This week’s Homeschool Carnival on homeschoolbuzz features my post, “Are we having fun yet?”
Other articles in this colorful “Word Cloud” edition include: “Cultivate a Growth Mindset,” “Schooling Without a Schoolroom,” and “Back to (Un)School.”
Also, if you write a homeschool blog and would like to participate in future Carnivals go here.
You can’t possibly know all you believe you need to know to homeschool:
before you homeschool,
while you homeschool,
long after you retire from homeschooling.
You won’t have it all together before you start. That’s okay.
You won’t have it all together as you go…ever. That’s okay too.
You won’t have had it all together, when you look back, though it will seem more like you did as you romanticize the past. That’s the reward for your persistence.
You may not have all your books, your plans, or your “necessary” materials before it’s time to begin. Begin anyway.
You won’t have your philosophy of home education nailed down and held in place for 15+ years with no alterations. It evolves as you home educate. Philosophy of education is discovered in the “doing.” It’s not a prerequisite.
Your children may not be in the “learning mode” you fantasize about in your head at the time you crack open the new books in the fall. They will get there by winter.
You will be going along when some new idea hits and you’ll smack your forehead and wonder how you could have gotten by for so long without that one key piece of information, insight, or ingenuity. That’s how it happens. You’re on the right track.
You won’t know enough in some subjects to be the best “teacher” your children could have. Dive in anyway. Learn what you can. Model what you can. Get help. Be satisfied with less.
You can’t know if what you are doing with your children today is enough to prepare them for college. You can’t know until the slip of paper comes back in the mail with the red letter “ACCEPTANCE” on it validating all your uncertain work. Yield today to the process of this day’s learning. Leave college for tomorrow.
You can’t worry enough to save your children from gaps, challenges, and failure. You can love enough to be with them no matter what, with a willingness to “do what it takes” as that is revealed to you.
You don’t know if you are a good enough mother, good enough punctuator, good enough mathematician, good enough enthusiast for learning.
You can’t know. You take the risks to be those things to the best of your ability today, and then trust.
You can’t know if the laws will change, or if the state you’re in will protect your rights. Take advantage of the laws you have today.
You can’t possibly know if your children will be glad you homeschooled them. That’s theirs to feel and own. You make your parenting choices for your family. They will make theirs for their children. Both are okay.
Stay open. Keep learning. Principles and compassion keep your family grounded.
You don’t yet know what you don’t know. You can’t.
What is incredible though is how much you already do know and how valuable, useful, and rich it is when you live into your knowing.
Make peace with “unknowing.”
Embrace your risk-taking, adventurous spirt.
In the end, it’s not the knowing or the not-knowing that create the best homeschools. It’s the willingness to engage that process with heart, hope, and flexibility.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Image by Horia Varlan
Image by Nickolai Kashirin
Moms toggle between two extremes: showing how their ideals can be realized to the good of their families (apply these rules, or those principles, or that group of practices and all will work as it should!), and those who want to reassure everyone that it’s okay not to live up to those ideals because we are human.
Weirdly, we need both.
We need to know that some of what we do makes a difference, or why bother? If breast feeding and bottle feeding are the same, why pick one over the other? If holding and rocking a crying baby is no different than leaving a baby to cry it out in a crib, why adopt one over the other?
We scrutinize the results of these possible choices, and then make decisions based on the outcomes we imagine will benefit us and our families.
On the other hand, no one can live up to their ideals 100% of the time. Even if you do, that faithfulness doesn’t prevent disaster, tragedy, illness, or life’s unpredictability from interfering with our best intentions.
So we want both. We want shining examples that inspire us to over-reach and commit to Big Shiny Ideals, and we want humbled examples of people who keep going when they can’t live up to their fantasy selves.
What we really want to know (this is the billion dollar question):
Just how faithful do I have to be to get the benefits of the ideal I believe in?
Is it enough to breastfeed six weeks, six months, sixteen months? Do I have to nurse my child exclusively for four years to really “milk it” for all it’s worth?
Am I committed to healthy eating if I let my kids drink sodas at parties?
If I pick up my baby instead of letting her cry it out, will she ever learn to sleep on her own? Conversely, if I let my baby cry this one time, will she no longer trust me?
Am I an unschooler if my child takes an online class?
Am I a good homemaker if my house is a mess or I don’t bake from scratch? How often do we have to eat together to consider ourselves a closely knit family?
The good news: Ideals are meant to be aspirations. You won’t hit them all. Holding yourself to a perfectionist standard wears you out and causes you to put principles ahead of people, including you and your needs!
Aspire to your ideals, share the wonderful results of the choices you make and how they’ve enhanced your family. Also feel free to be who you are and to tweak whatever aspirations you have to suit you and your time of life.
It’s a back and forth experience of striving and resting, reaching and leaning back, aspiring and being okay with how the ideal plays out in your particular family.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Image by Luiz Gustavo Leme
The gift of home education is that you get to shape your child’s exposure to the world.
The danger of home education is that you get to shape your child’s exposure to the world.
Our opportunity and obligation as parents is to create children with the capacity for caring. The caring they grow in their spirits comes through encounter, not explanation. It’s one thing to read about the elderly, it’s another to visit a nursing home, it’s another still to befriend an older person and make a commitment to knowing that person.
