I started homeschooling with a public school hangover. I even bought a hand bell to ring between classes! I had four students ages 6 down to 18 months. It was wild: every day we got up, ate breakfast, cleaned up after breakfast, sang a song, recited the pledge of allegiance (taking turns holding the flag), prayed, and worked on memorizing a verse. Then all bets were off. Sometimes we read together first. Sometimes we assembled at the table for math. Sometimes we bounced around the living room while I tried to put things in enough order to start.

I tried to do school. I really tried to duplicate a first grade/kindergarten hybrid. But my eldest son and I were the only ones who had any inkling what that looked like. The school he went to the previous year had trained him to wait for directions from me. Under pain of displeasure and losing recess! He obediently waited for me to get things going, and while he waited, he played with his brother and his sisters.

It took two years of painfully trying to duplicate public school at home before I got it through my head that this wasn’t working. We were all miserable. I had textbooks and workbooks and paper and pencils. My eldest son would reluctantly get through a page a day. My second child had her favorite workbook—that is, if we must do a workbook, this one is better. The other children ran all over. When they weren’t trying to get their older siblings to play with them, they were getting into things, writing on things, exploring, experimenting to see what would happen if you, say, dumped glitter all over. You know: learning.

I complained to my husband. I told him all about how nobody wanted to sit still and write multiple copies of alphabet letters. I told him how when we did art, the older children didn’t want a lesson on what to make or how to paint; they wanted to paint. And the younger children wanted to taste it, lick it, put paint in their hair and on each other, splash and fling and generally find out what happens if you… you know: experiment.

My husband was working a salaried restaurant position an hour away, an assistant manager. He worked all his own shifts plus whatever the restaurant couldn’t get enough staff to cover, plus most Sundays. When he became a general manager himself, he worked at least one Sunday a month to give each of his assistants a weekend off. He wasn’t home much except to sleep. When I told him how we hated timed class periods and having no lunch ladies or janitors, he simply said, “If it’s that bad, put them in school.”

I balked. Trying to duplicate public school at home was bad, but at least I didn’t have to get everyone up and into the car to take people to school on time. And not once did I have to get everyone up and into the car to pick people up from homeschool. They were already home!

So maybe the problem wasn’t homeschool. Maybe the problem was how we were doing it.