School

You haven't had to listen to me ramble about homeschooling in quite some time, but don't worry, you'll hear me now. :)

75% of my kids are in school, and only 50% are in full time. I haven't yet experienced all 4 in school, full time.

I'm scared.
Scared to death.
Already nights are crazy- they come home and I let them play- afterall, they just got done sitting on their asses for Way Too Long. Then comes the daycare kids leaving/dinner rush, followed by Need To Do homework, and get clean before bed.

This is while none of them are in anything extracurricular. How the HELL do you parents with multiple kids in multiple things DO IT???? HOW? I'm being serious, it's not rhetorical. How do you manage to slam so many things into so few hours before the day is over?
That is not the only reason that I will someday (soon) homeschool, of course.
I'm lost. I'm not in the classroom every day and I have no idea what the hell they are looking at or working on. Well, I do NOW since we had spring break. Here is what would be fun about homeschooling- when doing a unit on ...say...the American Revolution....instead of just studying what's in the book, and what we find online, we could go do a field trip on it. We could take a few weeks and really pour over it. This would be fun for me, too, now that i'm grown up and i give a shit. I do fell badly for kids these days, they are forced to learn stuff that barely is or seems relevant, tested and it's over. Buh Bye to that information til ...they are grown up and their kid needs help with their project. Sucks. But I guess at the tender old age of 9 is as good as any to be taught that you just have to do what they tell you to do to get through it, right? Do you remember doing tesselations??? I did not remember doing them, and chances are good that when we were in 4th grade, we weren't doing them. In general they have a different method for teaching math now, and it's different. CJ came up crying because he was trying to tesselate this one shape that just wouldn't GO. We finally let it go til this morning and his fresh mind got it to go, mostly, but WTF. I'd feel so much better if I had my nose all up in their stuff. You can talk to me all you want about "then get your nose up in their stuff" but sometimes there's no homework (don't need to bring it home) and until 6th grade, there are no lockers, which means these kids haul their lives around with them and if they don't have to bring it home, they don't.
My goal if I were home teaching would be to help them be the most independent learners they can. I wouldn't expect them to be fully independent at this age, but working on it. As it is in school right now, they are completely dependent on what the teachers tell them to do.
Isn't it weird that in 3rd world countries...or not even that poor...they appreciate education because it's such a rarity? And here we have "so much" of it that we can bitch about it? So weird. So spoiled. Spoiled brats.
Sigh.