Light Bulb Moment

I had one of those rare moments of clarity recently where I just wanted to smack myself on the head. Now I'm happier with my new insight and more self-forgiving.

I like to make things hard on myself. Today I noticed something I have been walking past every day for the past five years or so. A piece of plywood painted white on one side. It's been on the landing of the stairs to the basement, by the house side door for years. Years. Hmmm, what could I use that for? Oh, I know. For the conference this year, I need to replace the message board we've been using the past few years and was thinking of a cork board with push pins. That way we could use recycled paper bits instead of sticky notes that never retain their stickiness as long as we want them to. A better system and green as a bonus! Except I don't have a cork bulletin board. Why not glue all the corks I've been saving onto the board and use that? I lay them out, determined a pattern and a border and then did a load of laundry.

In my chain reaction world, the laundry led me to want another octopus-shaped clothes dryer from Ikea. It has eight arms, each with two clothes pins attached and is perfect for hanging cloth pull ups, fleece, anything I don't want going into the dryer. It also has a face, which makes it fun for the kids to use. Mark had the kids at the zoo, so I decided to head off for a solo shopping trip - the height of luxury.

Sadly, Ikea no longer carries the octopus. The worker I asked was standing in front of a pile of framed cork boards the perfect size for my information table needs, for $4. Unbelievably, I had to wrestle with myself, weighing the pros and cons of the wasted $4 on an imported cork board with a huge carbon footprint or my spending hours gluing corks onto the scrap wood from my basement. I spent the money, picked up a few other items and headed home.

This little exercise in futility made me think of a larger one I've been spending nearly the last two years on. I've been using the Homeschool Tracker, which is a really wonderful free tool put out by some great homeschooling folks. I just needed a method of collecting attendance data to meet the state's requirements, but ended up laboriously plugging in all sorts of data each day. I typed in how long the kids did free reading, math, spelling, what science videos they watched, whether they wrote anything that day, the history curriculum, etc. Each book was entered as a resource and then checked off as having been read. My kids read a lot of books. It became a job in itself. I was diligent, purposeful.

Earlier this year I had my kids take over their schedules, believing this to be a life skill they should master (as I am struggling to master). So, during our almost daily planning meeting, we schedule what needs to be done, when we need to leave, etc and at the end of the day the kids write down what books they have read, what science projects they have done, etc. They are keeping track of their lives. I would then take their planner and copy this information into the Homeschool Tracker.

Double work. I like the format of the Homeschool Tracker, it translates everything into school format. The tracker lists their activities as "assignments" and gives them a check mark for having "completed" something. I printed the information monthly into a binder for a while and then fell behind and would print it out in great bunches. I enjoyed the possibility of having something to show doubting friends and relatives what my children have accomplished, how hard they work, how far they have come.

The fatal flaw in this thinking, of course, is that no one has ever asked for proof that my children are learning anything. They are smart kids, easy kids. They love to learn, spend hours reading, ask for museum memberships for their birthdays. I have no doubters in my life. But I still felt I needed something to prove to some nebulous someone that we are productive. The problem with this is that the only people who would ask for anything resembling proof would be people who don't know my children. State superintendents perhaps, truant officers maybe? And these are exactly the kinds of folks I would never present my nicely labeled binders! Too much information, they would find something wrong with it. All they get is what is required by law, attendance records and a letter of compliance signed by Mark and me.

So, it turns out the only person I was keeping these records for was myself. But even I wasn't reading the stuff. I printed it, punched holes and put it in the three ring binders. There, all done. It should have been a big clue to me how pointless the exercise was when my laptop blew up and I lost all of school year 2007 - 2008's records. But it wasn't.

I don't need to prove to myself that my children are learning, I witness their learning in all its glory each and every day. Some day we will need high school transcripts, I suppose. But Medium and Large are only 9 and 10 now. By the time we need transcripts, they will be able to control what information is recorded in any tracking system on their own.

So, just yesterday I printed out attendance records year to date on each of my three monsters, put them in a folder with our letter of compliance and stashed it by the front door. I have at hand whatever anyone could need, in the unlikely event someone asks for it.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with all those corks. Small used to play with them like blocks. I could drill a hole in them lengthwise and make a sun shade for our front porch, I could make them into trivets if we ever needed more trivets, or coasters, or ....