It’s no secret that I am ambivalent about digital tech. I use the word ambivalent deliberately: it’s not that I have a moderate opinion on tech, but rather that I both love and hate it. I’m really conflicted about it, swinging from one extreme to another – or at least, I’m conflicted about my laptop use, that same darn laptop on which I’m typing right now. (I am not ambivalent about smartphones and other smart devices like Alexa or even smart homes — those I consider net negatives and do not use.)
Using my laptop for several hours each day makes my eyeballs sink into the back of my head. It makes me see my kids’ questions as interruptions to my Important Work on the Computer. And it makes my back stiffen and my head ache. I often dream of just chucking my laptop out the window and making myself spend hours in the garden every day instead. Anything but another hour on this blasted laptop.
But using a laptop also lets me write essays quickly and effectively while still being available to my children, even if I can be a bit impatient when they interrupt me. It allows me to stay up-to-date on homeschooling research and the media campaign against home education, two topics that are highly relevant to my own current research project. It keeps me in daily touch with my favorite far-flung homeschooling-parent-cum-writer friends, the inspiring and brilliant Nadya Williams and Ivana Greco. And it makes my main professional gig as an editor at the journal Hearth & Field possible in my daily context of homemaking and homeschooling. If I had to go to the office every day, there’s no way I could do all of this at once.
So I continue to use my laptop daily, and I also continue to agonize over whether I use it well or poorly. In particular, I am always re-evaluating how working on a computer fits in with homeschooling four active, curious, children at four different academic levels.
As is the case for many homeschooling families, our family’s decisions about whether and how to homeschool are made on a year-by-year and child-by-child basis. Early summer is the time when most of this planning and discernment happens, and so I have recently been spending much of my laptop time preparing for this coming school year. Since our eldest child will be doing some high school-level study in 2024-2025, I am realizing that this means our homeschooling will be leveling up this year, so to speak. You should see the boxes full of Livy and Plutarch and Plato and ancient epic poetry that have been arriving on our doorstep from various online bookstores lately. It’s both tremendous exciting and overwhelming.
We really need to get some more bookshelves, stat.
Any time I have to deepen my investment in homeschooling, I immediately begin to rethink my computer use. In recent years, I’ve been pretty strict about staying off of the computer during our formal school hours, except for the odd check-in; it’s been too easy for me to be distracted from the children’s needs while I’m working. But if I’m supporting our eldest’s rigorous literature, history, and science study this year to degree that I’d like to, I’m going to be putting in more hours supervising and facilitating our homeschooling. Gone, I fear, are the days when we were done with our schoolwork by lunchtime (although I still expect that the younger children will be). But if I continue to avoid using the computer for my own work during school hours, when exactly will I do my own research, writing, and editing?
So this year I think I will be tiptoeing cautiously into a different approach: when the kids are doing their work, I’ll be sitting at that same table, doing my work, as well. We’ll just have to do our writing and studying together. I’ll have to work on my patience and flexibility, striving to see questions and requests for help and the need to stop my computer work for an hour for a project or read-aloud as what I am meant to be doing, not a distraction from my writing, research, or e-mails. I’ll have to take lots of deep breaths.
But I think that this year I do need to give myself permission to do my work, too, in the presence of my children, and accept that I can’t compartmentalize it the way that a parent with childcare or normative school support might be able to do. It’s not that I ever thought it was bad for my kids to see me working – that’s important modeling. But I have always wanted them to think of their mother as mostly being off the computer, rather than tapping away at it.
Yet that’s not really the reality of my work right now. I can’t model a life spent mostly away from the computer, because my professional work simply must happen largely on that laptop. But I can model working well in our little family community, closing the laptop once the work is done, and being patient with the reality that my computer work and my work as my children’s teacher can coexist. I need to accept that, and go on freely to enjoy the possibilities of doing our work together.
So if you need me, I’ll be at the dining room table, typing out my next essay alongside my children.