Drowning On Land: When Homeschooling Is Overwhelming

JV(21)

As a homeschool graduate, I of all people should have felt prepared to homeschool my own spark plugs.  I grew up around other home-schooling families, participated in homeschool co-ops, and watched my parents started their own cover school that still exists today.

So why, at the beginning of my home-schooling journey with my own kids, did I feel as though I were drowning...on land?

Being a homeschooled student is, I'm learning, a lot different from being the homeschooling teacher.  As a child, I was completely oblivious to the behind-the-scenes work my parents did, especially when it came to legal paperwork.   All I knew was that there was something called an affidavit that needed to be filed at some point (I wasn't even sure when it was due or whom to submit it to).  Beyond that, I didn't have a clue what was involved in legally homeschooling!

Making the decision to homeschool was easy for Jon and me since we were both homeschooled and loved it.  But putting it into practice wasn't easy at first.  I'm pretty comfortable with everything now that we're several years into our homeschooling journey, but several years back I was overwhelmed by the the options that had popped up since I'd graduated almost two decades ago.

It also seemed like my first-generation home-schooling friends had a much better handle on things than I did, which made me feel even more overwhelmed.  Most of them seemed to know what curriculum they wanted to use, when to file the paperwork with the state, and what their homeschooling philosophy was.