This is a marathon not a sprint

My sister, who is starting to homeschool her oldest son (4yo), texted me this morning saying, "Public school is looking pretty good day!"  So this post is for her!  This is an idea that has been rattling around in my brain for quite some time.  There are lots of reasons that people home school and often it is a stop gap measure until they settle down in a permanent situation.  Some of us, however, take up homeschooling as a lifestyle choice and for us it is a marathon not a sprint.  Now lest you think I am a runner, let me stop you right now.  My sister-in-law runs marathons and my sister half marathons and other crazy races like the Ragnar; I am the un-athletic one in my family.  I do, however, understand the principles of pace.  When you choose to homeschool full-time, it is all about pacing yourself.  Over the twelve years I have been homeschooling, I have watched a lot of super moms give up and put their children back in school because they were running a sprint.  They went total gang busters out of the gate and made all these super lessons and spent hours and hours planning lessons and making cute cut outs and planning huge things.  I learned really quickly that if I was going to homeschool long term that stuff wasn't going to work for me.  So after a few times of falling on my face I settled into a pattern that works for us.  We simply make learning a part of everyday life.  We turn off the television and the electronic junk and we learn.  Some days are these wonderful aberrations of the perfect day and the next day as we struggle through I wonder what on earth I did different today than yesterday.  The answer is absolutely nothing!!  We are flawed and imperfect human beings and so are our children so why should we think that education should be perfect every day.  So what I have learned with two children graduated out is that it simply doesn't matter.  Good days come and so do bad days and in the end these beautiful children that we sacrifice to love and nurture and teach turn out to be just great.  We are doing God's work and His hand is in it even when it doesn't look pretty and in the end He took my meager abilities and mixed it with lots of family love and helped my children be amazing.  So my message to my sweet sister and all of you who feel like public school is looking pretty good is simply to hang on.  The harvest is great even when the larborers are few and exhausted!

My thoughts on testing

It is April here in North Carolina and that means annual testing at my house.  In NC all home schooled children are required to test every year using nationally standardized tests.  I personally hate achievement tests.  I hated them growing up when we were all required to sit at our desks and listen to the teacher drone on for the umpteenth time - "Fill in the bubble make your mark heavy and dark and if you want to change an answer erase your mark completely."  Where did all this come from??  Achievement tests to me are about the stupidest thing we do to children.  This is no measure of the knowledge of any child I know and only frustrates and humiliates children who do not test well or cannot communicate what they know in little round bubbles that must be colored in heavy and dark.  My high schooler's test is full of political correctness and some time I want someone to tell me what in the world that has to do with intelligence, reasoning, or the ability to communicate.  We do these tests every year because we are required to by law and I am also trying to teach my children about being good citizens and obeying the law, but I ignore the results of these tests completely.  I know full well what my children can and can't do because I am with them every day.  I know that children develop at different rates and not on a linear scale.  I also know that my ten year old has math days and non-math days.  There are days he gets up in the morning and for whatever funky reason he can't do math.  When these non-math days happen we simply read math books, biographies of mathematicians or play games, and then return to the math book the next day and he is fine and goes gang busters.  But if he tests on a non-math day people would think he is innumerate which he is not.   I know testing is not going away anytime soon so my April's will continue to contain this silliness, but I am so grateful that we live in a free land where we can homeschool our children and minimize the damage these tests can cause.

PS- I found this article today (April 20, 2013) and thought I would add it here.  Great article!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/17/eighth-grader-designs-standardized-test-that-slams-standardized-tests/
 

Thomas Jefferson's Great Example

“To read Latin and Greek authors in their original, is a sublime luxury. I thank on my knees him who directed my early education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight; and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired.”– Thomas Jefferson

Dwane at Visual Latin posted this today on his Facebook and I love it!!!  I also love this quote from the book The Real Thomas Jefferson, "Young Tom was five when schooling began in Goochland.  He later recalled sneaking impatiently out of a classroom that first year and kneeling behind the building to repeat the Lord's Prayer, hoping thereby to hasten the hour of dismissal.”  Tom stayed in Goochland when his family moved, under the care of an Anglican minister who was his tutor and in 5 years he could read Latin, Greek and French and he later added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon.  (Real Thomas Jefferson pp. 14-15)  Thomas Jefferson didn’t always love school, but he had a wonderful tutor who required him to keep at it and it blessed his entire life.

I hear so many homeschoolers who think that children should never be unhappy or dislike their schoolwork, or that they should guide their own studies.  It is difficult to push children through learning curves when they are learning new things or to require things of them that we as their parents we know they need, but it is always worth the effort.  And children who were unhappy at being required to finish a math or Latin lesson or practice scales one more time are forever grateful to a mother or mentor who required them to stretch beyond what was fun and pleasing at the moment to the great luxury of a strong mind or a skill well learned.

One of the things I love about my kids getting older is the words of gratitude for making them do the hard things.  It is truly an amazing feeling to have an adult child send a college paper home to mom and see remarks from the professor about how good a writer they are and I smile at the thought of this same reluctant writer as a child telling me they would not write no matter what.  The time spent lovingly coaching a child through the difficult moments of learning is worth more than anything else I could have done with my life.

 

 

 

Snow Days

I love snow days.  OK so it didn't actually snow in NC yesterday, but sleet and freezing rain will shut everything down for a while.  So yesterday I cleaned everything and did laundry in case we lost power and then I had time today to have a nutter in my school room.  One of the hard things about homeschooling is that it is messy.  I'm not just talking about science experiments and art projects.  When you teach children, you aren't cleaning your house so things get messy.  So today I had a nutter!  I don't get to do this very often, but the school room was seriously making me crazy so I took down boxes and books and dusted and cleaned out.  I got rid of pens that don't write, highlighters out of ink and sharpened every pencil.   I cleaned out papers and books - it is a funny thing as children grow up and children leave home and all of sudden you don't need this or that curriculum or book.  Home school moms really do work themselves out of a job, but with eight years still to go and a house full of broken pencils I am grateful for an occasional snow day to have a nutter and Monday I am back to math, history and read aloud.  I love homeschooling even with the mess and I love snow days!

The Winter Blahs

I just woke up!  I have this big blue rocker recliner in my school room that I refuse to use for read aloud anymore because I was constantly falling asleep in it and my kids would cover me up, turn out all the lights, and run away until I came to.  Today I couldn't resist its pull!  I read aloud in my regular chair, but it is such a gray day outside that I fell into the big blue monster and was asleep in seconds.  True to form, my boys covered me up and turned out the lights!  I am wondering when some enterprising home school grad is going to come up with a magic pill to help tired moms get through homeschooling in the winter, when it is gray and cold and rainy and the only civilized thing to do is curl up in a big blue rocker and read everyone to sleep!

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.