Decisions, decisions...

I haven't been blogging this week partly because we've all caught the winter bug--with me having the worst of it. Feeling yucky and lethargic, I would much prefer to duck my head under the covers and not come out for half the day. Still, the ship sailed on.

Today I went to a co-op orientation. It's a homeschool co-op that I have been aware of for several years. Year after year, I'd step out of my little shell of a home and peer out to see if there are better options than to teach my 12-year-old-soon-to-be-high-schooler all by myself. To be really honest, the whole prospect of college applications scares me. Both my husband and I went to a four-year university. I want our children to have that option. Yet, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward path from here to there.

The administrator at the co-op is a wonderful lady. She let me sit in a class to get a preview. I had hopes (probably unrealistic ones) of hearing intelligent, engaging discussions among students with great curiosity and capacity for thought. I was disappointed. It was just another classroom, with students just as bored and ready to bolt as any I had been in back in school. I walked away--unimpressed, dissatisfied.

I guess in my mind there is this ideal kind of classroom, with this motivating, stimulating teacher surrounded by bright, articulate, and creative students--the kind you see in movies. That's the sort of place I wish I had gone to and I want my children to go to. Yet, such an ideal place may not exist at all--except in movies. Perhaps the only person who can even come close to fulfilling that ideal is me.

Part of me wants to relinguish my dreams of an ideal education and go with the flow. Perhaps I need to drop those expectations and just let Poly set out into the real world with its imperfections. Perhaps it's time he learns to learn in spite of, rather than because of. (It's what I did, after all.) Yet, part of me is not ready to give up that dream. After all, I've sacrificed all these years so that my children can have a better education than I did. To give up now is to renounce my efforts and say that schooling does not matter, that good teaching does not matter, that good learning environment does not matter, that a solid educational philosophy does not matter. I can't do that because those assertions are simply not true.

So on I go, still searching, hoping for a better vessel, but sticking to this one for now, thank you very much.