Here We Go Again

Greetings! It's been, what? Five months or so? I've missed you! Allow me to explain my absence. It's simple really: my computer broke (thank you, Tropical Storm Otto!), and it is very, very difficult to blog without a computer. (Alright, yes, I could have used my iPhone. I've been plagued these past months by a niggling sense of guilt over the fact that I didn't at least try to post a blog or two from my multitalented phone. I mean, there's an app for that! But I just balked at the thought of attempting to compose an intelligible, interesting and pertinent post using a keyboard smaller than my library card. Maybe that calls into question my commitment to this blog, but I contend that it confirms my (oftentimes questionable) grasp on sanity.) So, where was I? Ah yes, the irksome difficulty of blogging sans computer. Well, I have recently solved this problem! I have purchased a new computer! And upon booting up my new MacBook for the first time, I immediately sat down to write a new blog post. (OK, so I spent a week or so surfing the web, shopping for stuff like work shoes for my husband, birthday gifts for my son and his buddy, face lotion for me. But a week is pretty close to "immediately" if you take the macro view.)

So what have my son and I been doing in our homeschool all this time? Ummmmm, a lot? How can I even begin to sum up?!? I think the most important thing that has happened since we returned from our Stateside odyssey is that I have relaxed quite a bit. When my son and I started out on this homeschooling adventure, I was--how shall I say--FRAUGHT WITH ANXIETY about assuming responsibility for my son's education. Thanks to the passage of time, votes of confidence from friends and family members and insightful conversations with my parents and in-laws, the anxiety has abated. I realized that I was responsible for my son's education before we started homeschooling, with positive results. (Oprah has "Aha!" moments; I have "Duh!" moments.) Just because we officially began to homeschool didn't mean that I had to suddenly start doubting my abilities as parent/educator. I also realized that I needed to stop comparing our homeschool to traditional preschools, that it's OK for our homeschool to look a little less structured, a little more "organic" than regular schools. As my dad reminded me, "normal" preschool teachers have to constantly tackle crowd control issues at the same time they are trying to educate their gaggle of little tykes. The structure that permeates most preschools is necessary; the schools could not function without it. Well, I don't have a gaggle of little tykes in my school so I don't have to impose structure strictly to maintain order. This allows my son and I to approach learning much more freely, to follow his interests and indulge his curiosity.

In the interest of being less structured, I decided to simulate my mother-in-law's pink shelves here at home, and thus keep our homeschool materials out at all times. (In this way, my son could practice pouring or stacking the graduated blocks or what have you whenever the urge struck him; my husband or I would always be on hand to assist him, if necessary.) I was worried that finding suitable shelves would pose a problem. The shelves we had been using for our homeschool sessions were wobbly, beige-y gray and (gasp) plastic. Ceding some of our already meager living space for the sake of allowing my son unlimited access to his homeschool materials seemed a noble sacrifice to make, but I just couldn't stomach the idea of having to look at those ugly Home Depot shelves day in and day out. But, as I've mentioned before, we have no Ikea down here; nice, sturdy, wooden and inexpensive furniture is awfully hard to come by. However, in a truly serendipitous moment, my husband happened upon a pair of discarded wooden shelves next to the dumpsters behind his restaurant just days after my son and I returned home from our trip. We (and by "we" I mean my husband and his business partner) put them in the back of a school bus yellow pickup truck, drove them home and carried them up the stairs to our apartment. It took a little elbow grease to get them looking good, but it was well worth the effort.

The before photo.

Helping me paint.

Blue shelves in action!

Postscript: My husband and were talking over dinner the other night (a very rare occurrence given his 100-hour work weeks of late, thanks to the recent reopening of his restaurant in a bigger, better space in downtown Cruz Bay), when he gently suggested that a tad more structure in our homeschool sessions wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I had to admit, I'd swung to the other end of the structure spectrum for a little while there; we weren't homeschooling so much as unschooling. While I admire the unschooling movement, the Montessori educational philosophy is what really resonates with me. So it's time to swing back a bit, to be somewhat more structured in our homeschooling. Notes on those adventures to follow...