Thoughts on Mastery

When I started homeschooling, I literally brought school home.  Then I read and read and read and we settled into the Well Trained Mind / Classical Education.  I like the general ideas and although I am sure there are kids who thrive on unschooling, none of them live in my house.  I think if we tried unschooling my boys would literally lie on the floor and do nothing.  So we work away at classical education.  Some days are better than others and I come nowhere near doing all the stuff in WTM.  This week I am struggling with the boredom of mastery.  I think we have a lot of problems in our country connected to the poor quality of education and I think a lot of that can be connected to the lack of mastery of basic information like reading proficiency and math facts.  So in our homeschool we focus on mastery.  When I start to struggle, everything I read is to mix things up or do something different, but no one out there seems to be talking about the value of pushing through and reaching mastery.  Besides the obvious advantages of the actual mastery of the material, there are non-academic advantages to mastery.  Mastery develops self-discipline and teaches the value of hard work and sticking to a job that is hard.  As the homeschool mom though, I just plain get tired sometimes and I need to be reminded of those same things not only for my boys, but for myself as well.  As I stick to my goals of mastery despite the boredom or frustration, I am continuing to develop my own self-discipline and I am teaching my children that these are life long goals worth developing.  Beyond all that, there is great power in mastery.  Once a child has pushed through the difficulty and boredom and actually mastered something hard they feel stronger.  Then the next difficult thing they approach they have greater confidence that they can do it.  This is a beautiful cycle that keeps coming around.  So the next time you are struggling watching the grass of mastery grow remember all the blessings that come from pushing through the difficulties and reaching the goal.

In the Beginning

I am a homeschooling mother of four.  I have three sons and a daughter.  I have been homeschooling for eleven years and I have eight to go.  I have two children in college, one in high school and one in upper elementary.  I have a bunch of thoughts running around in my mind and so I thought I would start to write them down and maybe they would help someone else.  Some days I wish I had somewhere to turn or someone to talk to that doesn't make me feel guilty.  It seems everyone does it better or has some great idea that seems so far out there that there is no way I can do that.  I would love to have children who love learning more than anything else, but I have four wonderful "real" kids.  They are marvelous and I wouldn't trade them for anything, but I often feel like a failure as a homeschool mom.  There are always lessons that don't get taught or experiments that don't get done.  I have a hard time teaching music history and poetry and some days it is all I can do to teach the basics.  It gets frustrating.  When I started  homeschooling, I had all these dreams about all the things I could teach my kids and all the wonderful things we could do together and the reality is that days are busy and food has to be prepared and laundry done and my dreams started to fizzle as I struggled to get it all done.  As my children started to leave home I thought I would have more time to add those wonderful things back in, but I am still struggling with the same things.  Children that need more time just to do the basics and the reality that mastery takes time.  So I want to write about what real life homeschooling looks like in a home with "real" kids and a very "real" mom.