This week I will be submitting my report for our youngest daughter for her homeschool academy, and it will be the last one I do as a fulltime home educator. This week will complete fifteen years of me teaching our kids at home. It is fifteen years gone that we went in to talk to a teacher who had supposedly been concerned with our oldest, and she ambushed us with her reasons for not believing in his abilities. It was clear she had a personal dislike, and we made the decision right then to pull him from the state school in England. I taught him for four years there, and have spent every year since either caring fulltime for my grandparents, or homeschooling one or more of our children.
Apart from my wife, I don’t think there is a person who fully understands this as a sort of retirement for me. And now, at 50, I need to figure out the move forward. I expect to handle some of the kid’s elective course next year, and beyond. There will always be things to each them at home, and on the homestead. And where we have made the choice to school them at home, I kind of owe it to them to be there for them till they are able to build up a social circle of their own. I am sat where I can see my eight year old now, and she does really well with the friendship we have together. She is always asking me questions, and I am always doing my best to answer them, and help her to grow up to be a compassionate and thoughtful person.
They say kids need to go to school to learn to socialize. That is the worst place for it. Nobody they go to school with is going to teach them how to behave in polite society.
I have been able to raise four amazing kids. I am still doing so. I just get to step back as teacher, and constant caregiver. Youngest will join her sister in the academy’s virtual bridge program next year, and she will sign into Zoom meeting and learn with other students and a teacher.
My greatest temptation is to really move our little homestead forward. Missus and I would both like to make a living on it, and it would fall to me to get a great deal of the work done to do that. I am happy to keep cooking and doing things that help the others out. But I would like to finish up the place and fix up the things we have already built that could have been done better. Then there are the things we could make, and sell. So much has to get done first. So much.
I expect to finish Language Arts tomorrow, complete the lesson reports, and turn them in. That done; fifteen years.