A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

“Julie, I’m exhausted already. I can’t enchant every single subject for every single child every single day! What about math?!”

Yes, uncle, true, I get it!…

Not every minute of every day can be a tap dance performance of inspiration, enchantment, and relevance. In the feast of ideas, sometimes all you can put on the table is lunch. Not every serving of educational value has to be a four course French dinner.

Let’s drill down to the essence of how to bring a satisfying, nourishing educational life to our kids.

I like to say that there are two primary goals every parent has when raising children:

1. Keep them alive

2. Fill up their time

When you homeschool, you add a third:

3. Qualify them for college/adulthood

Your daily life, then, is a dance between these three objectives. The route to a satisfying life and education is through connection, inspiration, and skill acquisition, while preventing death, and staying busy.

The best skill development comes when a child (or any person, really) sees the direct correlation between what they are learning and how that information or experience will enhance their lives. For instance, in art appreciation, it is unclear that there will be a lasting benefit beyond personal pleasure. Yet that can be enough! Art is meant to be loved, enjoyed, and admired primarily. The analytic tools necessary for a deeper dive will only be important to the few. Therefore, enjoy art! Don’t kill it through over-study.

When we look at mathematics, however, it is obvious that learning to calculate and use theorems (for instance) will be essential in most of the lucrative fields today.

It is not a violation of the spirit of an enchanted education to simply use a tool that teaches the incremental steps to mastering math or to using it effectively! Sometimes working through a workbook serves a couple of key needs for a parent:

1. It provides a clear pathway to skill acquisition (the parent doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel)

2. It fills time (the child can “do the next 3 pages” while the parent is otherwise occupied)

3. It provides repetition, a key property in mastery of any kind from Tae Kwon Do moves to conjugating Spanish verbs to dividing fractions

Where parents can enhance the experience of the subjects that are taught through rote methods is to find ways to connect what is being learned to the real world. Fractions don’t only live on worksheets! They are active in quilting, baking, origami, and carpentry. Is it possible to explore fractions in the real world simultaneous to the paper abstractions of worksheets? Yes! Do you have to only teach fractions by baking pies? No.

Where we get into trouble is this: we expect our kids to work in workbooks and text books all day every day, addressing each subject for 30-60 minutes, one after the other, using a pencil, sitting at a table. This kind of life slowly deflates curiosity and inspiration.

On the flip side is the life where homeschoolers live from inspiration to inspiration only to realize somehow a child never got interested in learning to read or never bothered to skip count and now he’s 12! That’s a horrifying feeling.

Sometimes parents simply feel paralyzed: like they will ruin their children if they ever use a piece of curriculum to teach a subject. Then they wring their hands while they watch their children wander the house like nomads in search of something to do. “Why aren’t my children inspired to follow their interests,” a parent wonders?

Is it possible the kids are waiting for an introduction to the feast? Perhaps that’s all that’s wanted.

Which leads us back to the main issue. A parent can embrace the properties of inspiration and skill-building by toggling between them. Parents tend to indulge joy in learning more freely when they feel that they are also being responsible to introduce their children to the essential skills of a basic education.

They can rely on the traditional tools for that base-level education and then depart from them periodically as they gain confidence or inspiration. Those flights of fancy away from rote learning will enrich the days when base level skill-building is on the menu in the same way a picnic enhances lunch!

So skill-build with confidence and make sure you sometimes connect it to how those skills apply to life on planet earth.

Melissa Wiley was asked in the BraveSchoolers Facebook group about what to do when kids have a snotty-tone or interrupt. Here is her brilliant reply (shared with permission and emphasis is ours).

I think tone is a really fun thing to work on because it gives the kids an opportunity to ham it up a bit. And in truth, we are all prone to lapses in tone now and then, me included. A friend of mine has a great story about having to listen to a message she had left on her son’s voice mail. She was shocked by how brusque and irritable she sounded. I have never forgotten that story!! I bet there are loads of times I would wince to hear a replay of words that came out of my mouth.

I start working on good tone habits by making it 100% a game at first. They don’t know I have an ulterior motive. 🙂 I pick a good moment—and I make sure it’s going to be a good WEEK for practicing. Whenever I’m building a habit, I look at the weeks ahead to think about what opportunities we’ll have for practicing it.

