Home School Curriculum Experts

I am so mad at myself. Every time I do this, I swear I will never let it happen again, and then before I turn around, I have done it …again. No, nothing illegal or immoral, just…well, irresponsible, I guess. I have fallen behind on grading my kids’ schoolwork. Not a couple of days behind…weeks. Like, two weeks with my girls in math and Easy Grammar and (dare I confess it?)…nine weeks with my son in math. There, I said it. My girls had done their work, but when I finally got around to checking it, they had gotten on the wrong track and so had not only missed several things that I should have caught and corrected early on, but this wrong way of doing things was now ingrained in their brains and will take a while to back out. Not to mention the fact that they were then faced with correcting two weeks’ worth of homework, a circumstance which does not make for happy times around our house. All of that is bad enough, and like I said, occurs far too often, but the worst thing was with my son. He is a seventh grader, and a pretty responsible and honest kid. So, in my busy-ness of the past few months, I had just relied on those character traits, and when I would ask him every day if he was done with his schoolwork and he said yes, I took it at face value. I knew that his Science, History, and Language Arts were up-to-date - he does those at co-op and I teach one of those classes, so I knew we were good with those. But I knew there would come a day when I would have to pay the piper and grade weeks’ worth of math homework, and I kept putting it off. So finally this week, the day arrived. I asked for his math homework to grade, and he immediately started hedging “Ummm, I’m a little behind…let me catch up and I’ll bring it to you.” “That’s okay,” I said, “let me grade what you have and you can finish the rest.” “But Mom…”…”Bring. Me. The. Book.” I opened the book to week 18, where he was supposed to be, and started flipping backwards to find where he had stopped. Week 9. ARE YOU SERIOUS????? “Mom, I started getting behind and I needed help, but the further I got behind the madder I knew you would be when you found out so…I just didn’t tell you.” And then I felt ashamed. Angry, yes, because he lied to me. But ashamed because I knew that I had fallen down on the job in a major way. So after a heart-to-heart about honesty and integrity, and an apology from me for my neglect, we sat down with his agenda and came up with a plan to catch him up in two months and keep him current. It will require a lot of extra work on both our parts, but it was a wake-up call to me to not lull myself into neglecting staying on top of my kids’ education, and a clearing of the air between my son and me that I hadn’t even known we needed. So chime in…please tell me that I’m not the only deadbeat mom out there :)How do you keep up with your kids’ schoolwork? How do you transfer that responsibility to them as they get older? How do you strike a balance?