Homeschooling for Free: Part V

{Hey, y'all. The saga continues! My friend Greta is sharing more of her experience with the self-imposed creative challenge of homeschooling without spending a dime on curriculum or classes/activities for the entire fall semester. Other installments can be found by clicking on the "Homeschooling for Free" sidebar tab.}     

"Really, Greta? Aren't you taking this Homeschooling for Free thing a little too seriously?  Chess club is so cheap and such a good thing and, I mean, what we want for our kids is the best education possible, irregardless of the cost."

     "Irregardless? Did you just say 'irregardless?' Okay. I'm done with this conversation."

So what if this was just a theoretical conversation that I had with my husband in my own thoughts? To be fair, he doesn't use "irregardless," but he does mix up his nominative and objective pronouns at times, which of course, can grate, but does not give me permission to invalidate his arguments.

 True, four out of five of us love chess club and the fifth one likes it, and so, at $1/per chess player, it really is one of the best things going. But, how could it hurt to give it up for just one semester...?

   Fast forward a few weeks into the fall semester, the weather was gorgeous and we had all gone down to the local public pool. An acqaintance of mine who was swimming easy laps called to me and said that hey, she had been wanting to call me. It turns out that she had taken charge of the after school enrichment classes at the elementary school down the street from our house and had wanted to inquire as to whether or not Phoebe and Christian would be willing to teach chess.  What?? The details all fleshed out were that it was a six week class which lasted one hour and might have up to eight children. My children were very interested, and I, as their agent, negotiated a screaming salary, double what they normally get, of $6/hr for Christian and $8/hr for Phoebe. They were ecstatic.

   Although teaching others chess does not actually advance one's own knowledge of this fabulous mind-bending game, it does impart other valuable skills. Not the sit-down- and-be-quiet-you-are-talking-too-much sort of teaching skill, rather the big bag of tricks which are needed to help a 13 year old and a 11 year old teach a group of children -- some who know how to play, some who don't, and some who pretend to know.  

My children know from teaching private lessons that the attention wanes at about 30 min, so imagine when the attention wanes for eight children at 30 min of an hour long class!  Each day, they would discuss how to divide up the kids, who could manage which kids better, who still needed to learn which chess skills and how to fill the time productively. And at the end of the session, they'll get to divide up a big fat check! What could have been better than that?