So, it has come to my attention that apparently it is the opinion of some that I am "spoon feeding" my kids when it comes to homeschooling my kids. When I first heard this, I was feeling very defensive. I was angry. I was ready to fight. Not exactly the most Christian reaction, I know. I've given much thought to why someone might feel that way, and in what I presume to be a negative way; why I reacted so strongly; and I've reflected on how I'm handling homeschooling my kids.
There are some things that I need to work on. I need to be more patient. Okay, I need a lot more patience. *chuckles* Especially with Bryan. I had very high expectations with him, and well, he's not living up to my expectations. I should have kept the same philosophy for this as I try to everything else, and I didn't. Afterall, the teachers had been telling me that Bryan would be a "straight A" student if he only did the work. My experience was that he would barely do his homework if I knew he had it and wouldn't even bring it home if he thought I didn't know about it. So why did I expect much more from him with homeschooling? But now that I have lowered my expectations a bit, hopefully I can be less frustrated and more patient.
In thinking about why someone would feel that I were spoon feeding my kids, I realized that honestly, if anyone who has actually watched me work with the kids on a consistent basis, and still thought I spoonfed my kids frankly didn't know what they heck they were talking about and didn't understand what teaching was really about.
I did not choose an easy curriculum for my kids. It's a very involved curriculum that requires many more hours of work than most homeschooling curriculums. My kids average 5-6 hours of hardcore academics everyday. That's not including PE, Art, and Music. The reading comprehension is a bit tough, even for me at times. The English curriculum, is actually teaching my kids how to diagram sentences, as well as parts of speech that are much more detailed than what the public schools teach these days. The Catechism is more concise and detailed than any of the CCD classes have offered; in fact I'm considering not sending them to the CCD classes because of the misinformation and inconsistencies they've been taught up until this point. Anyway, I am not sure why, but I felt compelled to share that. Take it as you will.
Now, I have to ask, what is a teacher? Or more importantly, what makes a remarkable teacher? Is she someone that rushes through the curriculum, with the main agenda being to touch on everything, with little concern on whether the student gets the information? Afterall, that's how our public school systems are set up. A teacher in a public school must cover a predetermined amount of information, and undoubtedly, some of the children do get left behind. Or is a teacher, a truly remarkable teacher, one that gets to know the student, his stregnths and weakness, and tries to accomodate those to optimize the learning?
So what does spoonfeed teaching mean? Am I giving the information too freely? How is that possible when I am the teacher and he is the student? First of all, my idea of spoonfeeding, is what I had when I was in school. I rarely opened the textbook in most of my classes. Now, I did take good notes. But I wrote down what the teacher told me, studied it (or reviewed it before the test), and did fine. I felt like that was spoonfeeding me. Now that I'm going to school online, where I am responsible for reading the material and learning it on my own, it's HARD! I have to do all the work. Now with that said, I don't spoon feed much to Ana. This is because she has the self-discpline to sit down, do the work, study the material and learn it. I do help her with her history. Some of the review questions require her to read the chapter as a whole and then deduce an answer from many points made in the text. The kids are not used to this kind of comprehension. It's not "spoonfed" to them by having the answers in the text word for word. So yes, she still needs help with that. Bryan, on the other hand, if I left him be, he's not motivated to get it done. I do need to hound him to make sure it gets done. And there are some subjects, like English, particularly the compositions, that he flat out will not do without me sitting with him coaxing him. I do read alot of his stuff to him, similiar to how I'd be lecturing. Bryan is a stronger reader than Ana, and so I'm not as concerned with him not getting enough practice reading. My concern with him is that he be exposed to the information and that he learns it. If that means I have to "spoonfeed" it to him, then by all means, I'm going to do it.
So with that said, is there something wrong with the way I'm handling it? Should I just leave my kids to do the work on their own, even if I know that if I don't help them, read it to them, explain further, etc that they wouldn't get it, or even do it? I know my kids. I know which subjects they can work on by themselves and which ones they need a little nudge. I'm determined to give them the best education they can get. Am I letting them down? That is my biggest fear, of course! But rest assured, no matter how I choose to go about it, I'm keeping their best interests in mind and doing what I feel needs to be done for them to get the education they need to succeed.
