You’re reading The Ten AM, a Tuesday check-in for the parents who chose the kitchen table over the classroom. Think of this as the group text you actually want to read—a quiet moment for us to connect from one living room to another about the beauty, the mess, and the hard truths of raising humans in the wild.
Welcome to The Slow Pour.
I’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a NEW column — a curated hit of field notes and finds to help you close out the week feeling even more grounded in your decision to homeschool. For today, let's talk about imposter syndrome in homeschooling...
No amount of curriculum, lanyards, or "expert" validation can replicate the raw, human connection that happens when you decide to be the primary witness to your child’s life.
Case in point: You can pull up a high-res image of the Mona Lisa on your phone while you’re waiting for the kettle to whistle for your slow-pour morning, yet people still pay thousands to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.
The same is true of the tanning beds I used to pay to lie in in college. It did nothing to beat the real, skin-warming sun in Arizona.
And don’t get me started on food! Do you know anyone who actually wants a birthday cake made of aspartame? Not this gal points to self. Give me the real sugar. Real ingredients. Real.
It’s nearly impossible to artificially satisfy a basic human pleasure.
But in this world of "school at home," we’ve been sold a different story.
We’ve been told that the "real thing", or the "qualified" thing, is a person with a lanyard, a laminate degree, and a lesson plan vetted by a board of strangers. That’s the persona we imagine needing to teach our kids, which isn’t a helpful persona when we’re looking at our own reflection in the microwave door, seeing only a tired parent who forgot to start the Crockpot. It’s no wonder we sometimes feel like a cheap, blurry imitation of a "real" educator. We worry that by choosing the backroads, we’re somehow giving our kids a diet of aspartame instead of the rich, sugar-filled life they deserve.
The "who-do-you-think-you-are" panic doesn't just knock on our front doors. It moves in and asks what's for lunch.
Anyone else have days when you wonder when the "real" adults are going to show up?
I felt that familiar acidic hum this week while reading Ramona the Brave with my boys . There’s a scene where Ramona, desperate to be seen, sabotages a classmate who is copying her work. Her teacher—not a bad person, just a busy one—decides the "efficient" consequence is a public apology in front of the whole class. It was a standardized, aspartame-level solution that left Ramona humiliated, unheard, and still boiling on the inside.
But then, she goes home.
Her parents didn't reach for a rubric or a handbook. They reached for her. They asked questions. They sat in the mess of her big, messy feelings and tried to map out what was happening in her mind. They gave her the one thing the classroom couldn't afford to give: the space to be humanly processed instead of institutionally corrected.
I saw this same flash of frustration in my own son recently. In his "before" life, he was often held back from PE to finish assignments he hadn’t finished in the allotted time—a move that felt like a betrayal since his body thinks best through movement. The public school classroom simply isn't set up to accommodate a kid who needs to run around to learn, and that’s not their fault. They have too many bodies to manage.
But here? Here, we have the "Slow Pour" luxury of pivots at Ten AM.
This week, while we were tackling math, he hit a wall. Instead of a public apology or a lost recess, he stood up for a series of jumping jacks. So did I. And so did his brother. We all must have looked crazy jumping all over our homeschool room and making ridiculous cheers to keep our head in the math game, but who cares? Ultimately, we were all left us both breathless and laughing on the floor.
The result of those shenanigans? He didn't just get back to work; he found a groove. He was more productive, finishing in half the time, but more importantly, he was at ease. He was actually thinking through the problems instead of fighting his own skin. He was excited about multiplication.
We spend so much time worrying that we aren't "qualified" because we don't have the teacher's manual, yet we forget that the public school system isn't designed for depth. It’s designed for volume.
Traditional classroom control demands a clinical quiet that simply can’t afford a jumping jack break or a fourteenth request for a snack. So, it settles for a high-res, aspartame-sweetened image of 'good behavior' while the actual child suffocates underneath.
But your kid doesn't need a proctor to demand an apology for their humanity. They need a parent who is willing to sit on the floor, look them in the eye, and say, 'Tell me what that felt like’.
Hear me out, here. The classroom isn't the "bad guy," and the teachers aren't villains. They’re just operating a different machinery. And because they’re operating a different machinery, we can’t spend our days holding our lives up to a yardstick that was never meant for us.
Public school is one form of education, but homeschool is another thing entirely. It’s a chance to go deeper. To do life. To see the parts of our kids that might otherwise stay hidden behind a desk for seven hours a day until we were able to ask the kinds of questions that would open our kids up once they were back at home.
If you’re worried that you’re a "blurry imitation" because you had to Google how to explain a decimal point this morning, look at the connection happening right in front of you. You aren't "qualified" because you know math especially well or because of a signature from a principal. You’re qualified because you are the only person on the planet who cares the most about your child.
The "teacher bot" mask can stay in the box. You’re already doing the work that matters most by being the person who asks the questions, the one who stays in the mess, and as a result, feeling like the real, skin-warming sun to your kiddo day after day.
XO,
Kimberly Crossland
P.S. Did you catch last Friday’s new column? It’s a curated hit of field notes and finds designed to help you shake off the week and feel even more grounded in this wild, beautiful decision to stay home.