Teri's 30 days of "First Day of School"

[DowntownAbbey]

I honestly can't tell at this point if Teri can't organize her way out of paper bag or if she just thinks her followers can't. I know I'm a nerd when it comes to organization, but I can't fathom that most adults wouldn't be able to figure this stuff out on there or if they even need to.

[salex]

I found another article by Terri about the first day of school. One of the "special breakfasts" was donuts from the grocery store. Yep, tons of extra clean up right there. :shock:

Then I found this gem about the school notebooks. Why this woman was writing anything about organizing or anyone was reading mystifies me.

Wow. I mean, wow. Apparently they have the organizing and 15 minute scheduling because she is not functional when it comes to organizing. Frankly, why she had to do this on class day is beyond me. Have the special breakfast on the saturday before you start classes, hand out the notebooks with a sheet of paper on how you want the tabs set up (alphabetized, anyone?) and have the kids do that.

And practically every home in the country (and likely other countries) take picture on the first day of school, and still get to the bus or school on time. What extra grooming did this entail? did she not have the kids brush their hair and get dressed on other days?

Can you see her managing to survive in any of the jobs you've ever had?

[MamaJunebug]

A mystery has just been solved.

For 3,4 years I've wondered about a comment a Maxwell Dan made while we chatted at the sales table. The customer's eyes filled with tears as she told me, "These people are The Best. They don't talk down to you!" Behind her, her friend nodded vigorously , also emotional.

Teri complaining about how fouled up

Everything is/was us a huge selling point for their fans! They don't feel intimidated by Teri & Cimpany because she presents herself as being as hapless as they feel!

What the what?! When I'm seeking guidance, I look for someone who's succeeded or at least succeeding.

Maybe half-assed home education is what the Maxwells and their fans are satisfied with. Maybe in later chapters Teri describes how she made things better, and *that's* what keeps people enthralled.

Weird!

[danvillebelle]

Disclaimer: I am NOT defending Terified or her seeming inability to organize a notebook.

That being said...

I do know that way back when, they used more than one method/curriculum style at once - unit studies, some textbooks, some other stuff, etc. So if you have that multiplied by several children in different grades to get organized (unit studies require a lot of teacher prep time), it *could* take some time.

But DUH - do it before the first day.

I have been home educating for 16 years. Even when I had 3 grade schoolers and a toddler/preschooler to deal with, I managed to get through the first week without my world crashing in. And I know now, in hindsight, I WAS clinically depressed. :disgust:

We never took first day pictures. My kids can add that to their future issues for therapy list. :roll:

[16strong]

A mystery has just been solved.

For 3,4 years I've wondered about a comment a Maxwell Dan made while we chatted at the sales table. The customer's eyes filled with tears as she told me, "These people are The Best. They don't talk down to you!" Behind her, her friend nodded vigorously , also emotional.

Teri complaining about how fouled up

Everything is/was us a huge selling point for their fans! They don't feel intimidated by Teri & Cimpany because she presents herself as being as hapless as they feel!

What the what?! When I'm seeking guidance, I look for someone who's succeeded or at least succeeding.

Maybe half-assed home education is what the Maxwells and their fans are satisfied with. Maybe in later chapters Teri describes how she made things better, and *that's* what keeps people enthralled.

Weird!

Holy shit. So if this is true, they're making a career out of capitalizing on Teri's mental illness? And they've built a following of other mentally ill people? Guess everything the light doesn't touch is Steve's... :roll:

[VodouDoll]

She was frustrated to tears by figuring out on the first day of school how many tabs each kid needed in their binder, what they should say, and whether they should be alphabetized?

You have got to be kidding me.

I am far from the most organized person in my personal life, but at my job, you had better believe it. Teri, homeschooling was your WORK! Get it together! Figure out the binder tabs ahead of time! Talk with your kids one on one during the summer to go over expectations for the coming school year! This is prep work. It SHOULD be done ahead of time and it's a good thing the freaking LORD took a break from running the universe to let you know that the first day of school is too late to start your prep. Christ Almighty, these people.

