More ramblings about HS

I've been thinking of nothing lately but of getting the kids out of school and getting them in a program of my own. I won't criticize the school and go on and on about their shortcomings. It's like a bad blind date--the guy is nice enough but it just isn't working out. You just want to get out of there without hurting anybody's feelings. I feel like that about the kid's school. No hard feelings just show me the door please, PLEASE. (I will mention that Charlotte is now on her third teacher--and it's only been two months--Go Ed. Nt'l for placing a teacher 7 months pregnant in the class! I've actually considered taking her out until we leave.)

There's a lot of behind the scenes on this I haven't blogged about so I guess it sounds a little out of left field to suddenly get on the homeschooling wagon but it's a combination of several things--mostly a thought I had waaaay before children came into my life that I would homeschool them someday. I'm not sure why. I guess it was mostly based on my own bad relationship with school. Like a lot of things in my life (my 45rpm collection!) I let all those homeschooling thoughts go with the wind with my move to France. After all how could I home school in another language? IMPOSSIBLE! Well at least I used to think that and yet now it's bothering me less and less which should be scary in itself.

So yes here it is all back again. Homeschooling. How did it come up again.

First it was Little S's learning problems and the psst in my ear from his moyenne section teacher that some kids are just different and won't thrive in a traditional French school. In other words, "run for the hills! you're funneling down a drain" She told us this off the clock of course and admitted that her own son was in an alternative school because he doesn't fit into regular school and she recognized S as being a bit like her son..

Second was my application to the Rudolph Steiner school for teacher training, --I got an interview in May but we decided to go to China so I left it lying. AGONY! I really, really wanted to try to do this but life gave us a crossroad and I chose the safest path I guess which was to not stay and try to browbeat a committee into accepting my application. (by the way Steiner is Waldorf to you 'mericans--Steiner was the founding father of the school's philosophy) In preparation I've been studying Steiner (Waldorf) methods for over a year on my own and really loving it--even learning about it for the pure pleasure of it and not for my entrance interview. I have had a complete change of attitude about the way children learn and think. It's how I should have been taught as a child.

Then some other things got peppered into the mix. My interest in doing art with the kids over the past few years has lead me to lots of homeschooling blogs and this is where I learned about project based learning, which I realized was basically what we do in our free time anyway. I was already pretty much homeschooling go figure. The kids do projects all the time. Right now I have a cardboard Narnia city being built in my dining room. Okay here I am doing it. Cool.

The whole HS thing really got pushed though when I started researching schools in Shanghai and I realized that there weren't any that fit what we wanted or needed for S who is more or less a special needs kid. Alternative schools? Chinese education tends to be really strict so even the alternative schools are a bit rigid like people who just won't relax even when they finally can. My mom is like this when I try to massage her head during our little beauty seminars--she just can't relax. I'll say "come on, relax mom!" and she'll say "I am!" but you know she isn't and she never can or will. So the one singular Montessori labeled school was out just based on the description alone which sounded vaguely masochistic. I'm not such a huge fan of Montessori anyway. It seems too reliant on materials that most of the schools hardly ever use and IMHO there isn't a huge pedagogy behind it other than the pretty classrooms. Yes Little S loved the rabbits at his Montessori school in Mexico but it was a very big price to pay to pet rabbits.

So this is how I've come to making our secular curriculum based on Steiner, Charlotte Mason (for Seb and meeting the requirement of the Ed. Nt'l of France) and Project Based Learning, but leaning heavily towards Steiner for the moment. I really like my curriculum and I hope Seb gives it an approval so I can start gathering materials for it but of course it can change again, again and it probably will. The cool part is that if it does change I don't have to get it approved by any committee or board I can just do it. Well I guess Seb has to approve it but he has a vested interest in the results so he's easy to win over.

I have just added a mother-lode of work onto myself before we leave if we do decide to do this and I'm slightly freaked out about the lack of ME time I have to admit but it's kind of exciting at the same time.