* Always compare yourself to everyone else. One of the best ways to do this is to read a variety of homeschool blogs and always assume that their days are always as perfect as they depict in today’s blog post.
*Be afraid to ask for help and never utilize outside resources for the areas you are not strong in. Don’t be willing to use your expertise to encourage others either.
*Make lists of the books you expect your children to read or number of pages they should read weekly, not lists of the skills that you want to accomplish for the year.
*Use the scope and sequence and ‘what your child needs to know when’ books as THE standard to gauge whether you are a good parent.
* Surround yourself with others who discourage you in your homeschooling efforts.
*Teach your children to be dependent on you for everything. Boldly discourage self-sufficiency, and disregard their maturity level.
*Fill in your daily school to-do list as detailed as possible. Fill in all those time slots with academics that have a definite start time and stop time. Do this for every hour on the hour. This is especially effective if you are not a schedule person.
*Discourage real life opportunities to practice and reinforce academic skills. Schedule the day so tightly with academics not related to real life that you leave no room for spontaneous learning.
*Never use Unit Studies which combine several school subjects into one awesome learning project. Keep all the subjects as separated and non-relating to one another as you possibly can.
*Complicate your schedule so that you can’t possibly be consistent with it. Start huge and over detailed and work from there. Add more to your schedule if you are achieving consistency and things are going smoothly. The goal is to remain in a constant state of discouragement.
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This is only slightly funny because it’s so true isn’t it? Do you see yourself in at least one or two of these? In the 25+ years of educating my 7 at home, I have been guilty of all of the above at one time or another. That’s why I could write this list with such ease. I know. I’ve been there and back. These are guaranteed peace suckers. And I have a story to tell for each one. I’ll save that for another time.
Gail Heaton