Image by John Morgan
Write about your bedtime routine. Now, or in the past.
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Friday Freewrite: Bedtime
Evolve and grow
Caitrin and me in New York
Recently I saw a movie where the main character died of cancer and her husband had to go on without her. While she was alive in her final days, we (the viewers) discovered that the husband had been a gloomy sort of man from the day she met him. In her final days, he was alternately angry, restrictive, hostile to her friends, and reluctantly supportive of her last wishes. I found him wholly unattractive, yet his love for his wife (the sentiment of attachment, not the act of generosity) was also evident.
It took her death to catalyze a transformation in him. He determined at that point that it might not be a “sin” to enjoy himself. He took risks that put him in contact with people and gave him a chance to express himself into the world. Naturally, the movie concluded with all the members of his community affirming him for his astounding courage to change his personality.
I, on the other hand, wanted my money back. I walked out of the theater angry!
Really? This man couldn’t get his act together until his wife died? She didn’t get to have a husband who participated in their community, who enjoyed living, who brought cheer and goodwill into their home and to her? She had to *die* before he decided he should be a good, decent person (like other regular people for whom decency and joyful energy are a natural way of life)?
I told my friends (who had watched the film with me): “I can’t stand it when people refuse to evolve and grow! I resent it even more when they don’t do it until it is too late for the ones they love!”
Hence this post.
The best thing you can do for your family is to grow and evolve, yourself, now. Become a person who is not haunted by anxiety, who isn’t walking on eggshells, who isn’t unhappy or angry or burdened by unfinished business from your own childhood (or previous marriage or current marriage or victimization or whatever!).
You can’t escape the ghosts of your past by ignoring them or pretending them away. Your traumas and hurts, the dysfunctions of your family—these leave a mark and tweak how you see the world and your children.
You owe it to yourself and to your loved ones to become the best version of yourself you can be today—a conscious person, making deliberate choices, filled with goodwill and trust, hope, and love.
People who evolve and grow become decent, humane people. They figure out what is theirs (what they can change or do to improve their lives) and what isn’t (what belongs to the other person and is that person’s responsibility to change or improve).
The step to homeschool is born of a desire to create a nurturing, healthy, vibrant space for learning. Cherish that space. Take a sober assessment of it. Be honest about it! Is it the space you envision? What is your part in that atmosphere? What is the other person’s? What can be done to enrich it?
Then, if needed (and who of us in mid-life doesn’t need a mental health tune up sometimes?), get the support you deserve to walk through the sandwich years where aging parents and emerging teens clash in the demands for your energies.
Remember my motto? Joy is the best teacher.
You can’t fake joy.
Find it again. Do what it takes to evolve and grow.
Become who you imagine yourself to be, who you want to be. I know that person is worth aspiring to.
Be good to you.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Are We Having Fun Yet?
When leading new teacher training, the topic of “fun” surfaced which made me think about that word and how I feel about it. Everyone wants to have “fun”—”fun” is the word we use to describe our happy experiences. Fun is free, happy, includes laughter, involves increased heart rates, lightheadedness, and the belief that life is good, right now.
But what happens when we say to our kids or friends:
“This experience is going to be fun”?
I know for me, when someone tells me to expect that an outing or event will be fun, a little part of me tightens. I wonder if I’m being tricked into an experience I don’t really want to have, or if I’ll be required to say I had fun because I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I wonder what happens if the event isn’t fun for me. Do I have a way to stop being a part of it?
There are times when the promise of fun is wholly justified. If a friend calls and says, “Let’s go surfing! It will be so much fun!” I’m likely to agree happily. But if right before spring cleaning, my spouse says to me: “You know we’ll have fun washing the windows,” part of me feels, well, manipulated. What if I really hate window-washing? Just white-washing it (ha!) with the word “fun” isn’t going to change that. I want it understood that I have a genuine feeling about it and I don’t want someone to require me to feel what they assert.
“This is going to be fun” is a coercive statement. Therefore, I avoid making it.
The thing about children is this. We’re told that they are responsive to joy, laughter, and the experience of fun. That means, adults attempt to win cooperation from childish children for tasks that are often associated with “not fun” by promising “fun.” Corporations have figured this out. Daily vitamins, as one example, are shaped like cartoon characters and soaked in sugar to make vitamin-popping a “fun” experience.
The promise of “fun” though, can be a promise of diminishing returns. If you tell a child that the visit to the dentist will be “fun” because there will be a toy at the end of it, and instead, the visit includes painful tooth-drilling, the fun no longer stands out as the key experience of the appointment. The child learns to be cautious when the word “fun” is batted about. It starts to sound like, “This experience is not going to be fun, but we’re going to pretend it is so you won’t get mad or cry or run the other way.”
