The Not-So-Perfect Homeschool Room
As many parents consider homeschooling this fall amid the pandemic, I admit I shook my head a bit when I saw reports of desk shortages. While I understand that people stock up on toilet paper during a pandemic, buying a desk for every child seems unnecessary to me. Why? Well, I have desks for two of my children. The first desk was purchased so my oldest son would have a nice work station in his bedroom where he could quietly complete his homeschooling tasks. If you’re a seasoned homeschooler, you’re probably laughing. Yeah, the desk has now been handed down to my younger son, and its primary purpose is to store random items in the drawers and display trinkets.
The second desk is my old desk that I really thought I needed when I was in high school. It looked really nice in my room as I laid on the floor to do my homework. When my youngest son migrated from a toddler bed in his sister’s room to a downstairs bedroom of his own, our daughter insisted she wanted this desk in her bedroom. It looks great in there, and she was very excited to have it and uses it intermittently - to hide piles of notebooking pages and history maps that she hasn’t finished yet and is hoping I won’t notice.
So, do kids need a desk? They use desks in schools. Desks are a necessary part of a well-rounded education and will help children stay focused and dutifully complete their assignments. Desks make them take their education seriously. Okay, when I write this I can hear the sauciness in my head, but I’m not sure it’s conveyed well in text. What does a desk REALLY achieve? Well, it does store papers and supplies, and you can use it as a writing surface. If your child needs to practice their penmanship, then sitting upright with good posture in a solid chair in front of a flat working surface is helpful. When my kids were learning how to write, I had them sit at our kitchen counter or a small table to facilitate better penmanship. If your child has a really hard time concentrating in a noisy environment, then a desk in a quiet bedroom might be something you can offer as a refuge in a noisy household. If you don’t have desks for your children, that’s completely fine. If your kids are anything like mine, they probably won’t use them very much. Desks are not a requirement in a successful learning atmosphere. On the other hand, if you already have a desk for your child, don’t feel like you have to get rid of it (but I do recommend you check the drawers often for buried treasures).
I don’t have anything against desks. In fact, I love the idea of a desk or I wouldn’t have one in my living room for myself (which is primarily used for sewing projects). It’s just that I learned quickly that my kids didn’t like sitting at desks and they certainly didn’t learn better sitting at them either. This really should have been a no-brainer. The only time I worked at a desk in high school or college (not including the thousands of hours I was in a classroom) was if I had to use a computer that was stationed at one. Now, with a laptop, I don’t even use a desk for that. My laptop sits on a handy little swivel stand that sits in front of my couch. My couch is comfortable, so comfortable that I should probably rotate these cushions again because I have a rather noticeable imprint of my bottom on the cushion that faces my laptop. Plus, I can see the whole room in front of me from my couch, and I can see trees outside through the windows. Have you ever noticed that most desks in homes face walls? That’s not exactly a stimulating view. It doesn’t make sense, given the size of most rooms in a house, to put a desk in the middle of the room. It would make for an inconvenient flow of traffic. That’s why we put them facing walls. Kids prefer to sit on comfortable, plush furniture or sprawl out on the floor rather than sit in a hard desk chair facing a wall.
This lengthy monologue about desks really leads into a broader question about homeschooling: What does the perfect homeschooling space look like? When I started homeschooling, I looked at a lot of online pictures of homeschooling rooms. I wanted to create a colorful space that was cozy and functional and had all of our supplies in one place. We have a large family room in our lower level, and it was already kind of split in half: one side included our couch with our entertainment center and television, and the other side was mostly toys. I did some redecorating on the side with the toys. I added a really fun, colorful rug, attractive bookshelves, and cabinets with games and educational toys. We started out using it quite a bit. When it was time for homeschooling, that’s where we went.
It didn’t take long before we ran into difficulties, though. We generally spend most of our time in our living room, which is in our upper level. It’s next to our kitchen and dining room, and we spend a LOT of time in our kitchen. Who doesn’t? Humans eat a lot, and often. Then those messes need to be cleaned up. It turned out that it was inconvenient to send the kids downstairs after they ate while I still had to be in the kitchen to clean up the mess. They didn’t want to go back down without me, so they weren’t getting anything done while I cleaned up. We also found that we got really cold in our homeschooling room. Because we have a split-level home, our downstairs tends to be COLD. That’s quite welcome in the summer, but in the winter we were dressed very warmly and still needed blankets. Over time, homeschooling materials started trickling upstairs, and pretty soon, we were spending less and less time in our homeschooling space.
Does that mean we quit homeschooling? Of course not! It means that I learned some important lessons. First, when you decide where you want to homeschool in your house, think about where you naturally spend the most time. By default, that’s probably where you’ll end up doing a lot of homeschooling. To accommodate how you want to homeschool, it makes the most sense to modify the space where you already spend the majority of your time. For us, that meant we needed to modify how we organized and used our living room, kitchen, and dining room. A second important lesson I learned is that when you homeschool your kids, there is no perfect space. Despite all of my good intentions to create a perfect space that would stimulate learning and inspire creativity, homeschooling really took over my entire house. When you homeschool, it isn’t a separate part of your life that you can easily compartmentalize into one place. It becomes entwined with every facet of your home and your family. Homeschooling is life.
