March-April 2009 Selected Content

Waiting for a Bad Teacher

The convinced parent isn't so sure that either a positive diagnosis or subsequent drugs will magically make everything all right. He's the same parent who just couldn't understand why his daughter was having so much trouble in school with simple addition.

One day, in the comfort of their home, he sat down with the little girl and talked about addition. After getting a handle on the situation, he encouraged her to use her fingers to count. That light bulb of connection, so precious to homeschooling parents who have witnessed it, lit up in her mind.

The session lasted less than an hour. The little girl understood what addition was all about. Dad enjoyed his first taste of sweet homeschooling success.

His own connection light bulb also burned even brighter, but there's that unconvinced parent. Sure, Mom realizes things could be better. She even knows that, at some point, a learning hell is likely to break loose. But, so far at least, the family feels they've been lucky. Heretofore, the precocious little girl has had "good teachers." All two of them.

And so, together the convinced and unconvinced parents bide their time, awaiting the "bad teacher" the convinced parent is certain will eventually come along before changing the situation. Fortunately for the daughter, the odds are in the family's favor.

Back in homeshooling's Stone Age, countless parents who ran into bad teachers didn't know there were options. Even fewer had options in place. It's reassuring to know that a 21st century family is aware that homeschooling waits in the wings as an alternative when public schooling becomes unbearable, whether because of a bad teacher or other factors.

And yet, delaying the switch to homeschooling carries the same consequences today as it did decades ago. You can take the child out of school, but it takes time to get the school out of the child. The longer she's been in, the longer it takes to get it out.

A general rule of thumb is to allow a child who is just beginning to homeschool at least one month of "decompression" time for each year of school attendance. Remove this precocious first grader today, and it will likely take the family a month or so to slide into homeschooling. If that bad teacher appears when she hits fourth grade, decompression time grows to four months. Wait until eighth grade? You get the idea.

Another consequence is lost learning time. Most apparently, there is the loss suffered when a child spends additional time in a school where she is restricted to learning only about subjects required by the state's curriculum. However, also flying by as a family waits for the bad teacher are countless moments that, through homeschooling, would have been the child's own, with which she might delve deeply into personal interests, pursue passions, dream big, and meet the many interesting people who populate the world outside of the educational institution.

Then, perhaps most important of all, there is the loss of time spent together as a family. When life is driven by the school calendar, it's almost always lived in overdrive. How much healthier it is for all involved to spend as many years as possible experiencing life lived in accordance with the family's consciously chosen lifestyle, honoring the individual child's unique rhythm.

Waiting for a bad teacher is akin to waiting for a known tumor to grow malignant.In their own ways, both acts of waiting are unhealthy, and create additional damage that never needed to exist and require longer time periods from which to recover. Indeed,in both instances, there will be cases from which the sufferer never fully recovers.

Perhaps this family will buck the odds, and the child will sail through the school system without ever experiencing a bad teacher. Perhaps that tumor would disappear by itself. In either case, waiting is a gamble, and risky business.

© 2009, Linda Dobson