by Alexa Payne

Created on: March 14, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Every homeschooling parent knows this: the decision to homeschool is not made once, but every day. Just about every homeschooling parent I know has threatened their child with sending them to school. "Kaylee, I just give up. If you can't do a page of math I'm just going to have to send you to school." It is almost universally an idle threat. The parents have no intention of sending their kids to school. Well, I did it. My kids had never been in school and I put them in 3rd and 1st grade.

For 14 days.

I began contemplating homeschooling when I was pregnant with my first child. I imagined what fun it would be to explore the world of knowledge together. But we lived in a house right near the neighborhood school, and another part of me would imagine strolling my child to the neighborhood school, volunteering in the classroom, admiring the walls covered in darling projects.

My daughter read well by the time kindergarten rolled around and I still hadn't made a decision. So I strolled over to the neighborhood school to ask for enrollment materials. The frowny bureaucracy behind the counter soured my enthusiasm for the smell of paste. I asked the principal if we could sit in on a Kindergarten class. She said, "Absolutely not."

So we went to check out the Science Magnet School across town. There went my vision of skipping to school hand in hand. We'd have to drive.

The class began with an Open Court reading lesson. Ninety minutes of scripted phonics instruction. "Tuggy the tug boat says Uh! Uh! The letter u says uh!" By the end my daughter was tearing at her hair, quite literally. She had big hunks of it in her hands and was yanking her own head around shouting "The alphabet! The alphabet! When are we going to be done with the alphabet!"

So I decided she was done with the alphabet. We homeschooled K, 1st grade and 2nd grade.

But somewhere along the way I lost my nerve. I started to think that maybe our long days of play were not serving the kids. Sure we got studying done in fits and starts, a day of Mesopotamia here and a game of Yahtzee there. But we hadn't done formal math in months. I was hoping my oldest daughter's resistance to it would wane and we could go at it with joy later. But maybe just doing worksheets at school would be better than nothing. So I followed through on the threat and signed them up.

It was new, and a little scary, but the overwhelming feeling they reported was boredom. There was no real learning in the first week, it was all learning the rules.

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