Repeat after me: “I don’t have to finish the book; I don’t have to finish the book.”  Okay, Now I feel better.  Today was one of those days where I have to remind myself that the point of schooling my child is not to finish the book, in this case it is math, but to be able to do the concept.  We are struggling through ratios and percentage problems.  A lot of the trouble is with word problems.  I have a math text by a different publisher that a friend gave me so we are going to work on some problems in it.  Some days I think we have to move on; we must finish this book by the end of the year.  It is hard to convince myself that it is okay to spend longer on a topic than the text we are using does.  I’m afraid that we will get behind or that we won’t be showing progress to the evaluator.  I know the public schools don’t always get through the text books but that seems of little comfort to me.  I just have it in my head that we are not doing it right, well, or something if we don’t finish that book.  So I will spend the rest of the night saying to myself “I don’t have to finish the book!”

Maybe I should write it 200 times like they do in school for “I will not talk during class.”