Mom Is Teaching

Last night a group of homeschooling moms met to eat chocolate, drink tea, and share the ups and downs. It was like a breath of fresh air. When you spend your entire day with kids getting out to be with other adults relaxes and refreshes you. I came home bubbling over and completely renewed.

We talked a bit about our experiences with public schools, both with ourselves and our kids. As I drove home I thought about my own school experiences. About the dull history books we never got through and the uncle who shared history in stories he told from his rocking chair. About the ordinary science classroom and the extraordinary days on the side of the river getting dirty and asking a million questions. And I thought about math.

I could never do math. It just was one of those subjects that I could not grasp. I remember the exact moment math became painful to me. I was in the First grade, we were learning addition. It suddenly clicked in my head that when adding with nine you could subtract 1 then put that 1 in front. So 9+8 would be take 1 from 8, 7, and place the 1 in front. 17. Excited that I finally got it I ran to the teacher and shared my new understanding. In return I was punished for not “doing it right”. I gave up on math.

Skip ahead to my sophomore year in high school. I entered that year in a remedial math class. I could barely multiply and divide. I hated math. My teacher that year was a young man straight out of college. It was his first year teaching, and the only year he taught at my school. For whatever reason he decided that he knew I could do math, that I was better than I knew. Each day he would give the class their lesson, assign their work, then sit with me in the back of the room and teach me math one on one. He taught me how to do math my way instead of the “right way”. When I graduated high school I had already complete Algebra levels 1, 2, and 3, Geometry, and Calculus. As well as taking Chemistry and Physics that require math. I was a math whizz, I got it, it made sense. But I never would have if I had not gotten that one on one teaching. Though, looking back now it was at the expense of the other students in my class.

I want my sons to get whatever they need to learn. I do not want them to be held back from something they could be great at because they aren’t doing it the “right way”. I want them to gt all the one on one attention they need to thrive. My math experience is just one of the reasons I knew I would homeschool. Not every student is lucky to gt that one on one attention, I know there were 20+ other students in my math class who were not getting half of what I was getting. What if each of them had been able to sit down and relearn math as I had? How many of those who were in my remedial math class would have gone on to become great in math? We’ll never know.

While my kids may grow up to be truly bad at math they will always get as much as they need to succeed. They will never be passed on or overlooked. It is a promise I can’t give them in public school.

homeschooling, education, public school