Reality

This week was spent debating whether cyber is truly the best fit for our situation. I have only had fleeting thoughts of traditional homeschooling, mostly due to the fact that I would have to document so much of what we are doing instead of the cyber school taking care of that for us. I feel sometimes like I spend too much time working through tedious, unnecessary material just because it's in the Lesson Plan. I bought a lot of educational material from many different places as soon as I made the decision to pull JT out of brick and mortar school. I never seem to have the time to supplement with those activities.

Two of my friends who are cyber schooling as well helped me work through my dilemma. I am a list person. I write lists for everything. I LOVE to check things off of the list. The problem with Calvert's material is that every lesson plan is laid out in list form. When I don't 'check' things off the list, my little mental dysfunction screams, "You can't skip that, you need to check it off the list!"

So yesterday I decided not to look at the list during our school day. I made up my own list and followed that instead. We did a little better. Last night, I went online and found a good site for challenging math word problems. Today instead of the monotonous worksheets, we did math that took up the whole chalkboard. We found the volume of two tubes we made out of paper. We calculated problems involving speed and distance. We had fun and JT learned useful math. He will still have no problem passing the math tests as long as I am sure to instruct him in their definitions and methods for specific problems. Hopefully as I work through my own behavior therapy I can come up with a happy medium that allows JT to learn with flexibility.

JT finally experienced his first virtual class on Wednesday. It is an enrichment class meant for 5th-8th graders. I signed him up anyway based on his reading level. The class had 4 students. JT is the youngest, but he did fine. I listened in for the whole session to help him with the little details of the technology. I think he'll be fine on his own for the next one. The kids had a good discussion on the elements of a mystery novel. They will be reading a book and doing enrichment activities covering math, art and history. The book is 'Chasing Vermeer'. The only problem is that the teacher only wants them to read the first 4 chapters before next week. JT had already read 3 before the class began. Luckily he's preoccupied reading 'The Fellowship of the Ring' for now. He's only a couple chapters from the end, so I'll have to throw something else his way to keep him from jumping ahead too far in the book for his class.

This week was not the best week we have had. I think JT had an ok week, but I had a sudden realization; I will be doing this until 2021. With our youngest in K this year and his projected graduation date in mind, I saw my life pass before my eyes. I spent a couple days being a little negative (my friends know this is stating it mildly) and now I'm going to press on trying to keep John Lennon's quote in mind. "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans."