Tuesday, March 11, 2008

PS Is Starting To Look Good

How often do I have to look at the sulky face, hear "I hate school", and punish for the slamming of books? If I put him back in public school, he'd still do all this stuff but not at home all day. I'd only have to hear it for a couple of hours after school and in the morning. It's hard not to take it personally when you've worked so hard to come up with an interesting way to present something, replace a written lesson with a movie, activity or field trip only to be met with a bored, annoyed, disgusted sigh.
His goal is to get up, speed through everything, and be DONE.
No joy in learning, no enjoyable discussions about what he's studying, none of that. All it does is make me resentful and him manipulative. Homeschooling brings all character flaws in parent and child front and center!
Of course, that's a lot of the point, isn't it? Because hsing is about character training as well as academics. If I can keep in my mind, truly REMEMBER that he whined as much about regular school - well, actually he didn't. Some classes he hated, some he enjoyed, he wouldn't do homework if it took any more than answering a few questions, okay he complained about that too.
He's 13 so I know he'll be dealing with drugs, crime, all that at public school. He never was happy with other kids at school, he had plenty of friends but was dismayed at the way these kids behaved. They were disrespectful, disruptive, and some were just plain mean. He was annoyed at them for treating OTHER kids badly, and being rude to the teachers too. Some teachers have no business being a teacher, he saw some outlandish behavior from a couple of them as well. My boy gained a wonderful education in ps for years but also learned to be totally antisocial.
I need to make more of an effort to introduce him to or teach him about heroes. All kinds of heroes, the ones who are famous but mostly I want to point out everyday heroes. Our friends and family who go out of their way to help someone else, companies that are honest in their business practices, police and fire fighters, doctors, missionaries, people who take seriously the command to love our neighbor and to care for the earth. The ones we usually hear about are those who have done something wrong, selfish, illegal, dishonest. But compared to how many are out there trying to excel - I don't know, I wonder what the statistics really are. Really, for every retail clerk that's grumpy and lazy, how many are friendly and helpful, happy to do a good job and taking pride in their work? There are MANY. That's the attitude I want my boy to learn, pride in his work, and gratefulness that he has the ability to do it.