A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

My kids are 9 years apart top to bottom. The idea that I could run five grade levels each day became a joke-on-me quickly. Certainly there are skills that are child-specific, but once I stopped thinking of pushing the rock up the hill called “individual work” and thought about my crew as a unit, my life got easier and theirs got happier.

Here are three ideas to help you one-room schoolhouse it.

Same Topic, Different Levels

Why study five different historic periods or five different science concepts or five different grammar terms? Everyone can learn about fingerprints or the red-tailed hawk or Colonial America or the Lakota Nation or adjectives at the same time.

Sure, your older kids will bring more detail to the table (though your curious youngsters may surprise everyone), but the littles also bring down the house with giggles. The connections they make are off-beat, charming, or super silly—refreshing the cool elders. Each kid can do a project scaled to that child’s skill, but all on same topic.

Same Skill, Different Levels

We had math time (everyone working on math at once). If a child needed extra help, I focused on that child while others worked individually but as a group (same time of day, same table). If my littlest ones were too small to “do” math, they had blocks or games or puzzles reserved for math time. Same for handwriting/copywork.

One Project, All Contribute

Pick a project: building a small medieval town, or writing a year-end family newsletter, or hosting poetry teatime. Each child can help—scaled to skill. Final project is a combination of everyone’s efforts.

For the village, big kids build it, little kids add decorations. For a letter, youngest kids contribute drawings while older kids write the content. For a party—you know who can bake, set the table, arrange flowers and books. Enter in together.

Some independence is good too—especially as kids start to become teens. But any time YOU feel frazzled, the best way to reset the dial is to come TOGETHER again—even going to the zoo or flipping through Netflix or making crafts.

Happy Home Educating One Big Family!

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

What’s the difference between empathy and accepting mistreatment?

Empathy is the capacity to imagine someone else’s perspective—how that person sees the world. It’s an important skill to foster peace-giving relationships. We use it every day with our kids. We imagine crankiness is hunger in disguise. We imagine a tantrum is a cry for one-on-one time. These are good solutions to childishness in most cases. Sometimes we are off target. The child has pinworms. Our empathetic imagined reason was wrong.

Empathy gets trickier as human beings age. We guess an angry smart-mouthed teen is masking a failure on the soccer field so we offer cheerleading and reminders about how the next game will be different. We get back biting rebukes and a surly look, only to find out much later it was a broken heart (first love rejection by text-invisible to us).
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In our compassion, we misdiagnose…frequently. Where empathy goes south is when your projection of what must be happening turns out to be a thinly veiled excuse for someone else’s mistreatment of you. If you’re a peace-keeper and peace-maker, the tool called empathy can be used to diminish your needs—for kind treatment, for respect, for communication. The focus becomes how to understand why they are being cruel or abusive or angry, using you as an emotional punching bag. You may think “My husband had a rough childhood” or “My friend had an alcoholic mother”—this is why they are going nuclear on me. I can empathize.

That capacity to see the source of pain is not, however, an excuse for their out of order behavior.

Instead of empathy, in that moment, show up for your own needs. Name them. “I can’t be yelled at right now. I need you to master this emotion before we talk about it.”
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You might say: “I told you what I need. I’m happy to discuss it. I will not be punished.”
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It’s respectful to not guess why someone is misbehaving as well. Empathy is not a diagnosis. It’s the willingness to not know why and to accept that how it is for them is not how it is for you. You still deserve to be handled with love and care, not their out of order cruelty.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

Julie here. I miss you. I miss connecting with you via email.

With a brand as rocking as Brave Writer with endless tools, classes, and resources to promote, it feels a little nervy to tell you about another email you could receive from me.

Yet what I want to do is write to you, not just market our amazing offerings.

I thought it over with my team and realized that I wanted to share with you my favorite stuff—the writings I’ve done over the years that have made the biggest impact on our community. These writings will come once per week as essays to your inbox to make it easy to digest them.

Sound good?

And so: we’re launching a brand new email list (it requires your consent, so be sure to sign up if it appeals to you).

I’m calling it “Tea with Julie.” 

Each email will come on Saturday morning and will be a letter to you about a variety of topics (usually in a series of 4-5 emails over 4-5 weeks). These emails are free (no fee to join).

Topics include:

• Writing, in general
• Revision, more specifically
• Self care
• Parenting
• Being an awesome adult
• Forces of enchantment
• Brave Writer Lifestyle

…and so on.

My goal is to give you the benefit of the thousands of pages of material I’ve written over the last twenty years in an essay length format, personalized for 2020. You are free to read them, save them, share them, file them, or discard them.

The “Tea with Julie” emails are not primarily marketing driven (we may occasionally let you know about something important on the calendar, but you can expect them to be mostly marketing-free). 

To sign up, you must “opt in” using this landing page.

Sign Up for Tea with Julie

You can opt out at any time by using the unsubscribe button at the bottom of any email. Feel free to manage your email preferences with us using that button at any time.

Brave Writer is 20 years old, and I’ve got lots to share with you. I’m excited to talk to you personally via email this year.

Emails will be sent every Saturday.

Can’t wait to curl up with my favorite tea (PG Tips) and a pair of shortbread cookies while writing to you. I recommend similar for reading the emails.

Sidle up. Be a sidler. When you see engagement or devotion to problem solving or free play or a moment of curiosity:

• wordlessly join,
• stand by,
• observe out of the corner of your eye,
• see the learning, before you name it,
• and allow it to expand.

If you want your child to learn something, try the thing in your child’s presence. Work the math problem or copy the passage or diagram the sentence during breakfast in full view. Don’t announce it. Simply do it. Maybe on the white board. Maybe you talk to yourself out loud as you do it. Be an object of curiosity rather than a teacher.

You want a reader? Create a cozy nook, stack books next to it, aim a lamp just so. Then see what happens. Give it a couple days.

Wish someone would pitch in with chores without complaining? Do it together, listen to a good audiobook, toss some change in the dishwater, rub shoulders, do clean up sprints of five minutes. Make space for growth (don’t expect high standards from novice cleaners). Be kind.

Learning happens because of receptivity, not insistence. Insistence teaches kids to learn other stuff: like how to resist, or how to think of something else while appearing to pay attention, or how to comply. These subtract power from concentration and retention.

To learn? That means there’s an openness stirred by a desire to know that is born inside. Play with it. Tease it out. Exploring learning. Sidle up!

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!