Ends and Beginnings

The signs are all there. The scents of harvested fields are in the air. The crowds in the school supply aisle at the local Wally World. If you look closely, you might spot a patch that is no longer green in the backdrop of trees across the fields.

Can you hear it? The rumble of school buses, the grumble of the no longer leisurely students. Yup, it is time to start schooling again.

We don't wave good by to our boys to send them off to school. To listen to them, we torment them with books and videos and studying. For some reason, the vision in my head about homeschooling is not quite what plays itself out at home. We persist nevertheless. They wonder what it would be like to go to school, but there is much that happens in school that has nothing to do with education, such as bullying and peer pressure. The traumatic experiences are more deeply ingrained in the long term memory than this weeks spelling words will be. My boys cannot appreciate the absence of the negative parts of the school experience from their lives, but their dad and I can, and that is why as a parent, I take on the challenging task of homeschooling.

Tomorrow is the start of a new year. Time to fill that blank slate!