Adventures in The Life

(Note on recent blog neglect: Yeah. I kinda let that cancer story stop. In all honesty, the retelling brought up too much stuff that I wasn't ready to relive. Perhaps another day.)  

In the months since my last post, The Life has shifted yet again and another adventure has started. We are now homeschooling Connor! This is honestly something I never imagined I would tackle, but that's life, isn't it? New directions you'd never thought you'd take, but the situation leaves you little choice. 

We've been struggling with Connor's education for awhile. He is a smart little bugger and has been desperately bored by the traditional offerings at school. Heck, I've been desperately bored by the stuff I've seen coming home with him every day. That isn't to say that he hasn't had amazing teachers and lessons here and there, but those flashes of brilliance haven't been enough to keep him going. So, we jumped, and now I'm a homeschooling mama. The only trouble is, I've never done this before, and it quickly became apparent that I have a lot to learn.

Monday was the start date and I spent the weekend drawing up lesson plans, pouring over the school district's curriculum, and his textbooks, trying to puzzle out what we needed to cover and how I would present the material. Little did I know that Connor would be teaching me!

Monday was a crazy since the roof sprung a very dramatic leak and literally buckets of water came pouring through the ceiling.

Tuesday then became the first real day of homeschooling. I came up with the idea that we would do current events in the morning and focus on the uprisings in the Middle East. What better way to work on Geography, Politics, Economics, etc...  , right? Exactly. 

I printed off maps of the region and had him start by getting out his school atlas and labeling all the countries and their capitals. 

HUGE EYE ROLL.

MAJOR SIGH. 

And I hear him mutter...

"This is just like school. Only worse, because my friends aren't here." 

I sat there a moment just staring at him, stunned. Stunned, not because he was being rude or negative, but stunned because he was so completely right. Who of us can honestly say that we would try to learn about a region by pulling out a blank map and making ourselves fill in all the missing place names? It's absurd. Not only would you not remember any of it, you too would curse the pointlessness of the busywork. 

I grabbed the map out of his hands and told him to follow me to the computer. We pulled up the Aljazerra English website to see what was happening right then. First article to attract Connor's interest? One with a map detailing who currently controlled the major cities in Libya and which ones were the focus of battles between the rebels and Gaddafi's forces. 

Connor's reaction? "Now, that's an interesting map!"

New plan. I got my blank maps back out and suggested we track the action in a similar way. Connor decided to color code the cities with push pins. Every couple of days we'll update our map based on events in Libya. 

While we were at it, Connor thought we should track the uprisings in the rest of the region. Now we had a REAL reason to label that map. Another coding system - yellow for rumblings of unrest, red for outright rebellion, and green for Egypt where the president was ousted. 

For now, the textbooks, worksheets, and lesson plans have been packed away. As Connor said to me, this whole homeschooling thing is supposed to "be different." I can't take the same formula used in school and expect a different result just because we're at home. Instead, I have to focus on this amazing kid who loves learning but hates school. I have to help him dive right in and explore without sucking the life out of it.

I'm learning.