Do your work!

"I can't write. My hand is broken."

"James, focus."
"Get your face off the table."
"Do the next one."
"Can you do the next problem before I count to ten? 1, 2, 3..."

It took an hour and ten minutes. It's one page. One page of math problems where you write the number that comes before and the one that comes after. Not exactly rocket science.

He didn't have any trouble figuring it out. What he had trouble with was the sitting, the writing, the actual focusing on something that he hadn't decided himself that he wanted to do.

I decided it was going to happen anyway. The worksheet was getting done. So it did; it just took over an hour, but now it's finished.

Homeschoolers like myself hear other parents say things like "I could never homeschool" or "I don't have the patience for that." Me neither. Being patient is hard and today was no picnic. Most days my children are pretty good about getting their work done. For James, today wasn't one of those days, but we got through it. It was more an exercise in parenting than in homeschooling. I decided he needed to do something and I saw it through so that he would know that I really meant he had to finish it. We don't homeschool because I have an extraordinary amount of patience; we manage to homeschool despite my lack of it.