! For me though it’s been the Sonlight catalog…you can never have too many books.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 pmi love these posts every year when your catalogs arrive!
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 pmI remember those catalogs. My mom homeschooled me for three years and now homeschools the many remaining kids at home. We did some of those crazy projects. I think I even remember some of the things I learned from them….
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:50 pmAlso, that is the best title of a blog post ever.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:50 pmDid I ever tell you about the time we mummified a chicken when studying Ancient Egypt? That was definitely a case of a project that should not have been embarked upon
Chris says: YES! I do remember that!!!
September 24th, 2008 at 4:31 amI’m also homeschooling and know exactly what you mean. Our mailman will come to the door with a package and ask about what we are learning this week because we are always getting interesting things in the mail. My favourites are the freebies I find on-line to order.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:42 amAmen!!
I have 5 kids (ages 16 to 6) and have homeschooled for eternity. I so relate to this.
I don’t do crafts. I don’t clean up from crafts. This is the reason I take them to co-op at a young age - so that one day a week they can mess up someone else’s space and I don’t have to think it up, buy the crud, or clean it up!!
September 24th, 2008 at 8:44 amI am a regular reader of your blog and just beginning the homeschooling journey with my kindergartener. I loved this post . . . up until the very end. I’m struggling with finding the fine line between making learning fun (”approaching the topic in a new way”) and realizing that some things are just hard at first and take time and practice. Is it really our responsibility to make things enjoyable to our children whenever they aren’t enjoying it? Or are there some things that they just have to plug away at. I just don’t know.
Chris says: Well, first off I was talking about the elementary school years, the middle school years have found my kids self motivated and willing to plug through the boring or find their own areas of interest in a subject. And really isn’t that our goal?
I was mainly talking of all those extra things that looks so great in the catalog. You buy them and then they sit there mocking you from the bookshelf for years.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:12 amYes, there are things that are not fun and you have to plug away at them… multiplication tables, grammar rules come to mind.
But things like history and science? I absolutely feel like I need to make them accessible and exciting and not just a bunch of boring dry dates and charts to memorize. Do I always succeed? Of course not.
I wish that some public school teachers thought like you do. Some of them I know they do but they do not have the time nor the resources to be able to making learning fun while there are 30 other students in the class… UGH
September 24th, 2008 at 9:19 amOrganic Pop-Tarts?! Is there such a thing? OK - just looked it up. Who knew?!
September 24th, 2008 at 10:34 amLove this post…just wish you could come on over and give me (a homeschooling newby) some pointers on what to try…and more importantly NOT to try!
September 24th, 2008 at 3:32 pmIf you don’t want to do a chicken you can do apple slices (mummies) and not take up azs much space… same concept. Did this with my students in 5th grade. They loved it.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:54 pmSpeak for yourself - I want it ALL. Plus another set of blocks.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:39 pmI have an entire shelf of those catalogs - I just had my highlighter out this afternoon while we were outside. The kids were playing and I was dreaming
Now we did make the sugar cube pyramids, but they were not very big. What do you do with a finished sugar cube pyramid anyway?
September 24th, 2008 at 8:36 pmThanks for the inspiring, encouraging post! I am in my 7th year of homeschooling, and I a. don’t know where the time went, and b. am just waking up from a bad unschooling nightmare, where my oldest children are dull and uneducated. So, I’m back to the curriculum drawing board hoping I have what it takes to slog through the boring stuff. This stuff does really work, doesn’t it?
September 24th, 2008 at 8:48 pmFirst off - we’ve been homeschooling for 9 years as well! Started with our now 13 yr old. Only 4 of our 6 kids are old enough for school and I sadly think that I have to teach 2 more kids to read the Bob books….they make me fall asleep.
The Veritas Press catalog is my choice. I have like every page highlighted.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:29 pmwow……seriously……i would love to mummify a chicken..honestly……that sounds really interesting!!!…..
September 25th, 2008 at 4:14 amUm, hubby mumified the roaster chicken with the kids. He did it with another Dad who happens to be the town mortician. Between my husband, the physicist, and the mortuary guy my kids learned way more about this topic than they thought possible.
Julie
p.s. I made them take it home and store it in there refrigerator. I refused to have that thing in MY HOUSE!
September 25th, 2008 at 10:31 am“If there is a concept or a subject that my children are bored with, the onus is on me to change that.”
Sounds like you’re doing a great job, even when things you thought were going to be fun fall a little flat.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:02 pmI teach math in a public school, and I couldn’t agree with you more - in my opinion, much could be done to fix American education if more educators, at school AND at home, approached learning in this way.
how do you teach stuff you don’t understand very well? like some type of geometry/algebra/calculus/biology? bec i have trouble helping my FOURTH grader w/ homework sometimes!
September 26th, 2008 at 12:52 amp.s. i am so afraid for you of the weirdos you might get to your sight by putting the words porn and school in your blog post!
September 26th, 2008 at 12:57 amAwww, MAN! So the chicken mummifying should be skipped? Because we’re just now at that point and I’ve heard from several people that it’s a project better left in the book. But it sounds like it could be so FUN! *sigh* Oh well!
My homeschool porn is the Love 2 Learn catalog!
September 26th, 2008 at 6:26 pm