A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

In our attempts to find a philosophy of education that works for our families, we can feel batted around by the strong gusts of the latest curricula, the current trends in home education, the program that solved whatever schooling bugaboo over which we agonized.

Usually no family has just one principle by which it functions and most of the time, we operate by a collection of tidbits:

• math books recommended by a friend,
• a writing program discovered by a google search,
• philosophy expressed in that homeschooling book we happened upon in the library,
• personal hunches,
• comments made by our partners,
• anxieties fostered by relatives, and so on.

And somewhere in that mix are the feelings of our children, a messy house, and a need for a long hot shower!

What happens when we go to a conference or attend a webinar that gives input to home educators living their eclectic, demanding homeschool lifestyles?

Two things: inspiration and guilt.

We attend homeschool support meetings, conferences, and webinars to

• be inspired to try again,
• find a way to connect to our original vision,
• reconnect to our kids,
• internalize some ideal we like but don’t know how to apply.

On the flip side, though, it’s easy to believe that what is presented is perfectly true, works all the time, should be easy, and is preferred to what we are already doing. That little dance leads to guilt

Why haven’t I done it right yet? Why can’t I figure out how to do what looks like it should be easy to do?

Let’s pause here to b r e a t h e.

I’ve got a couple strategies to help you integrate all your aspirations!

First principle: One thing at a time.

I’m reminded again of the One Thing Principle. Take the new ideas one at a time. Pick something you’d like to try and give that one thing a chance to work, to be successful. Then be the judge of it. If it works, celebrate. If it doesn’t, dump it without guilt, without feeling that your family is failing. Know that each idea is only as valuable as it is to YOUR family.

Second principle: If it’s working, don’t fix it.

Sometimes we hear about a “better method” and race off thinking that while what we were doing was okay, this new process must be better because some home education “expert” says so or our best friend loves it. Add in uncertainty and boredom and we may dump something that is well-suited to our kids and family life and find ourselves instead, floundering.

Our families will not be perfect testaments to any curricula because families are living, breathing organisms. Curricula is not.

Therefore, if what is working in your family is, in fact, working, it’s okay to ignore someone else’s suggested best practice. Changing gears, starting something new, applying a different strategy in that instance can be more disruptive than helpful. You make the call!

Each year will present us with challenges and opportunities that require new solutions. One year tea times and copywork may be the key to joy at home. Another year, they’ve become stale or the toddlers won’t let you eat and drink or a spouse is sick and needs attention.

Freedom. Freedom to try things, to discard them, to cycle through them, to find your own homeschooling voice—that’s why you signed up for the bold, brave life. Embrace it!

In all things, I hope that Brave Writer is a place where a table is spread so that you may pick and choose what leads you and your children into joyful language arts and writing.

We’ve talked about the key difference in home education versus school being the word “home.” Home makes all the difference. If we are at home, with family, living a lifestyle of learning, how we educate will be different than what happens in a school building. We may also have a different set of goals or expectations for home learning than a school has.

For instance, how can Algebra foster close family relationships?

Algebra only fosters close family relationships if

• the child has bought into the idea that Algebra is a necessary part of his or her future success,
• and the parents are willing to help a child who finds it challenging by working side-by-side, trying new curricula, or hiring outside help to enable the student to develop competence without debilitating frustration, tedium and failure.

On the flip side, in a family where Algebra is an expectation and not a goal the child has owned for himself, where the curriculum is tedious or difficult, where frustration attends the daily schoolwork, family relationships will suffer as the child resists learning the subject matter and finds ways to subvert the learning process leaving the homeschooling parent exasperated and discouraged.

Inspiration First

Let’s look at one particular homeschool subject I know well: writing. There are two aspects of writing: the mechanics and the inspiration. Traditional academic settings tend to focus first on mechanics and then on creation, inspiration. Brave Writer reverses that order. We start with inspiration. We create a context for writing to spring to life for the child first, through reading quality literature, through jotting down a child’s thoughts and sharing them with an interested audience, through nursery rhymes and poetry, through word play, through celebrating a child’s attempts to write without help even while the writing is not legible or has mechanical errors.

Home is a great place for inspiration to occur. Parents make natural cheerleaders, they seek connections that are personally tailored to the child, they offer time and commitment to a child’s interests and use those as a means to enliven a subject area like writing.

The Mechanics Follow

Once a child discovers the joy of writing, learning how to read, hold a pencil, handwrite, spell, punctuate, incorporate literary elements, revise, and publish will follow naturally because these are what make it possible to participate in the joy of writing. They can be accomplished in ways that inspire:

• copywork
• dictation
• reading novels
• reading non-fiction
• freewriting
• funneling a topic
• poetry teatimes
• keeping a journal
• writing a screenplay for a favorite story…

Home becomes a place where skills are married to joyful acquisition, not to painful subjection. Over time, new challenges in writing offer a child not only the opportunity to develop new skills, but to explore uncharted territory, to have a fresh adventure. The point is that writing is not a subject to be endured because a parent says to do it. Writing becomes a means to an end, that end being, the purposeful use of writing in the child’s real life.

For kids who find that writing (for example) is not their passion, they may still discover its uses in their lives in a home that celebrates writing as relevant and approachable. Perhaps those kids will also see writing as a means to an end: an effective tool for academic pursuits. If that is the case, the child who has been taught writing through inspiration followed by perspiration (the joy followed by the mechanics) will have more success in studying the essay format and preparing for an essay exam than a child who has only learned to hate writing or who has had minimal success to that point.

Writing can be taught to a student for whom it has a utilitarian function. Not all of us have to love every subject, skill equally. Still, the key then is tailoring the kind of writing instruction and opportunities to the objectives of the child. A student who is preparing for college will approach writing differently than a child who is planning to go into a trade (like auto mechanics or culinary school or cosmetology).

Does relaxed schooling mean that a child never feels strained or that a big effort is not required of him or her? Not at all. If any of you have kids who love console games or play sports at a high level, you know that putting in big effort is key to their success. You also know that they don’t mind working hard when the objective is meaningful to them.

So here’s the trick of home education:

Parents are responsible to facilitate their children’s goals using whatever tools create the most conducive environment for joyful learning.

See if you can apply some of those principles to other subject areas. How can we take advantage of the intrinsic value of any subject matter to first, bring it to life (inspiration) and then second, to develop competence (mechanics)?