The Bad News About Homeschooling

All homeschoolers should read this article by Misty Krasawski: The Bad News About Homeschooling

This is just a sample:  

And here’s more bad news: YOU will still be YOU. You will not wake up on the Monday after you make the decision to homeschool and find you’ve turned into Socrates, Anne Sullivan, Charlotte Mason, Lisa Whelchel or Sally Clarkson overnight. (Bummer, I know!) It will just be little old you, same as the day before, with all the same flaws, only now they’ll be thrown into horrifyingly sharp relief by the plight of being sandpapered 24 hours a day by the little blessings (students?) the Lord has graced you with. Sometimes it’s called sanctification. Sometimes it’s called painful. Sometimes it’s called homeschooling. . . 

There will be no girls-only lunches (unless all your children are girls, of course; at least not until someone’s old enough to babysit–and even then, not very often) and no real alone time during school days, no cleaning-out-the-closets-in-peace time, no time to rearrange the furniture forty different ways, because you will be too busy teaching English and Algebra and Physical Science and a bunch of other things you perhaps didn’t enjoy the first time around. Children deserve a chance to learn about God’s wonders, His orderliness and creativity and wisdom and power, through grammar and science and math and languages and all the history of all the world. It’s our job to teach them that it all revolves around Him. If you’re not a reader, you’re going to need to (gasp!) change. If you were “never good at math,” you’re going to need to (gasp!) change. Learning . . . it’s a difficult job, but someone’s gotta do it . . . and that someone is YOU! (See key phrase one.) It takes research and planning and tweaking and more research and more planning and more tweaking and a lot of hard work.