Puttin' Them to the Test

As a homeschooling mom, I often find it difficult to rate my performance as a teacher. Most of the time I feel confident that my children are getting a good education...

...then suddenly I find myself broadsided by one of those days when I begin to second guess myself. I begin to question whether they are learning enough, whether I'm doing enough...the longer I allow myself to indulge in that line of thinking, the more miserable I get.

This year Adam, our second oldest son, is a senior. He has a bad case of Senior-itis and I'm having difficulty getting him to complete his work...but not in the subjects I thought I would. He's whizzing through Trig and Physics...it's English and German we're at war over.

Hehehe...I'm a writer...and I struggle to get my kids to do their work in Language. Where's the justice in that? (martyred sigh) Alas!

But being a senior means another hurdle in his/our homeschool career. College entrance exams.

My oldest son went all twelve years to public school and his testing was arranged by the counselor. I didn't think much about it...I paid, he took the silly thing, passed it, and then started college. Well, maybe it wasn't QUITE that easy but, at the time *I* wasn't the counselor/teacher, either.

I find that there is a huge emotional difference: although Guy's education is as important as that of the other three boys, somehow I have a more personal stake in the boys I've homeschooled.

I guess that's because there's nobody else to blame if something goes south, huh?

Anyway, Adam scheduled his SAT for a Saturday that didn't have previous obligations and then gave it little more thought. Even though I "encouraged" (which bordered on nagging) him, he didn't put much effort into preparing for it...

Hehehe...maybe HE didn't think about it but I sure did...for about a week after the date was set I wrestled with an overwhelming propensity to rate my overall performance as a homeschool mom on how well he did on his test scores.

In one of the most gut-wrenching/looking-over-my-shoulder-at-myself experiences pertaining to my children's education since the actual decision to pull them out of public school, I realized that I was being tempted to base my self worth as a teacher on one set of test scores...

...kind of like the way the public school placed my kids in one of the three tracks based on one set of math test scores on one day of the 6th grade (a time when my children seemed to wake up in a new world every half hour). Hummm...

If it didn't make sense to me then...why did it make sense now?

I came to a point where I had to make a decision. Was I going to allow myself to let how Adam did on someone-else's-test dictate my self worth?

It was nip-n-tuck for a day or so, but thanks be to God, the answer was no.

I wish I could better explain what happened, but it boiled down to a simple (but not easy) choice: I could either make myself miserable or choose to go on about my business. Either way, Adam would make what he made. Period.

I chose the latter.

I'm happy to report, though, that he passed his SAT with a 1040. While I know that he was capable of scoring much higher, it was high enough to get him into the local community college. He wasn't so lucky on the other test he was required to take. He didn't bother to read the rules and showed up with the wrong kind of calculator. While I'd sweated his performance on the Language part, he passed that with flying colors...but flunked the math section by 2 points. Yup, 2 points. Now HE gets to pay to take it again because a passing score on that particular test is a requirement for one of the scholarship applications he's working on.

Instead of being mad...or worse, feeling like a failure because he didn't pass...I find that it's been a lesson for him in self-directed preparation. He got himself in this predicament, he has to get himself out...but with the advantage that he is still at home and so has a safe place to fall...and parents to...ahem...urge him on.

Adam started dual credit classes at North Central Texas College this week, taking English and speech. It was hard to watch him walk out that door into the next phase of his life, but, at the same time, I'm granted the peace of knowing that he has a strong foundation, both educationally and morally. Now it's up to him. And no matter how he does, I've chosen to cling to the fact that I've done the best I knew how. Somehow there's great peace in that.

Jackie

Copyright 2004 by Jackie Zimmerer