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The Imperfect Homeschooler |
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Cardamom Publishers P.O. Box 4 Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235 |
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Living with Homeschool-Induced ADD
I’ve been homeschooling for nearly twenty years, so you would think I’d have learned a few things by now, but sometimes I wonder. Take this morning, for instance. I was sitting with my son working on subtraction worksheets. He loves doing them, but if I don’t stay on task with him the entire time, he loses his concentration. It’s hard for me to just sit there while he works. I get bored waiting….and with him, you do a lot of waiting while he comes up with answers. Enter my 15-year-old, who needs help with her high-school level geometry assignment. She asks if I could just give her a quick idea of where to proceed on one exercise. Now, I should tell her she’ll have to wait until we’re finished, but I’m just sitting there waiting on my son to cross out a certain number of kites, so I think to myself, “This’ll only take a sec.” Well, it takes a few minutes, and in that time, my son forgets that the minus sign means to cross out the kites; taking the initiative, he goes on to add the kites in every exercise on the page. So here I am, in the middle of a geometry problem, my daughter just catching on to what she needs to do, and I see my son giving himself a star at the top of the page because he thinks he did great (self-esteem has not been a problem with this child). So my daughter still doesn’t have her answer and my son thinks he has all the answers. And it’s my fault, because what I should have done is ask my daughter to wait a bit. I know this because I have been through this before, not just with these two but with the older two children I homeschooled first.
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My problem is, that after all these years of teaching people and feeding people and running a house and taking people from one end of the county to the other, I have developed Homeschool-Induced Attention Deficit Disorder (HIADD). I can’t sit still without thinking I should be doing something else, and when that something else comes along, as it inevitably does, I run after it like a dog after a stick. While my HIADD was a coping mechanism that I needed while homeschooling four kids at one time, it has now become a problem for me. While I’m listening to the sermon in church, I’m getting article ideas I want to write down. When I’m writing, I’m thinking of what time to start dinner and what to start first, the chicken or the salad. When I’m making dinner, I’m thinking about which projects I need to work on with the kids the next morning. And while I’m sitting at the table the next day waiting patiently while my son prints out his sight words, I’m wondering what Pastor was getting at in his sermon……which I didn’t absorb because, as I said, my mind was elsewhere. I didn’t used to be like this. I have a vague memory of working for hours at a time on homework in college. I might have taken a minute for a stretch here and there, but boy, did I have an attention span back then! Now, I’ve reached the point where there are toddlers who can hold a thought longer than I can. Does anyone know if there’s a cure for HIADD?
© 2008 Cardamom Publishers/Barbara Frank
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