First things first. Kinsale is fine. She and her sister boats here in the marina weathered Tropical Storm Isaac just fine, thanks to a steering low pressure front south of Cuba and some dry air choking off circulation on the north side of the storm. Unfortunately for folks in Louisiana, Hurricane Isaac wasn't as kind. It's the damnable truth about hurricanes -- your fortune is another's misfortune.
Once the skies cleared, the kids and I returned to the boat, sans our captain. John was able to fly on Tuesday for his military duty in Georgia so the kids and I packed up and returned home (to the boat). But first, we visited an awesome teacher supply store in Miami to get subject review books. You see, I always thought of myself as a rebel, a bit of an anarchist. Turns out I'm actually a compulsive rule-follower.
Call it wisdom, call it midlife. I found myself on the eve of the start of school, panicked by the thought that my children were not engaged in any academic pursuit whatsoever, unless you consider Club Penguin and fighter pilot games academic. I do not. As the week wore on and we still hadn't settled on a curriculum, my fear that they would land in truck-driving school grew. (No offense to truck drivers intended.) Imagine my relief, then, when we finally made the decision last Sunday about what curriculum to use, and then my renewed horror when we were told we couldn't start until SEPTEMBER 24! Unacceptable! I pictured three more weeks of IQ-sucking iPad slothfulness and felt the weight of my parental neglect heavy on my shoulders. It was time to DO SOMETHING! Off we went to 'Get Smart' and $135 later, I left with a stack of books and restored parent cred. Priceless. So determined was I to redeem myself that I made the kids do their first lessons in the car on the way down to the boat. It was a blessedly quiet, serene three-hour drive! Wednesday morning, our first official day of school, found us under the tiki hut with a 15-knot wind blowing in from the southeast, a welcome alternative to the steamy confines of the boat.
Besides the books, the kids got out their pocket microscopes and observed a few things. The small cup below holds what I thought were jellyfish larvae, but my kids say it's not, although they have yet to determine what creature those little brown dots are.
They also tried to look at a moon jelly fish but would have had to kill it to get it in focus, so we let it go. But here's a look at a moon jellyfish from Google Images.
Turns out the plastic table top was pretty fascinating under the scope too! But I digress. You would think that being able to do school under a tiki on a beach in Key West would inspire such gratitude that the process would be flawlessly smooth, right? The cold, hard truth is school is school, even on a beach. That first day was a bit rough. What should have taken maybe three hours took five. The kids were tired and crabby. I was tired and crabby. But they did it, and on Thursday morning, they emerged from the boat, books and pencils in hand, ready to start the day's schoolwork -- without my even asking! Which just underscores that transitions are tough, even if they're transitions to something really, really good. It takes time to find your way through change, something John and I are all too familiar with.
The homeschooling we're doing now is review -- 5th grade for Ian; 2nd grade for Eve. I tell myself it's what they would be doing in regular school right now anyway, but I still have this nagging sense that the we're falling behind. As novices, we didn't realize that the materials we picked wouldn't be available to us immediately. In today's wired, "overnight-it" world, how is THAT possible? That was just one of many lessons we learned while navigating the labyrinth that is homeschooling.
As in other pursuits, there exists a broad range of philosophy and intensity among people who choose to homeschool. Some, like us, see it as a short-term stop-gap solution, either because they need a certain flexibility in lifestyle (we do) or because they aren't content with a particular teacher or school and don't have other viable options. These folks generally buy a curriculum, either online or on paper, and implement it. In our case, we've chosen a streaming video approach because neither John nor I can do the instruction and work our jobs. At the other end of the spectrum are people, who for a myriad of reasons, are passionately committed to the concept of home education, people who create an entire curriculum based around their personal philosophies and life situations, and create their own standards for learning. It sounds great, but it's a TON of work, first to figure out what to teach and then to teach it. And it's overwhelming for newbies. Thankfully, there are a lot of homeschool parents who are generous with their knowledge and advice, and that certainly helped us figure out a direction, but the path wasn't linear.
As states go, Florida is fairly lenient about homeschooling: there are no specific standards you have to follow and you just have to demonstrate that your child has made progress at grade level. And that's assuming they ask. If no one requests paperwork, Ian and Eve could step right back into public school next fall without any scrutiny of how they spent this last academic year. That should make it easier, but it doesn't. Figuring out the "right" approach is difficult when you aren't certain what the right approach is. Do we focus on traditional education standards? Do we focus on the enriched learning that a liveaboard life brings? And whatever we choose, it has to be a self-directed program since we can't provide the bulk of the instruction ourselves. One option we seriously considered was free virtual school through the state of Florida, but we soon realized that it was like being in school at home. That is, it was more of a scheduled, regimented program than we wanted. Another option was fully self-directed, independent study and completely self-contained (they do all the grading), and it was academically rigorous, with a 5th-grade pre-test that I probably couldn't pass. It was $6,000!
What we eventually figured out is that there is a sizable middle ground. For us, it was buying the same curriculum the kids were using in school these past several years (thankfully available for homeschooling) and supplementing with enrichment activities about marine biology, weather, astronomy and, for my budding paleontologist Eve, dinosaurs. That solved the standards issue for us, and the streaming video/independent study format took care of the instruction conundrum. Maybe if we continue this lifestyle we'll go a bit more avant garde, but for now we're content knowing we're keeping the ever-present spectre of truck-driving school at bay.
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