Ooooh, you know what it is, you guys? She wasn't excited. If she had been excited about homeschooling, if she'd actually enjoyed teaching her kids and been eager to start, those binders would've been labeled ahead of time because she'd have been champing at the bit to get going. It sounds to me like she didn't want to think about it or do any work on it until she absolutely had to, and then she panicked because Steve expected academics on day one and she couldn't do it.

[FloraDoraDolly]

She was frustrated to tears by figuring out on the first day of school how many tabs each kid needed in their binder, what they should say, and whether they should be alphabetized?

You have got to be kidding me.

I am far from the most organized person in my personal life, but at my job, you had better believe it. Teri, homeschooling was your WORK! Get it together! Figure out the binder tabs ahead of time! Talk with your kids one on one during the summer to go over expectations for the coming school year! This is prep work. It SHOULD be done ahead of time and it's a good thing the freaking LORD took a break from running the universe to help you figure out that the first day of school is too late to start your prep. Christ Almighty, these people.

Ooooh, you know what it is, you guys? She wasn't excited. If she had been excited about homeschooling, if she'd actually enjoyed teaching her kids and been eager to start, those binders would've been labeled ahead of time because she'd have been champing at the bit to get going. It sounds to me like she didn't want to think about it or do any work on it until she absolutely had to, and then she panicked because Steve expected academics on day one and she couldn't do it.

It sounds to me like Teri is suffering from an anxiety disorder in addition to depression. The two often go together. When you have an anxiety disorder, you overthink absolutely every little thing and then freak out if something's not right. I'm sure having Steve around didn't help, but Teri probably wouldn't be a lot different even under the best of circumstances. The woman's brain just ain't wired right.

[NotALoserLikeYou]

I know homeschooling is important and vital for ensuring where your kids go when they die, but has Teri ever said she LIKED homeschooling? Or enjoyed the experience??

[defraudingjezebel]

Has she talked about being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder? As someone with a bit of anxiety myself I know that when I don't have big things to worry about, I sometimes tend to worry about the littlest things. Maybe in Teri's world, she doesn't have anything significant to cause her anxiety so all of her issues stem from things that (outwardly) seem really insignificant. Since she has no/little say-so in large matters, perhaps she gets anxious when the few things she CAN control don't go as planned.

[VodouDoll]

She's never talked about anxiety that I can recall, just her depression. It could be, though. We've talked before about how the Maxwell homeschool was just a bunch of textbooks, and their assignments were "Read the chapter and answer all the questions," ad infinitum. No projects or library trips or supplemental reading ever, because Teri didn't want to have to plan it. They checked their own work against the teacher's guide because she didn't want to have to grade it. She only scheduled half an hour a day for actual teaching and whenever she felt overwhelmed (which was often), that was the first thing she'd drop from her schedule because the kids didn't really need face time with her to sit and chug through workbook questions. It was education by rote checklist rather than curiosity and exploration, because that's all she had the bandwidth for, and she didn't like teaching much anyway, but at least they were all at home and not off making friends, so she and Steve were just fine with that.

Can you see her managing to survive in any of the jobs you've ever had?

Ah, no. If it didn't occur to her until after several years of teary starts to school that she could jump right in with academics if she started her prep before the first day, I'm sorry but I honestly can't.

I can't believe they presented this as some kind of cool lifehack. It's so tone-deaf and strange and sad.

[jakesykora]

I don't understand what is so overwhelming about the first day if homeschool. Who cares if you don't get a lot done that first day? You are at home. You can make up the work tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday, or a random evening. I thought homeschooling allowed you to go at your own pace. Why would the kids feel they were behind if everything wasn't don the first day? They aren't competing with anyone else. They will only think they are behind if Teri or Steve tells them that. Oh, and based on what we have seen and read of the Maxwells kids, they are actually behind everyone else education-wise.

