A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Imagine this scene: your child is reading a book, and they’ve been reading for a few months now. Yet suddenly you think, “What if I had taught them to read this other way? What if I had used this other philosophy from the beginning? What if my child were in school?”

When the “what if’s” show up, they can trigger worry, envy, and despair – and they can show up everywhere – but that isn’t serving you or your children!

Let’s take a couple deep breaths and focus on what you are doing well already while we tame the “what if” monster.

Listen to the Podcast:

What if… there’s a magic puzzle piece missing from my homeschool?

One of the biggest catalysts for ‘what ifs’ is what we like to call It Must Be Me Despair Syndrome.

When a lot of us run into a challenge in our homeschool, maybe we just started a new program or picked up a new schooling style, we end up thinking the problem must be us. It seemed perfect online, but now it’s not perfect in our homes.

So, of course, there must be another piece out there, another style of teaching, and we’re just missing it… which then kick starts this cycle all over again.

Tips to help you break the Despair Cycle:

1. Expect new things to come with unforeseen challenges, and that’s okay. Instead of treating yourself like the problem and falling into despair, treat the problem like the problem!
2. Remember that you do have limits in your capacity to carry out anything you ever try. You’re never going to get the house clean enough, you’re never going to use the math book thoroughly enough, you’re never going to understand grammar well enough, and you’re never going to do science to a high enough degree of accuracy. Just admit it, it’s liberating!
3. Stick with it! Something we believe in here at Brave Writer is The One Thing Principle. It’s pretty simple: don’t try to start spinning three new plates at once! Just start one thing, get it spinning, and then bring in the next one. Give yourself a time frame, be it six weeks or six months, and keep checking in on how you and your children like it. Consider ways you can tweak it and make it better, and don’t abandon ship at the first sign of a storm.

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Do you ever wonder if your kids are retaining anything they learn? Yeah, me too. I wondered about it all the time. Thank goodness you have a resource I didn’t discover until years after I finished homeschooling my kids.

Enter: Barbara Oakley, PhD—the mastermind behind the wildly popular Coursera course “Learning How to Learn.”

Barbara Oakley is a force to be reckoned with. She went from having a math phobia to getting her PhD in Mechanical Engineering (after mastering Russian, by the way). She learned how to learn anything!

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Barbara’s work focuses on the complex relationships between neuroscience and social behavior, and we think that any Brave Writer fan is also going to be a fan of Barbara’s newest book – Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens – which teaches kids and teens simple tricks for learning difficult subjects, even if they don’t feel like they’re “good students.”

Although learning is quite complex and the most important aspects of it can’t be distilled into a simple list of “three things you can do to learn better,” there are a few vitally important ideas that we’d like to highlight:

1. You want to create neural links that your short-term memory can call to mind instantly.
2. You need to have both focused and diffused modes, meaning you sometimes need to give your mind a break and let it wander! If you feel are banging your head against an idea, you are probably overusing the focused mode. Doing something else allows the diffused network to work through the idea.
3. You need to develop effective tools for dealing with procrastination.

There’s a lot more, of course, but this is a great starting point for learning how to learn!

In the book, these principles are then broken down into practices that children and young adults can do to reinforce the concepts.

And especially for young children, the practice is really important – they need the practice to develop these neural structures in the first place! Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that the U.S. public education system often does not provide enough practice for these neural patterns to develop.

Would you please post a review on Apple Podcasts for us?
Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!