“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
- Pogo (Walt Kelly)
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Time seems to be my enemy these days. There is so much I want to accomplish before the end of our school year, but I am clearly not going to reach my goal. Every day we seem to run out of time and end up leaving one or more items “undone” on our list of subjects or activities.
Make our own cuneiform clay tablet? Not today. Create a 3D mobile of the solar system? Uh-uh, no time this afternoon. Build a scale model of Noah’s
(OK, I made up that last one. I never intended to do that. Granted, it crossed my mind... but only for a moment, I swear!)
Actually, I don’t really plan all that many activities. I did plan for the cuneiform tablet project, because it was actually do-able (a little bit of air-drying clay, a chopstick, and a rolling pin to flatten the clay into a tablet shape, and you’re ready to go). But it’s more than just the fun activities that go by the wayside.
In part, I believe this is because I set some pretty ambitious goals for each day, perhaps bordering on unrealistic. Can you cover math, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, Bible, science, and social studies (history, culture, geography) every day? What about fine arts? Handwriting? Typing? Phys Ed?
At the same time, I don’t know how much time to allot for certain activities or for teaching a new concept. Should math take an hour? Should it take more? Less? If I plan on math only taking an hour, but we really spend 90 minutes on it, is that because I overestimated the amount of work that could be accomplished in an hour? Did I spend too much time on introducing the concept? Did I assign too much seat work? Or is my son simply wasting time daydreaming, dawdling, and generally procrastinating? (This last possibility is most definitely a contributor factor to our time problem, but not the sole cause.)
Veteran homeschoolers keep reassuring me, “Don’t worry! You’ll figure it out!” In the meantime, the perfectionist in me feels like a complete failure because we aren’t even coming close to completing our daily “to-do” list. I hate looking at my weekly lesson plans and seeing all these unchecked boxes and circled items with a big fat ? beside them – as in, when we will ever get back to this?!
If I were going to be perfectly honest, I’d have to confess that time, itself, is not the enemy… rather, it is my inability to wisely manage the time I do have. For now, I’ll chalk some of that up to being a novice at this homeschooling thing. Y’all are buying that… right?
2 comments:
There's absolutely no way you'll EVER get that many subjects completed in one day. Sorry! I've read that for the subjects that your child really dislikes (for us it's writing) to have them do it no longer than 15-20 minutes and to use a timer. Sometimes I have to use the timer thing with math, too, because, like you said, daydreaming hits.
Oh, I know... I don't really try to cover all that in a day.
But it's mind-boggling all the subjects to be covered over the course of year, then deciding which ones get daily treatment, which ones get hit maybe 3x a week, etc. It would be so easy allow the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic... and science and history) crowd out everything else, like fine arts, foreign language, etc. So, I can see it's going to be a struggle for me to keep everything well balanced!
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