I mentioned in an earlier post that when I don’t do school with the boys somehow I don’t have two extra hours in the morning, even though I spend about two hours working with them. I think I’ve solved the mystery there. I paid close attention today to just what was happening through the morning, and realized that in fact I am multi-tasking through most of that time. For assignments that are basically recitation I will have whomever is doing it follow me around while I do something else; while D. is doing math I help him with the beginning of his lesson, but then I do kitchen clean-up during the rest of it, where I am available if needed but not actually sitting with him. For part of our “couch school” time (which consists both of them reading to me and of me reading to them), I am usually nursing the baby. In all, during the time that we are doing school, I am also doing laundry, putting away breakfast dishes and clearing the kitchen counters, stoking the fire, nursing, pottying, and changing the baby, and supervising the non-school age children. All of which still has to be done on non-school days. There is actually not more than forty minutes or so when I am only doing school with them, and so forty extra minutes is about all I get when we don’t do it. In a way it is encouraging that we are able to pull it off so efficiently, but in a way it is discouraging, because, well, see above. At any rate, I can see that I’m actually not wasting time on those days when we aren’t doing school, but just doing fewer things at one time.
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