A Day in the Life: Homeschooling a 12th Grader and a 6th Grader with a Full-Time Job

There’s no “typical homeschool day” in our house, but here’s a representative day from 2019, when my oldest was a senior in high school, my youngest was a 6th grader, and I was juggling homeschooling with a full-time job outside the home.

(I wrote this for the magazine last fall when we were in the middle of my daughter’s senior year.)

Over the years, I’ve published a few different “day in the life” glimpses into our homeschool, and the thing they have in common is that they’re all completely different. Our homeschool shifts all the time — with the season, with my workload, with the kids’ interests. It’s never been a fixed and static thing, and I love that about it, but it also makes it hard to say “look, here’s what a typical homeschool day is like for us.” The “typical day” is probably a myth — but I thought I might share with you a representative day from this fall.

I wake up before 6 A.M. and start coffee while I check my messages. I work on a few short pieces for the magazine and double-check my lessons for the day — it’s Monday, so I’m teaching middle school chemistry and creative writing — while everyone else is waking up and having breakfast.

Around 9:25 A.M., my daughter logs into her online college class and the rest of us load up to head to the hybrid school we started a few years ago. My son is a 6th grader in the junior high, and he loves learning with other people so much I wonder what we would have done if we hadn’t started a twice-a-week school for him to go to.

Students arrive by 10 A.M., and Suzanne and I grab a few minutes to plan while Jason starts a lively Spanish lesson. I’ve got a scavenger hunt review lined up for chemistry, and Suzanne turns out to be a genius at figuring out good hiding locations.

Then we head off to do our things: I’m reading my daughter’s essay on Cry the Beloved Country, which she has declared “a mess.” It’s not a mess, though I can see why she thinks so — she’s got lots of ideas, but she needs to go back to her thesis to figure out how to hold them together. By now it’s 11:30 and she’s done with her class, so I FaceTime her, and we go through it together. At first technology felt like a weird addition to our homeschool, but it’s made it possible for us to keep homeschooling while I work full-time outside of our home, so we’ve adjusted.

Suzanne and I have lunch together, working through a book list for the high school’s spring semester. As usual, Suzanne has almost too many good ideas, and I am going to have to winnow my now-gigantic list down.

After lunch, I get the kids started on the chemistry review scavenger hunt, sending them racing around the school in search of hidden envelopes. They almost don’t realize they’re reviewing the periodic table. They find the last clue and crack the code, so we move onto creative writing. I’ve been trying to help them understand the plot arc, so we’re playing a variation of Dixit to practice the different parts of the arc.

When I get home, it’s around 4:30 P.M, and my dog is very, very excited to see me. I start dinner and take him for a speedy walk around the block. My daughter joins me, and we catch up about her day — she was working on some math as well as her computer class and essay writing.

We keep chatting while she helps me with dinner, and my son joins in, too, telling her about a new version of the Preamble to the Constitution that he and his classmates made for TikTok. They’re both giggling while they set the table, and we sit down to eat around 5:30.

After dinner, Jason heads off to teach math down the road, the kids settle in for video game time, and I sit back at my computer to work on the winter issue of home/school/life. I’ll work until about 11 or so, listening to a lecture series on the Hittites in the background. I end up chatting on Slack with a student about roller derby for about 20 minutes, too.

Around 10, the kids come clattering down with our current readaloud — Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, which I loved and am excited they’re getting into — and we read together for about 30 minutes. I’m thankful every night that we’ve managed to hold onto this piece of homeschooling that I love so much — snuggling up on the couch, reading together, and talking about what we’re reading. Because while lots of things about our homeschool have changed — and more will probably change in the future — this core piece has been part of our homeschool from the beginning.

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