Student Teacher

Captain's bLog: 26 weeks.

Lesson planning is a lot like meal planning.

I should clarify that this is in relation to the "home cook" only; I recognize that my experience with a single, fairly unfussy "diner" is a far cry from more industrial-sized applications. But at the scale of the home cook/teacher, I find there are a lot of parallels:

Specialization. I used to have this friend who managed to singe her eyebrows off every time she lit the barbeque, in memory of which I have assigned all grilling of things to DH. He also likes to roast things, puree things, and do my sous cheffery for me. My specialties include baking, soup wizardry, freezer management, and a savant-level ability to sense the right size of container to use for leftovers. From a homeschooling perspective, ELA, art, French, and basically anything requiring patience or enthusiasm (real or manufactured) fall to me.

Balance. I would happily have pastries/art class for breakfast, burgers/creative writing for lunch and perogies/biology for dinner every single day, buuuuut it's my job to be a responsible grown-up and make sure we get all our nutrients/subjects in, and that everyone's favourites are cycled through.

Leftovers. I'm definitely counting on having leftovers, even as I nag Small Fry to focus on finishing his schoolwork/dinner. Sweet, that'll get us through lunchtime tomorrow!

Enthusiasm. Bursts of utter planning genius. May be accompanied by delusions of viable alternate career paths.

Planning fatigue. Like, I have to do this every day? 

Repetition 1. I wonder how many times I can rework this idea without anyone noticing... 

Repetition 2. They've definitely noticed. I wonder how many times I can rework this idea without absolute mutiny?

Repetition 3. MUTINEERS WILL BE CRUSHED.

Marital conflict. Yes.

Lack of appreciation. Oh, all my care and planning and hard work wasn't to your liking today, Highness? It's not up to your refined tastes or something? Well, feel free to make your own goddamn...

Attitude adjustment. ...Yeah, sometimes the problem is me.

So, yeah. That's about it. When I started writing this I thought I might have something useful to offer the newly (abruptly) homeschooling families I know, but I've been meal planning for fifteen years or so and homeschooling for seven months, and looking at this post it seems all I can tell you for sure is that I cycle through a lot of very comparable mixed feelings about both things. I'd call it a love/hate thing, but it's more like love/fatigue - turns out I really enjoy homeschooling, I'm just a lazy slug who can't be arsed half the time. Or maybe I can only be whole-arsed, half the time...?

Anyway, it's nearly dinnertime here so I'm off to rustle up some nutritional balance after a hard day of fostering Small Fry's educational balance. It feels like a mostly-whole-arse kind of day so I'll throw in some extra veggies as insurance against my lesser self, whenever she turns up.