The Kingdom of Anxiety

Homeschooling my children doesn't make me the Baddie.

Today is the day I dread most of the year—state testing.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I know I’m being a baby. It doesn’t even take the whole day. It basically means lining the kids up at the kitchen counter with their laptops, opening the email, logging them in, biting into a large bar of chocolate, and standing around anxiously while they wander the wilderness of all the stuff I didn’t teach them because we’re busy learning a lot of other things.

What I’m trying to say is, my educational choices never match those of the common core or whatever is the latest iteration of bureaucratically devised curriculum. My children have had to slog through Dante and Plato and cram Latin and Greek into their stubborn minds this year. I have totally not remembered to teach them how to read a paragraph about Global Warming and then pull out some vocabulary words and fill in the little bubbles. Though they are good at navigating any online platform because all their classes are delivered through the medium of the Internet, they are often baffled by the subject matter of the tests. It is always dry and excessively dull. Their educational lives are a strange mashup of ancient content and modern technology culminating in a jolt of cross-cultural orientation for that one day at the end of the year. They always do fine and don’t care because then their scholastic trials are basically over (except for math practice all summer) until it all begins again in September. It is only a little tiresome to read about where to find a book you would never want to read in the library, do all the math problems, fill in the bubbles, and then go on with your life. I’m the one that’s stressed because seeing what the educational industrial complex thinks is important is soul-crushing.