Why We Started Homeschooling (It Wasn't Really a Choice)
We started homeschooling four of the kids this year, and I want to be honest, it was not really a choice so much as a series of things happening to us until this was the only option left.
The school in town is still standing, the building is fine, but half the teachers left for Canada last year and the ones who stayed are stretched so thin that my oldest was in a class of forty two kids being taught by someone covering three subjects they never trained for. The school still has a building is not the same sentence as the school still has a school, if that makes sense.
So now our kitchen table doubles as a classroom four days a week, and I am teaching math I have not touched since I was in school myself, off a curriculum that keeps adding units about Republic history that feel more like ministry press releases than actual history, which, sure, fine, we read it, we also fact check it after, quietly, at the table.
The younger three still go in person, mostly because I genuinely do not have the hours in the day to teach seven kids at seven different levels and also do bookkeeping and also make dinner out of government cheese, something has to give, and today it was my dignity, but the kids ate.
Some days this is fine. Some days I am doing fractions with a toddler climbing on my back while also trying to remember if I already fed the baby, and I think, this is not what I planned for myself at twenty two, and then I think, well, none of us planned for any of this, so, fractions it is.