good morning!

ok, i want sleep. the kids are asleep. why am i awake? i should be productive and fold laundry....
this post is beginning to sound like my facebook profile status update.

a couple of days ago, i asked Bear if she wants to go to school or stay home and have mommy be her teacher. this was after a visit to a mom's day out where a couple of my friends send their kids in which she really seemed to want to stay and play on the playground. anyway, her birthday is a month past the state's kindergarten entry deadline. this means that the state says she can't go to kindergarten until she is almost 6. in my opinion, she will be ready before then. the child is identifying beginning consonant sounds, she is a "mother hen" in her sunday school class, and she loves to learn. she soaks up names of plants and birds. she loves older kids.

one of my reasons in adding education to my major in college was that i thought i might want to homeschool my kids some day. then i taught public high school for 2 years. while most of you might think that would be incentive to keep my kids at home, it actually had the opposite effect on me. i realized the serious responsibility that home-schooling parents face, and questioned whether i am up to that challenge. i had a few "students" (kids who were on my class roll but rarely showed up and when they did were not exactly eager to participate) who withdrew from school in order to "home-school". God help them. if they could not get motivated to work under the instruction of caring teachers like myself, and if their parents did not care enough to return my phone calls, how were they possibly going to truly learn at home? i envisioned them sleeping in and taking only open-book tests.

after my brief stint as a teacher in a public school, i had the opportunity to tutor home schoolers through a private tutorial at a local church. MOST of those kids reminded my why i had initially considered home-schooling. their faith and work-ethics were phenomenal. yes, i had at last one student who was ineligible to return to that tutorial program, and she reminded me of some of the students who had dropped out.

anyway, the core of my internal debate is not so much my daughter's capability or even my past experiences in the field of education. it's the knowledge that i am lazy and unmotivated by nature and can't even get myself into a system to keep up with, well, anything. so how on earth can i teach my child effectively? that whole "socialization" debate that often accompanies objections to home schooling does not apply, in my opinion. there are plenty of social opportunities for home schoolers. there are multiple resources for parents, and many kids thrive because they are not limited by the budget restraints or distractions of conventional classrooms. however, being a product of a combination of christian and public education, and having been a teacher, i don't buy into the fear-based theory that christian kids will definitely be corrupted in public schools any more than i buy into the theory that they will be sheltered in private christian schools. kids are kids, and peer pressure exists everywhere. as parents, it is our responsibility to teach our kids values. my parents weren't perfect, but the foundation God gave us through them was not broken when we went to public schools.

it's 4 a.m. my improper punctuation and grammar may demonstrate to some that i should not home school my kids. i'm tempted to close the comments on this post, but this blog has been dead for a while, and as i have nothing else to discuss at the moment, feel free to post your thoughts. i'm not looking for debate, just thinking out loud here. God knows my mind is enough of a forum for debates. feel free to think along with me, if you like. at the very least, pray that i will not let my indecisive nature hinder my daughter's intellectual development. (i don't see that happening, she seems to be doing just fine. but the decision is what will be "just fine" and what will help her truly thrive? i know, only hubby and i can make that decision.)