Schooling

As always, I’m going to try to work out my thoughts by writing them out, and sharing them with all of you.

I think when it has come to schooling, Knut and I have been on the same page pretty much all the time. We both want our kids to go to public school, as we feel it is so important for there to be a presence of Christian kids and Christian families in our public school system. We had no intention of going the private/Christian school route for a few reasons. One of them is the usual: money. The other is the fact that both of us knew people from both here and where I lived in Arizona, where kids grew up in Christian schools and were never really exposed to non-Christians, or a non-Christian culture, and college can be such a shock to that. Knowledge of God to those friends seemed boring, and commonplace. We never want that knowledge to be that way for our kids.

Don’t get me wrong, Knut and I both graduated from a Christian high school, which I attended for two years and he attended for one. I hope our kids will decide to go there someday too. However, there’s a difference between getting immersed in that culture for awhile, because it is such a fun culture, and living there your whole life.

As far as homeschooling, we’ve played around with the idea, but neither one of us has been fully onboard. We keep coming back to it over and over, and I don’t think it will ever be ruled out, but for now, we’re going the public school route.

I should say, there is such a spectrum to homeschooling, I think. There are those who do it poorly, and those who do it well. There are those who get their kids out and involved in their community, and those who just shelter their kids as long as they possibly can. We don’t want to go this route, unless we can have a plan to do it well.

We are near completing Silje’s first year of school. It was only kindergarten, and it was all day, 3 days a week. Here are some of my observations that I’d like to reflect on about our first year in the public school system.

First, her teacher was awesome. I don’t think we’ll ever get another teacher as awesome as she is. She sent us home with a weekly update. She gave us her work phone, and her home phone, to call her anytime. She let us know what they studied that week, and what they intended on studying the next week, so we could have talks with Silje about any possibly “if-y” topics in school. Two examples of topics we felt we should talk to Silje about before it was address in the classroom was the various holidays studied in the “winter holidays” session, and their unit on families, and how a family is defined.

When Silje is at school, the house is so peaceful, which surprised me. She’s not very loud. However, she and David aren’t fighting and bickering as kids their age often do when she is gone. I get more alone time with David, and he thrives on the days that she is at school, because he doesn’t feel as though he is living under her shadow.

Those are the really good things. Now for the annoying parts. First, Silje’s attitude when she comes home from school is usually terrible. Her attitude in general has become worse, and she has more and more of a feeling of entitlement, that we are fighting and compares herself to other kids much too often. She looks down to David since she has started school, and talks down to him. We are constantly correcting her on this. Constantly.

I don’t like seeing her like this, and the more we correct her, and she will not be corrected, the more I worry how to reach her, and how to help her understand. We’ll sit and talk about it over tea. We pray together. We talk about how God wants us to treat others. Still, whatever our efforts, it does not seem to be changing. Is it just her age, or is it going to school? I don’t know! Our relationship seems to becoming more distant as I feel like I can’t get her to open up about certain things, and with the younger kids, I’m not able to volunteer in her classroom as I had once hoped I could. My mother in law works, and has her parents to look after, etc. I just don’t feel like I have the resources at hand to ask others to watch the boys so I can spend more time with Silje at school. Knut and I have each been able to go on at least one field trip with her, but I don’t feel like that was enough. Not only that, I need to be spending time with the boys while they’re home!

I don’t mean to say she always has this attitude, but there’s been an attitude to deal with on days when she’s at school, and more often on other days as well. Part of me wonders that if we had more opportunities to correct this, it would be beneficial.

There is so much wasted time in her day, and that bothers me. The biggest part of this is her extremely long bus ride. It’s about an hour to school, and an hour home. That’s 2 hours of her day every day. She hates that, by the way, and it’s very obvious to me that those 2 hours are miserable for her. From what I can tell, she’s not bullied or anything, but is bored stiff. We’ve allowed her to bring books, toys, and I’ve started writing her letters on some days for her to read on the bus. It does not work for our family for me to bring her and pick her up every day. The gas money alone would be crazy. Waking the boys up from their nap in the afternoon to pick her up would make our evenings unbearable.

When I heard that so many homeschooling families only spend their morning in school, and their afternoon doing other activities because all the wasted time in a large school setting is cut out, I was surprised. The feeling of doing school all day long is daunting as I have so much else to do! The idea of spending some hours every morning doing school work with my kids doesn’t sound so terribly different than what I’m doing now: reading books, playing, talking, coloring.

I suppose there’s no point to all of this, but I’m just revisiting the thought again. As we make plan for this fall, we’ll need to figure out what to do. Both Knut and I are still leaning towards public school, but the homeschooling has again, not been ruled out. I’m dabbling at looking at homeschool curriculums, and trying to wrap my head around the concept again, to see if we could do it well. One plus would be that we could travel as we pleased in the winter when Knut has more free time, without regard to Silje missing school. We would just work around it.

We could study U.S. History in the capitol itself. We could take the kids on mission trips when they got older. There are so many awesome things about homeschooling, that it seems almost wrong to take it off of the table. However, we refuse to make any decision lightly, because in reality, it’s so scary. Parenthood is scary. You don’t know how many times I ask myself, especially at times like this: “Are we really screwing up our kids?” What if we make the wrong decision? What if we leave Silje in school, and she is over influenced by the world, and struggles with her faith? What if we school her at home and she has a tough time adjusting to the world when we get her there, and has a huge crisis?

When I dwell on all the ways we can royally screw up our kids, I start panicking. How can one not? It always leads me back to the same place, and the same prayer. We must, must release our kids to the Lord, because if we rely on ourselves we will screw up. We must pray, “Dear Lord, take my children and overwhelm them with your presence. Never leave them, and never give up on them. Take whatever we screw up, and turn it into something beautiful in them. Help them understand your plan, and open their eyes when we cannot.”

So what are we going to do? Well, we have to give our kids to God. Whether we are going to put Silje back in public school or decide to go the homeschooling route, I still don’t know.