Considering how regimented everything about their days/weeks are (down to weighing out 1.5 ounce dough for each tortilla) I suspect the problem was you couldn't put off today's work to tomorrow or to the weekend because every portion of each hour or activity, etc. for then was also scheduled with its own 'responsibility.'

Their own system and obsessive planning (basically) is probably the very thing that did Teri in, in many ways.

[jakesykora]

It's amazing that the very rigid and avoiding of excess or pleasure Maxwells* look downright generous and indulgent with the first day of school 'surprises' when compared to someone like Erika Shupe! :lol:

Two candy bars for Mary? New pencils and tabs for the notebooks that stressed Teri out?

The Shupe kids would get half a jelly bean and have to work many hours to be able to earn a pencil or a tab - and it'd probably only be a golf size pencil with how stingy that Erika's system is! :roll:

*again, with the things like the weighing out how much spinach is allowed per smoothie or the ounce of dough permitted for a tortilla

[Jana814]

I think Mary's last year of school was school in name only. They probably just tacked it on so that Terry could claim she homeschooled for the nice round number of 30 years rather than 29.

Agree!!

[rosalitta]

The notebook mystery is solved! To be honest I was envisioning some crazy involved organizational scheme, when apparently it's just tabs. I can understand a teensy bit of anxiety just because I would personally hate to have tabs in order and then realize that one was missing and have it placed at the end. I would have probably just ended up relabeling them, but obviously that wouldn't ever work for them. Unless of course they scheduled relabeling time into the day. Actually, a 15 minute once a week "organization time" added to homeschool might have helped Terri a lot. Clearly she couldn't handle any variation or flexibility and I'm sure her robot-children would have needed to fill the entire time slot with organizing so things would be beautiful.

[Howl]

"Seinfeld was a self-described show about nothing in which nothing much ever changed"

This Teri post, and the Maxwells by extension, reminds me of this quote about Seinfeld -- indeed, it's a show about nothing -- but unlike Seinfeld, it's been drained of joy, fun, self-awareness, irony or humor.

Edited to note that part of the fun of Seinfeld was a lack of self awareness!

[Howl]

Maybe Teri would have benefited from doing school the German way. Six weeks of summer break tops, but more breaks in between to have a rest during the school year and ease things up a bit or skip a week of vacation in between to catch up if there are significant delays. Dear God (or dear Steve?), I thought homeschooling was the laid back alternative to public school because it leaves so much room for individual time scheduling.

Not in the Maxwell House apparently. :whistle:

Some years ago, Austin, TX attempted to transition over to this schedule (Year Round Schooling). Instead of a long summer break, there would be three month-long breaks, or (alternately) cycles of eight to 10 weeks, with three to five weeks off after each, throughout the year.

It was completely thwarted by summer camps, who would have been at least partially out of business. They launched a fierce lobbying effort called "Save Our Summers" which pretty much shut the whole thing down, but apparently, many other school districts here and there across this US have this schedule.

[slickcat79]

I found another article by Terri about the first day of school. One of the "special breakfasts" was donuts from the grocery store. Yep, tons of extra clean up right there. :shock:

Then I found this gem about the school notebooks. Why this woman was writing anything about organizing or anyone was reading mystifies me.

I'm confused. Tab dividers are deliberately crafted so that you can add more if you need them, and cost like 10 cents. Why could they not just get more and add them if they found they needed them?

And really, why was Teri messing in the children's notebooks to return their work or whatever? When I was in school (at least middle school age), I think most students had a binder with tabs for different subjects. It would never occur to any teacher to tell us how to organize the tabs, though...because they would never be looking at them. Maybe some children would like them alphabetized, but maybe some would like them grouped categorically, or in the order that the lessons were being taught.

Sorry, I'll just take myself off to the prayer closet with my "individuality" crazy talk :cray-cray:

[Howl]

Considering how regimented everything about their days/weeks are (down to weighing out 1.5 ounce dough for each tortilla) I suspect the problem was you couldn't put off today's work to tomorrow or to the weekend because every portion of each hour or activity, etc. for then was also scheduled with its own 'responsibility.'

