Grades

So I am sitting here at Panera dutifully trying to come up with grades for my high schoolers. The public high school will, of course, expect grades on my kids' transcripts, not just a list of books read or texts used. Drat grades!

Because of so many days taken off for wallpaper stripping, painting, packing and moving, my two high schoolers are still finishing up school. (Bantam13, with a bit less to do, just finished his reading list last week.) Part of me would have loved to grant grace in the circumstances and not make them finish every last book and chapter of the text book...but another part of me knows that I would be depriving them of a valuable lesson about time management: They are now experiencing the consequences of their own choices about how they spent their time while I was busy with the move and not able to keep such a watchful eye on them.

Overall, I was most disappointed with myself over the last year. I was not the teacher I could have been; I was so distracted by selling the house and moving that I was barely able to keep track of what they were doing, let alone help them with difficult material or enrich their learning with teacher input. Knowing what kind of a year we were facing, I had chosen curriculum that could stand alone and I do feel like they learned a lot without me this year, but more teacher involvement would have been so much more preferable. Another of my big disappointments was that after the first few months, we never had time for writing assignments since we were always in catch-up mode.

When we were in the middle of all the uncertainty about when and whether or house would sell, I had moments of wondering what God was doing. Couldn't He see what a distraction all this was? Wouldn't He rather I invest time in my children than in a house?

I still wish I could have done things differently last year, but I'm forced to accept the year as it ended up. It's entirely possible that the lessons God wanted our kids to learn weren't about academics! I know they learned a lot about taking responsibility for their own schedule and assignments, since Mom was too busy to tell them what they should be doing every minute. I know they learned lessons in faith and prayer from the whole selling/moving process. I know they learned history and vocabulary and saw good writing modeled in the "living books" assigned by the Sonlight curriculum, and they "met" children and adults in those books who were examples of honesty, courage, creativity, compassion, resourcefulness and other good character qualities.

They also learned how to strip wallpaper and what a difference de-cluttering makes! They learned a few painting strokes, Blondechick15 painted her own room, and we all learned how to clean up the whole house quickly and keep it that way (for a few hours, at least). They were in three musicals, including Charlotte's Web in which Blondechick starred, and three 10-week drama or dance classes. Three of them took voice lessons, and Blondechick learned a lot from babysitting for her voice teacher. Bantam17 got a refreshing year off from public school, which brought him closer to his siblings once again and gave him more time for his own pursuits, and I depended on his muscle and maturity for help with the move, the house and younger siblings.

So how do you put a grade on all that? How do you show those lessons on a transcript?

How do you assign grades to history and literature, where basically all they did was read books?

If their teacher had been on the job, they'd have written about each book and we'd have discussed each one. That was the plan. It is a shame that my first year of teaching high school was such a distracted one!

Lord, I thank you that education is more than what can be graded. I thank you for the life lessons my children learned this year, even if they can't easily be recorded on a transcript. I thank you for drawing us all closer together this past year, which couldn't have happened if we hadn't homeschooled through this difficult year.

And I thank you in advance for helping me give my highschoolers grades that are fair and reflective of what they've accomplished this year. Amen.