WHAT WOULD MOM HAVE DONE?

Homeschooling, that dreadful thought that crosses parent’s minds. Having your child home 24/7 is a sobering thought. Maintaining a schedule at home for yourself is hard enough, having forced imprisonment of children is scary. They need to socially grow as well as you need to have a life. But as former President Clinton once said: “It is what it is.”

I was wondering what it would have been like if when growing up, I had to be homeschooled? What would Mom do?

I imagine that old kitchen table and a scowl across my mother’s face, as she assigns her children in seats at the table. Slowly and deliberately she would take out her wooden spoon and place it in front of me, as a reminder that ‘business is business’. We would probably learn incredible bladder control (No leaving the table) learn to starve at a reasonable rate (No refrigerator break) and no phone calls or attempts to weasel out of staying at the kitchen table. The cookie jar would be placed in the basement, and if we didn’t have one, she would dig one just for this occasion.

If by chance we were given a break, it would be because the phone ringing is for her! She would begin school at promptly 9:00 AM and cease at promptly 3:30 PM.

The gym class would be vacuuming the floors, dusting, and making our beds. This would be the first period. Mom was a resourceful lady.

Foreign language class would be trying to figure out what she was saying as she wrung her hands and admonished me in Italian, and home economics would be just extending the gym class by thirty minutes.

Math would be: “If I have ten cookies in a cookie jar, and at the end of the day there are only 5 cookies, at what time did I manage to steal them and how? Follow up question: How many smacks with the wooden spoon per cookie should I get?

In Mom’s school, religious education would be mandatory, I would pray daily not to catch too much of the business end of the wooden spoon.

But in the end, she would probably just leave us off at the school building and tell us to wait.