Their own system and obsessive planning (basically) is probably the very thing that did Teri in, in many ways.

Is it Steve's shadow looming over all of this? Perhaps Teri wasn't allowed to homeschool (or do anything else) in her own way, but everything EVERY. SINGLE.THING had to be done Steve's way, with bad consequences for both Teri and the kids if anything went awry. That's a great recipe for depression right there.

[formergothardite]

Disclaimer: I am NOT defending Terified or her seeming inability to organize a notebook.

That being said...

I do know that way back when, they used more than one method/curriculum style at once - unit studies, some textbooks, some other stuff, etc. So if you have that multiplied by several children in different grades to get organized (unit studies require a lot of teacher prep time), it *could* take some time.

But DUH - do it before the first day.

I have been home educating for 16 years. Even when I had 3 grade schoolers and a toddler/preschooler to deal with, I managed to get through the first week without my world crashing in. And I know now, in hindsight, I WAS clinically depressed. :disgust:

We never took first day pictures. My kids can add that to their future issues for therapy list. :roll:

My mom homeschooled multiple grades with multiple curriculums/methods and yeah, it can be hard to get it organized. But she spent weeks during the summer making sure it was all ready before schools started.

My mom remembers when ATI was pushing the Maxwell materials and she always thought they were crazy. She always felt that flexibility was the key when it came to teaching children and the Maxwells seem to view being flexible as a sin.

We never took first day of school pictures either. :lol: But I don't remember even the people I knew who went to public school taking first day of school pictures every year.

[Jana814]

"Seinfeld was a self-described show about nothing in which nothing much ever changed"

This Teri post, and the Maxwells by extension, reminds me of this quote about Seinfeld -- indeed, it's a show about nothing -- but unlike Seinfeld, it's been drained of joy, fun, self-awareness, irony or humor.

I have never seen Seinfeld. But I agree that's a great discription of Teri's homeschooling.

[Eternalbluepearl]

I have 2 thoughts on all of this.

1. The Maxwells exaggerate how painfully hard organizing and scheduling was for them in the earlier years because they sell organizing and scheduling books. This is their bread and butter is having frazzled moms believe they were once frazzled and now aren't.

2. Teri's depression was very severe. No, she didn't like home schooling, she didn't want more kids after the first 3 and every aspect of life was hard for her. She meted out her day in 15 minute increments so that she could survive them. She was in need of help. That she didn't get.

[FundieWatcher]

2. Teri's depression was very severe. No, she didn't like home schooling, she didn't want more kids after the first 3 and every aspect of life was hard for her. She meted out her day in 15 minute increments so that she could survive them. She was in need of help. That she didn't get.

This reminds of some advice I once got. I did a stint in the military after high school. I dont like to talk about, not because of something traumatic, I'm just a different person now. 2003/2004 I was in Army basic training, someone suggested to live meal-to-meal and Sunday-to-Sunday. When you are having a hard time just count the hours to the next meal. "Just one hour until lunch"..." Get through this PT and we can eat breakfast"...And the same way with Sunday, which were used for cleaning, various services and after phase 1 we could use the phone. "Just two wake ups until Sunday"... (Who knows how things are done nowadays, by 2009 my brother was using his cell in basic)

Terry must have lived 15 minutes-to-15 minutes for 30 years.

[salex]

If one fj member met 2 weeping devotees at one workshop it may well mean Steve and sons inc made out like a bandit and may have plenty to buy houses mortgage free and buy expensive baby accessories and leave enough for the daughters to live on.

[Eighth-of-eleven]

Omg, that poor woman, I may disagree with her beliefs but as some one who struggles with major depression and general anxiety disorder (and complex ptsd) she has my compassion. And the husband sounds like a major tool. Those poor children. My trips down the multiple rabbit holes of fundy culture may have contributed to my recent increase in medications, that and the joshgate trigger.

[Brightonbelle]

How are US school holidays spread over the year? I'm in the UK and we only have six weeks off in summer, I always assumed it would be similar in the states.