Lots of people are wanting the skinny on how school is going for Josh, so here we go. Overall, he loves it. I was hoping to have a peaceful moment to write out everything I have thought about it, but that'll never happen, so I'm going to try to do it now with the usual chaos on going on around me, and hopefully it'll all be coherent. :-)
First of all, two important insights I have had.
INSIGHT #1 -- Lots of times when people find out that you homeschool, they say something to the effect of "oh wow, I could never do that, what a time commitment, etc." I have often thought that actually, if you added up the time it takes for Junior to do their homework, get ready for school, do PTA, and all that it takes to keep a kid going in public school, it actually probably takes the same amount of time or less to homeschool. I was right.
INSIGHT #2 -- All of those times where all hell was breaking loose at home and I thought to myself, "maybe if Junior went to public school, he would get more done" -- I was wrong.
So, my homeschooling friends, especially those of you who also never had a kid in public school and often wondered if you were doing the right thing, the answer is probably yes.
That said, do I regret putting Josh in public school this year? No. I have confidence that his school and his teacher are the best I could hope for in our area. Did he have a horrible time getting adjusted to school? No, he fit right in without incident. Do kids offer him drugs at every turn in the hallway? No. Does he come home having learned new cursewords, or other undesirable behaviors? No. (His neighbor friends have always been good about sharing that stuff anyway.) Am I totally happy with the curriculum? No. The first week of school felt like a total waste of time, academically speaking. I know they're supposed to review a little bit, but they seemed to be reviewing stuff from a couple of grades ago. (INSIGHT #3 -- I do realize that Josh is "gifted," but any worries that I had that public school might be ahead of anything we were doing in a subject was completely unfounded. I think that maybe homeschooling curriculum across the board is more difficult than what you could expect in public school. Even in the subjects that got the least attention in our homeschool we still were ahead of public school.) We are now in week #4, and things have improved a bit. They seem to emphasize language arts type skills the most, math skills next, and "social studies" after that. Science gets the least attention, which is unfortunate for us since that is Josh's forte. The math is heavy on "mental math" right now, or basically learning little tricks so that you can solve a problem in your head without having to work it out on paper. Social studies has consisted of lots of "how to be a good citizen," pretty cheesy and very simple.
The school rotates "specials" -- art, music, PE, library day. Josh has each once a week, and PE twice a week. The art class seems pretty lame so far. The music class seems pretty good, he says that the games they play in PE are fun and their library is pretty good. I volunteer in there every Thursday morning, which I enjoy. They have a good selection of books that I like, but since it is a new school they still have a limited amount of books. The kids can only check out 2 books at a time. They also have a computer lab, but I haven't had any reports from Josh that his class has used it.
Finally, supposedly they are evaluating the kids for reading and maybe math, to determine skill level and how to proceed with each child. I have heard that they have until the end of the first 6 weeks to finish that up, but I have not been able to determine that any of it has happened yet for Josh. I did receive a permission form and short evaluation for me to fill out so that Josh could be tested for the gifted and talented program, but his teacher said that it could take a month or two for that to be completed. Josh told me that he got pulled out one morning "to do some puzzles with someone," so I assume that was at least round #1 of the testing. There is a gifted and talented coordinator for the school (as opposed to the entire district sharing one like it was when I was a kid), but my understanding is that if/when Josh is accepted into the program, it will only entail being pulled out once a week for about an hour to do some extra work.
In summary, I have had many conniptions (however you want to spell that!) over the first few weeks, but I'm feeling better now. I have a good idea of what will be covered at school and what we'll have to do at home, and we're starting to take action on that. After school will look like this:
Monday -- astronomy course with a friend from school (also formerly homeschooled)
Tuesday -- Cub Scouts
Wednesday -- history (maybe Story of the World combined with Sonlight)
Thursday -- Robotics Club every other week
Friday -- whatever we feel like!
The things I think that Josh specifically likes about public school are (1) the structure of a classroom -- he feels better with a desk, chair, and whiteboard in front of him and (2) "I like to meet new people." If he were to be homeschooled again, I would make sure that he had lots of structure and lots of co-op activities with other kids.
I would say that the pros/cons of either homeschooling or public school are pretty even, but I say that knowing that we have a pretty good school here in a conservative neighborhood. It really depends on the kid, too. I'm not sure that my free spirit/art freak Delaney would be as happy away at school as she is here at home, where she can indulge freely in artsy stuff. I have no idea at this point if we'll send Josh to public school for the rest of elementary or not, but I'm not impressed with the middle school/high schools in our area, so my guess is that Josh only has two more years of public school ahead of him, at the most. I could always lose my mind again like I was last week and consider pulling him out, but as I have said before, I still feel like this is what God wants for Josh right now, and so we move ahead in that direction.