And so begin the dubious associations with the word “fun.”
With homeschool, as in life, there are tasks that are “fun” and tasks that are not. Not every task has to be “fun” in the true sense of that word, in order to be satisfying or productive or even practiced. Each person needs to have the freedom to form his or her own opinion of the subject area or how we teach it.
“Fun” needs to be experienced as a wonderful by-product when observed in hindsight: “That was a lot of fun learning about dependent clauses.” It is not likely that forecasting “fun” for dependent clause study will be met with anything but suspicion.
Rather than looking for “fun ways” to learn any subject, focus instead on teaching a subject area in a way that involves the child’s whole personality and sense of self. No one wants a subject “done to them.” No one wants to be required to enjoy a subject area.
The best learning experiences are those where the child is engaged/immersed—with his or her full powers of evaluation and capability available. Your job is to provide a stress-free, nurturing, attentive, clear environment in which that activity can take place. Fun is not essential, but when a child is fully involved, fun is a frequently cited result.
And that’s when fun is, well, fun.
Image by Clemens v. Vogelsang
Poetry Teatime: Slowing down
Today is the day we finally initiate Poetry Teatimes. I love this idea at BraveWriter of slowing down, doing something different, and, of course, reading poetry… Turns out, the kids love it too. They are so excited, helping me get out plates and candles and such.
Our poetry teatime begins. We have the difficulty of getting Charlotte to leave the dishes where they are set. Ava is so frustrated with Charlotte for messing up her table setting. I try to have a mini-chat with her about lowered expectations, but Wyatt starts chasing Charlotte, so we have to shelve that one. We all get seated, tea is poured, and munching ensues. Kids are content as they look through poetry books to decide what we’ll read. They are genuinely interested and I’m pretty pleased with myself for getting this far.
Ava reads first. She chooses “From the Passionate Shepherd, to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe. She sighs wistfully at the end and says, “I just love poems that have ‘thee’ in them.” She is a peculiar 6 year old, and I just can’t get enough of her.
Wyatt chooses the poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends where the guy is sitting on his own head. I remember he is the only boy in this tea party. Charlotte tears her Jamberry board book in half, at which point I notice a suspicious dark spot on her pillow and realize I haven’t taken her to the bathroom in an hour. Shooot. Everything grinds to a halt while I change her and start pillow clean up. During this interval, Wyatt and Ava get into a heated discussion about who should get the last square of (gluten free) rice crispy treat. I solve the dispute by eating it myself. Everyone agrees this was a sensible solution (ha!).
~Danielle
From her blog, Further Up and Further In.
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Catch Your Child in the Act of Thinking
This is a great time of year to catch your child in the act of narrating—expressing a thought, experience, or the content of a movie. When your child hits the white heat of language (you know it’s happening because he or she is animated and interrupting your phone call), you want to jot it down right then. Stop driving, stir frying dinner, or chatting with Melinda. Grab the back of an envelope or the random super market receipt and start writing, quick as a flash. Get the words as best you can.
If your child asks you what you’re doing, this is what you say:
“Keep going. This is so good, I want to get it down in your own words before I forget it. I want to share it with ________ (Dad, Mom, Grandma, sister, my best friend…).”
Then later in the same day (maybe at dinner when the family is gathered), say this:
“Today Arthur told me the funniest story about Rocky and how he chases the squirrels in the backyard. I wanted to get it right so I wrote it down. I want to read it to you.”
Then read it. Enjoy it. Talk about the contents. Ask Arthur questions related to the story of the contents (don’t talk about writing). Then put it away and eat dinner.
Make this a practice you return to again and again (not every day or even every other day, but when it’s worth it to capture in writing something meaningful your child says). You can even jot down the names of all the Lego men your child makes, or how your daughter explains the instructions to playing Wii bowling. These are also useful and important to write.
Eventually, your child discovers that what’s going on in his or her head IS what you want to see in writing. They start to realize that what is going on inside of them is worthy of print and sharing. They discover that writing is an extension of themselves, not a foreign language or practice to be mastered.
If you keep it up, your kids will take over and do it for each other and you won’t even realize that they’ve picked up the habit until they greet you at the front door saying, “Mom, Mom, Caitrin wrote her first story.” Then your older daughter will hand you the carefully transcribed narrative that her younger sister told her at bedtime.
That’s how it works.
Also consider our Jot It Down! product. It gives you ten original writing projects you can do with your children. These are activities (one per month) that enable you to focus the original writing impulse in a specific direction (fairly tales or writing letters or issuing party invitations). They are delight-driven writing activities and cover a range of writing skills. And your child never has to lift a pencil!
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