School at Home Doesn’t Work (And What To Do Instead)

From Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network

Thirteen years ago, on the very first episode of this show, Felice Gerwitz said something out loud that most people would have edited out: “When I had this idea to create this radio network, I had no idea if it would even work.”

Within three weeks, the shows launched anyway. HomeschoolingIRL on September 13th. The Homeschool Sanity Show on the 14th. Vintage Homeschool Moms on the 17th. Two more by the 25th. Every one of those episodes is still on this website.

So it worked. And to mark thirteen years, we’re doing thirteen short episodes — thirteen things we’d tell a brand-new homeschool mom.

This is the first one, and it’s the mistake nearly all of us made.

We tried to build a school in the dining room. Desks. A bell schedule. A wall calendar with somebody else’s year printed on it. And it lasts about three weeks — then one Tuesday nobody comes to the table, and you sit down certain you’ve failed.

You haven’t failed at homeschooling. You’ve failed at being a school, which was never the assignment.

In this episode:

Why a school is an answer to a problem you don’t actually have — one adult, thirty children, a building, a bus schedule, a fire code
How much of what looks like “school” is really crowd management
Why copying that form into your house makes everything feel so heavy
The difference between structure (good, necessary) and institutional machinery (not yours to carry)

The one question to answer in writing today:

what problem are we actually solving?
Why you give yourself a one-year trial with a date on the calendar — and why week three is when everybody wants to quit