I'm not going to lie. I made four different attempts at the title of this blog post and I still don't think it's very good. I tried to make it as clear as possible what my topic is, but I think that whenever people see "parents" and "homework" and "school" in the same sentence they're going to assume I'm talking about the children of these parents...but not today people!
In this post, I'd like to share an insight comparing my previous experiences in school to my current experience being back in school while having young children: Everything is different!!
Obviously, I knew that this time around would be a very different experience and I was prepared for that, but I don't think I quite realized how utterly useless many of previous approaches to school would be. Luckily, my kids are nine and six and in school during the days so I'm not completely screwed, but, as you may know, school only goes from Monday to Friday.
At the end of my first week back in school, I thought "I'm going to buckle down and get a bunch of work done this weekend." I'm guessing that thought must have been some sort of relic from my experiences in college twenty years ago when, if I was behind on work going into the weekend, I'd only go to parties on Friday and Saturday night and try to get some work done during the rest of the weekend. Wow. The sacrifices I used to make. Now, if I'd been thinking logically about my current situation, I would have realized that these days the weekends are a TERRIBLE time to get work done. The weekends are always about the kids. I'm taking then to soccer games and birthday parties and playgrounds and if that isn't happening then we're playing board games or reading books or playing pretend. When is there time to do homework?
And it's not just weekends that are different. I'm in school from September to January so there's all the holidays to deal with too. We've had Halloween and Thanksgiving and now we have both Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations this month and it's very difficult to get much work done during any of it. Also, I don't want to miss out on these experience with my kids because I know they're getting older and soon they aren't going to want to spend as much time with me.
Now, what have I learned from these experiences? I've learned the importance of staying focused during the school day and trying to be as efficient as possible with my work. I've also learned that sometimes you just have to put your kids first... and if that results in my blog not being quite as organized as I want it to be some weeks then that's just something I'm going to have to deal with.
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