So: when the time is right (we are hanging out together, no high pressure/time constraints/overtired kids), I’ll say:

“Let’s play a game. Pretend you want a drink of juice and ask me in your rudest, snottiest tone.”

Kids think this is hilarious and tend to really get into the acting job. Then I’ll ask them to do it in a whiny tone. And I’ll praise their performance: “Wow!! That is impressively whiny!!” —stuff like that. Then while we’re all laughing, I’ll ask them to ask again in their most beeyootiful manners—or in a sweet tone—or whatever. And again, they seem to enjoy that performance. So that first day, we’re just playing an acting game, really. Sad tone, mad tone, scared tone—we’ll run through a bunch.

After that I’ll watch for opportunities to practice in real life. Usually someone will whine or snap later that day or the next and then I’ll say—in a very casual, no-big-deal tone myself—”hmm, could you try that again in a different tone?” I’m not stern, I’m not scolding, I’m being lighthearted and nudging them toward a different way of framing the question. I try to keep that same game-like spirit about it. In that moment, a really grumpy kid might not want to play the game, in which case I won’t push it. It’s still early stages.

At some point that first week, we’ll (again when the stakes are low and everyone is mellow) have a conversation about tone. If it doesn’t come up organically, I might work it into a read-aloud—like, I’ll read a bit of dialogue and then say, “Wait, I don’t think that sounded right. Should it have a more grumpy tone?” or some such. And this will spark a discussion about what a difference tone makes. I remember one time we got into a kind of group contest to see how many different ways we could say the word “No” —how many meanings we could convey via tone.

So what I’m trying to convey here is that once I have identified a habit I’d like to build, I look hard at natural ways to ‘practice’ it in everyday life, in a light, fun way. And after we’ve had time for playfully practicing it (even if the kids are not aware that’s what we’re doing), I’ll let them know—again, in as organic a moment as possible, when something pops up that makes this relevant—that we’re all going to work on (in this case) using really kind tones with each other. I’ll encourage the kids to try to “catch” me using an impatient or crabby tone. THEY LOVE THIS MOST OF ALL. And if someone is snappish or whiny or snotty or whatever, I’ll ask, as I said above—not reprovingly, just cheerful and matter of fact— “Could you try that again in a different tone?” This stage of habit-building typically lasts 2-3 weeks.

After that, I’ll let them know that I expect them to use a pleasant tone the first time, when asking for a drink or whatever. And I’ll continue to remind as needed. If it seems like the habit isn’t sticking, we’ll go back to the game and keep practicing for a few days. Or if, say, a year passes and I notice people are starting to be short with each other, I’ll reintroduce the game and the expectation. (In our family we call this “boot camp” for reasons dating back about 15 years.)

In the moment—when an annoying tone is aimed at you in the ordinary course of the day—is NOT the time to work on building this habit. In the moment, we’re reacting, one way or another. Don’t beat yourself up for having genuine (negative) reactions in the moment. We all do. That’s how you know the behavior is something that could be improved by working together on a new habit.

Instead of thinking of it as something to remember in the moment, you can plan it, just as you would plan any other activity. It’s a little like potty training or copywork. You set aside a time in your own mind for gently easing into this new thing. Because that’s what it is: a new accomplishment you’re helping the kids master.

Controlling our tone of voice in the emotional moment is hard and takes practice. Years of practice, for most of us! And even though I make a joke with my kids about using a “snotty” tone when we’re playing the game, I’m not thinking of it (snotty tone) as a form of misbehavior. It’s just a placeholder for a more appealing habit that hasn’t been learned yet.

As for the interrupting—I use the same 6 week, gamify-it-first process. I teach them to put a hand on my wrist if they want to say something while others are talking, and I put my hand over theirs to show I’m aware they are waiting to speak. And then I try really hard to give them the chance to talk ASAP! Often I have realized a kid has been holding my wrist for five minutes and I look down to see a big grin because Huck knows he caught ME this time—I’m the one who needs boot camp for that habit. 🙂

I think the important thing is the overall attitude about habit building. I love that I can approach things from a positive, proactive perspective instead of being critical and reactive. What GOOD habits would I like to see in place of things that irritate me (or others)? How can we build those good habits TOGETHER in a spirit of fun?

Listen to Melissa Wiley’s talk on Tidal Homeschooling!