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Time management is essential to home schooling
(October 2, 2004) Working full time while home schooling your children may seem an impossible scenario. After all, life offers only a fixed number of hours each day. Add up the time devoted to the job and the hours needed for home schooling and the clock can quickly run out.
Still, a number of families are making the combination work Ñ albeit with a great deal of effort, major cooperation among families and a militant focus on time management.
Rob Rolleston, a researcher at Xerox Corp., makes it work by beginning his day before dawn.
"In my typical schedule, I wake up and do a round of work e-mail long before the kids ever get up," said Rolleston, who with his wife is home schooling their two children, ages 12 and 14.
He hands out a few assignments before heading off to work. Then his wife, Marjorie, takes over teaching during the day, while he occasionally answers e-mail questions from the kids.
Many evenings, he teaches classes at home to other home-schooled kids: math, physics, neuroscience. Then he's back on the computer at night, planning new assignments. "Home schooling is a way of life," he said.
For families willing to take on the challenge, there is help. And parents successful with home schooling have lots of advice.
Most would not advocate parents taking on home schooling if both spouses have full-time jobs. It's easier if one parent works no more than part time.
More than that is "very hard, but doable," said Lynn Barnett, a board member of the Rochester Area Homeschoolers' Association.
A flexible employer really helps, as it did for Nathaniel Martin, also a researcher at Xerox, whose children are 12 and 14. The nature of Martin's work is academic, so he has more flexibility with work schedules.
So when his wife, Shari Rediess who had been home schooling their children full time, took a full-time job in July 2003 at Ortho-McNeil in Rochester, Martin was able to restructure his job to work Monday through Thursday.
This year their youngest also went to traditional school full time, while the oldest has started taking some classes at Monroe Community College and the University of Rochester, supplementing classes he takes from his father at home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
"My bosses have been supportive with everything," Martin said, such as planning meetings at times he can attend.
Cooperation between home-schooling families also is immensely helpful, said Sue Klassen, who home schools her two children, ages 13 and 17.
"I can't imagine parents doing this alone," she said. "We helped put together reading groups, ballroom dancing classes, pilates sessions with some kids, chemistry with others."
Pat Wall, Nat's boss at Xerox, said the nature of research work lends itself well to flexible schedules. And allowing such flexibility helps the company retain talented people.
"The whole premise of our group is built around trust," Wall said. "These are professional folks and part of our job is to create and invent, and I think people working in environments that are positive and supportive helps with that creativity."
If home schooling sounds as if it takes planning, it does.
"We have this master calendar at home," Rolleston said. "The kids are all over home some days, taking science classes at the university other days."
It also takes inspiration.
Klassen and others recommend books such as Family Matters, (Harcourt, $14) by David Guterson.
If this all sounds like taking on two full-time jobs, or three, that's not far off base, Klassen said. But, she adds, "Raising kids is a big job, no matter how you cut it."
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