A friend of mine told me that I might be better just to put her in public schools, let her find out the hard way how easy she's really got it. He has a point. Being in school and having to work six hours out of every day, get up before the sun rises, and then come home to have homework on top of it all would be a great way to show her exactly how easy her two to four hours of homeschooling on a normal day really is. She'll recognize how nice it is to eat when she wants, nap when she's tired, and take breaks whenever the mood suits her. She'll start to understand how nice homeschool play dates really are. There's a lot to be said about public schools in that regard. She'll have so much less time to screw around the way she does. It'll be nice for her to see that I'm not really being so mean after all!
That's when he added the part that made me want to scream with frustration. This one phrase, no matter how who says it, always makes me want to scream. They seem to think that this is such an easy and logical conclusion that everyone must simply agree! "It will free up a lot of time too."
Really? So, instead of getting up when my older boys get up, around eight in the morning, I'll have to drag myself out of bed at five am to get dressed, make sure my daughter eats breakfast, is dressed in an appropriate way, and has all the supplies she'll need. After that I'll have to walk her down to the bus stop, or drive her down to the school myself. Once she's done with that, I'm a little more free for a while. I've got the rest of the afternoon, mostly, to homeschool my older son and manage to run all my errands, Then I have to make sure I'm there to pick her up. This means I have to give up homeschool play dates and field trips because I have to be home in time to pick up his sister. If I was going to send them all to school, then I'd have two school drop-offs to worry about with an elementary school student and a preschool student. I'd have to drag out the baby for both cases. Then it would be time to bring the kids home and my daughter's incredibly frustrating fights over homeschool would start again with her homework. By the time that was done I'd have to cook dinner and it would be time to send all the kids to bed. I'd have to go to bed not long after that. My life would be run around school schedules, days off, summer vacation, and everything else. Then there would be possible calls about grades, behavior, getting my children into the programs they needed to be if they don't get into them. Over half my day during the week would be run by school. My whole life, in truth, would revolve around school.
Let's look at the flip side of this scenario. As things stand I can get up with my kids around eight. We spend the morning doing our school work. In reality, homeschooling takes an average of two hours out of any day, though sometimes we push it and go for four. We generally do that before lunch and the rest of the day is pretty free. We rearrange our schedules as need be for appointments and homeschool events. Sometimes we even skip school during the week all together because the time gets made up on weekends or over the summer. We tend to work more in the summer than we do in the school year because it's just too hot and miserable to go out here in Texas. We'd all rather just stay in when it's cool. I go run my errands when I need to during the day, sometimes I even wait until after dinner so I can go by myself. If I really need to I bring the kids along because it's a good place to learn some life skills. You can learn a lot at the post office, grocery store, or wherever else. We just take our lessons on the road those days. Typically our home schooling is done while we're running errands rather than at home, so I end up being able to kill two birds with one stone. I have more time to knit, write, relax, and I feel less stressed about everything because the only schedules I have to keep are those of my own making. It's positively freeing to be a homeschooling family because I end up spending very little of my time dedicated to educating my kids. On top of that, I end up getting a lot more "homeschooling" done than I intend to on any given day because we end up doing arts and crafts, play games, or get into discussions. In truth, I only spend two to four hours actively educating my children on any given day, but my children are probably being educated close to twelve or thirteen hours on any one day. Of course, it's hard to prove or estimate for certain because a lot of it is things none of us really spend much time thinking on, but there's no way to deny it's happening if you take a good look at our family life.
Then there's the cost of homeschooling. Everyone says homeschooling is so expensive. Many curriculums will cost you nearly a thousand dollars per child. If you've got two or three kids to worry about, that's a lot of money! That's a cost you incur every year, though in some cases you can get away with passing the books and assignments down if you're thrifty. You just don't get any of the help with the costs from the company providing the materials. There's the cost of arts and crafts supplies and other things that might not be included in your program as well, travel for homeschooling events, maybe the cost of a local co-op. Community sports, art classes, and everything else that many homeschooling students do for socialization come at a cost as well. If you think about it, homeschooling isn't always cheap, though there are some families that manage to be thrifty enough. The truth is, you're never going to be able to homeschool for free. There will always be costs for travel and supplies, but you can make do with a lot of things that are really inexpensive or all together free.
Public schools, on the other hand, are not as "free" as everyone thinks they are. Public school comes with a lot of hidden costs. School supplies in this area are more than a little insane. Children are required to have two sixty-four color boxes of crayons
last I saw. They had requirements on glue sticks. There's always going to be pens, pencils, sharpeners, and erasers. I think they were required to have markers as well. Each student was required to bring a box of tissues and Clorox wipes
as well. The Clorox wipes bothers me because I know what's in those chemical cleaners and I'm not comfortable with my child using them as though they were nothing. There's the obvious need for backpacks, notebooks, paper, folders, and all of that as well. Many of these items can't just be carried over from last year. They need to be replaced yearly. If you catch everything on sale you're easily looking at over a hundred dollars in school supplies to start the year for each child. This always drove me nuts because I didn't understand why a child couldn't come in with a tin of last year's crayons and call it good. It seems so wasteful to just replace the crayons every year because last years crayons work just as well as new ones and generally aren't all used up. They don't even do anything productive with the old ones, such as use them to color wax for candle making. It just seems very wasteful.Yes, that still seems like a low cost in comparison to a homeschool curriculum, but if you look at it, a homeschool family can get along just fine with less than that. After all, there's no real need for new backpacks, folders, and all of that. You buy it when you run out or have a need for something you don't have. All of that money spent on two boxes of new crayons of a specific count or higher every year could be put towards an inexpensive arts and crafts project or be put towards admission to some field trip.
Schools charge for field trips too, so school supplies aren't the only expense. If the kids are doing something outside the classroom they have the cost of field trips, possibly lunch out, and other sorts of things. That is, if a child is lucky enough to have their class go on a field trip. It seems like down here most students spend their whole day in the classroom. My kids go on far more field trips than your average school student!
So, after all of those expenses, you then have the cost of new school clothes. Yes, kids need new clothes pretty much every year, but homeschool kids can get away with a lot more. If my daughter wants to wear her nightgown to homeschool every day, she can. If she only wants to wear hand-me-down stuff from her friends that's all ripped up, she can. If she decides for whatever reason to shave her head or get a mohawk (which I kind of hope she never does!) she can without the school telling me I have to make her wear a wig. Her clothes don't risk becoming a red-flag for the school's dress code if she's wearing jeans that were all ripped up, or that she or one of her friends have decided to draw all over because they felt like it. There's no pressure to buy brand name clothing or something with Hannah Montana plastered all over it because it's trendy. As a result, most of our new clothes have been hand-me-downs in all kinds of condition, and I don't care that my daughter's style seems to dictate "the more used and abused, the better". It also means that I don't have to worry about having "school clothes" and "play clothes" for my kids because I don't care too much if they beat up their clothes. Rips can be patched. Stains aren't something to worry much about and in some cases almost seem to be badges of honor. Clothes get retired when they're worn out, but it takes a lot of wear to put them into the retirement pile. They see some great use before that.
In truth, I think I'm better off with my kids not being in school. I get more out of all my time and energy spent. My kids learn more even when I'm not trying to teach them. The schedule is super flexible. I spend significantly less money. In the end, I think we're all happier about it!
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