Within our homes, our habits of behavior and thought, our values and worldview, our biases and beliefs are as invisible to us as the air we all share. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that we live those lifestyles and beliefs unfettered, without anyone looking over our shoulders telling us we are right or wrong.
The flip side, though, is sometimes missed by us. That sheltered space can create a windowless view of the world. We read about other cultures warmly, fondly, with interest. But do we know them? Can we? We read about injustices from another century, but are we actively exposed to the current communities of protest in our own backyards (whether or not we agree with them)?
I remember when my kids were small, Jon and I took them to Little Saigon in Orange County (Los Angeles). We had been studying Asia in homeschool. Our first stop was in a bakery. Everyone spoke Vietnamese. We did not. The shopkeeper recognized us as outsiders and gave my kids free pastries. Free pastries…for four kids (at the time). I have never been to a shop before or since where that happened.
We walked down the strip mall, noticing ads in characters I couldn’t read, rice cookers in shop windows. We entered a small art gallery where paintings of willow-lined dirt paths featured lovely women in pink gowns and sun umbrellas. I realized I didn’t know Vietnam was beautiful. I had only ever seen images from the war.
I asked the owner of the shop how he came to America. He told my kids, Jon, and me: “My family and I fled Vietnam by boat. The little ones. I sent my family ahead. Their boat didn’t make it. They all drowned. Pirates. I followed safely behind, and didn’t know what happened to them until I arrived in America.”
I was staggered. My kids were young. This was nothing like reading about the Vietnam war.
Years later in Ohio, we met a Russian who was carrying groceries home in 20 degree weather. Jon gave him a ride. We invited him to Thanksgiving. We learned the story of his family he hadn’t seen in five years while he sent money home from his dishwashing job. When kind friends gave us a new van (we were “poor” in our world), my kids asked us if we could give our old van to our Russian friend. We did.
After 9/11, Jon brought donuts to the local mosque to say: “We know you are about to go through a lot because of people unlike you, who look like you and share your religion.”
Homeschoolers are good at studying history, noting past injustices, reaching out across the ink and pages to other worlds beyond their own. This foundation creates the right context for the next step: encounter. You know you are having an encounter when you are rendered a little speechless, a lot uncomfortable, and you find yourself revising your assumptions.
We have the perfect opportunity to do this with/for our children (and naturally, for ourselves). But it’s a little unnerving to do it. Very easy not to.
As adults, we can begin by admitting that there’s a lot we don’t know. Standing in the shoes of the other (or even just getting near the shoes of the other, in physical proximity to the other) is the foundation for empathy, good public policy, and healthy spirituality. This objective ought to be the context for the Common Core Standards of education, if you ask me.
I hope you’ll find ways to get out of your community and into one that is risky and new to you. From where I sit, I can’t see any downsides to that curriculum.
Cross-posted on facebook.
It’s easy to go into evaluation mode with your kids. I wonder if parents aren’t hard-wired to do it! We are the nudgers, the urgers, the pushers, the cheerleaders, the critics, the reviewers in their lives every day. The temptation is to assume we know what each action means before we even understand it, much of the time.
We see shoes strewn across the floor and believe it means a child is lazy.
We hear a child yell at a sibling and assume he is rude.
We notice paints, paper, and string left in an untended mess on the back porch and sigh with exasperation that the child goes from one project to the next without finishing anything she starts!
Now because you live with your kids, you may be “right-ish” some of the time. It may be that your child cares less about shoes being put away than you do. That doesn’t make him lazy, but you aren’t that far off—the essence is that he cares less about shoe neatness than you do.
It may be true that one child is bullying the other and you need to step in.
It is quite possible that your daughter flits from one project to the next without finishing any of them.
But even if you are “right-ish” about your kids, you can’t ever be completely right. The story that goes with who they are and why they do what they do lives inside of them. You can’t know how they see the world because you don’t live inside their skin, walking around their brains, noticing the personally created interconnected system for filing information and making choices.
The best we can do is to ask questions:
Joey, I see shoes in the hallway. What’s that about?
Sydney, I hear yelling. Is everyone okay?
Prisca, there are art supplies on the back deck. Are you coming back to them or can I help you put them away before they get baked in the sunshine?
Questions need to be open-ended—not accusatory, not labeling. (We all make the mistake of doing both because we are human beings who also have emotions and reactions we don’t always know how to control.) But with a little self-awareness, we can change how we talk to our kids. We can be curious about their intentions and choices.
Many possible answers could come related to these circumstances:
I left my shoes out because the shoe box is over-flowing and I don’t want them to get squished by Bobby’s boots.
I hate putting shoes away. It takes too much time to get them out again. Do I have to put them away?
Oops! Forgot! I just wanted to get to the television show when it started and meant to put them away at a commercial. I forgot.
For the other two situations, you might discover the yelling was about joy or safety, not anger. Or you might find that it IS anger, but justified by some circumstance. Or it may be unjustified but your daughter doesn’t know that and needs you to help her calm down.
The last situation may be that Prisca abandoned the art project when her best friend popped by, or she saw her bunny escape the yard, or when the phone rang and she answered it.
Being curious is much more likely to yield a trusting relationship between you and your child. When you show interest in how your child sees the world, that child will more naturally tell you the truth about what is going on. Then you can support, guide, comfort, or correct when you know which approach is most suited to the situation and person.
Cross-posted on facebook.
