There are no bells, no forced schedules, no dress code. No busses, no other students, no anxiety. This is homeschool. And even though it is the ideal learning environment for some kids (like Nigel), it’s still school. And he’d rather not do it.

We’re relatively new to homeschooling, having started six months ago (and the past three months were summer vacation), but, knowing my son, I think that even if we’d been doing it for years he would still complain, as he did this morning. I pointed out to him that I was sure he’d rather be doing homeschool than be in a classroom with lots of other students bothering him. You’ve heard of fantasy football? Nigel wants to do fantasy school. He responded, “I want to do school on a video screen lying in bed.”

So, even for homeschoolers, it’s hard to get in gear. Maybe it’s because we don’t have bells and lockers and busses. I’m still working on our schedule because we’re waiting to hear back about the time slot for the social skills group meeting that Nigel will attend once a week at the middle school. And we’re waiting to hear back about checking out an eighth grade math book for the year.  So for now, we work with our tentative schedule, we do a review of last year, we go through the math and grammar workbooks, we discuss our plans for electives (Spanish, psychology, and judo), and wait for things to be ironed out. It’s our way of warming up and easing back into academia. Short of lying in bed with a video screen, that is.