You might think that after ten years of homeschooling, I’d be some sort of “professional” at it. Ha ha. The kids and I have the darnedest habit of growing and changing! Which is supposedly a good thing, but it sure makes figuring out “how to do school” a constant challenge. I don’t think this should be surprising, but somehow it is. The kids have been training me on this since they were babies. I think we all remember the moment that our first baby finally seemed to be sleeping through the night. I rejoiced thinking, “We did it! Now we all get to sleep through the night.” Only to be astonished when said baby started teething or had a cold or had their routine interrupted or had a growth spurt, or… and started waking up through the night again. It turns out that school is a lot like that.
Ironically, this was going to be the first year that I have two of my three kids “going” to school. Like actually leaving the house each day and going to a school building where other people would be teaching them. Our 13 year old daughter is involved in a classical homeschool group, which she really likes. We weren’t going to mess with that. She goes to her group all day on Mondays and goes to art school on Fridays. Read between the lines: I was going to have two whole school days every week all to myself. The hubs and I were already thinking about how I could be involved in his business and I was dreaming about those few hours of quiet I could count on encountering each week. But we all know how this story turns out. Distance learning. Joke’s on me. Joke’s on all of us.
To be sure, I really like my kids. I really do enjoy spending a whole lot of time with them and honestly, I worked hard to get there. I hate to say it, but there have been multiple times in my life as a mom when I looked around and said, “I’m not enjoying this” even as I felt such fierce love for my little people. I’ve had to make adjustments along the way so that I could, on the whole, enjoy this season of life. Sometimes that has been letting go of expectations and what I feel are my “rights” and sometimes that has been upping the training of my little tribe to help out and advocating for a regular moment of peace and quiet. Now I use the enjoyment factor as an indicator for what we/I need. I’m not going to quote a bunch of research or anything, but I think kids do well when they feel like their parent/s really enjoy them. I’m not talking about feeling euphoric about life every moment of every day. I’m just talking about a general, overarching sense of enjoyment of our life together.
Back to the school discussion. At the end of August, we were staring down a school year that would begin (and likely end) with distance learning. Since the school district couldn’t even settle on a schedule for this, I was feeling agitated. The years that I homeschooled, I had a schedule figured out and all the supplies we’d need by that first week of school. But this year we just felt fortunate to snag a couple of Chromebooks before the first day of school, not even having a clue about what we were going to be doing with them. This made me feel very uncomfortable. I’m a recovering over-achiever, so I tend to push myself and the kids too much. I admire and am inspired by people who feel the freedom to figure it out as they go and seem to feel pretty sure that everything will turn out fine. I tend toward feeling like everything depends on me and school is no exception to that. For the record, that’s erroneous thinking. Were the kids going to get the stimulation they needed? Were they going to be challenged appropriately? I wasn’t feeling too certain of that. So I bought a Brain Quest book for my 2nd grader and my 6th grader and a couple other little amendments for their education (I already had some stuff I could use for them).
Do you need all this stuff? Nope. Not when you have a library, some paper and pencils and Khan academy all available. But these items were a sort of security blanket for me. They just felt good to have around.
School started with a “soft-start”, ie: very little academic content and work to do at home. You’d better believe I had my kiddos working away in these books. We didn’t want to “get behind” right? Ideally, a homeschooler has these fears tamed, knowing that “grade level” is arbitrary and the most important thing is that our kids are learning to ask great questions, make observations, and figure out how to connect in meaningful ways with whatever subject they’re studying. Sounds so good. But, at least for me, these concerns creep in with regularity and I never feel perfectly secure in what we’re doing for school. Especially with some learning challenges in the mix, I’m always aware of my kids not being “at grade level” in whatever.
However…
Something remarkable has come of all these years of homeschooling. I still feel insecure. I still make the mistake of pushing the kids too hard. I still wonder, “are we doing enough?” But I feel more confident that providing a nurturing environment is one of the best things I can give them. That me being less stressed and more present is a huge benefit to school at home. That we grow in fits and spurts and my kids’ school skills also grow in fits and spurts and that’s how it’s supposed to be. The hubs and I were talking the other day about the weird expectation we have that growth be linear, a nice 45 degree line going up. But not even nature reflects that. My garden this year was looking pretty bleak early on. All my plants (minus the mint – gosh that stuff grows) looked so puny for so long. Like nothing was happening. But suddenly, in a week’s time, it seemed like they all doubled in size. I didn’t do anything different to cause that to happen. It was the same soil, the same sunshine, the same watering, the same weeding (or lack of weeding as it were) that was happening but suddenly everything grew. Then it seemed like the tomatoes were flowering like crazy but no fruit was forming. It was well into August before there were tomatoes forming on those plants and then, suddenly, there were a ton of tomatoes. And how about potty-training or learning to tie shoes? I remember each of those things getting to the point that it seemed like they would never happen, but when it was time to click, it did, and now I have three kids who use the toilet and tie their shoes without thinking much about it. After ten years of homeschooling, I feel like the main advantages I have in approaching another round of distance learning is the repeated experience of my kids “getting” something when the time was right. And the repeated experience of it making no difference how much I pushed them to learn something, if they weren’t ready, it didn’t work. Also, the invitation for me to learn something I’m interested in and inviting them into that. I count in this equation too. Even if they aren’t interested in what I am, they’ll usually humor me and give it a try. Right now that’s nature journaling.
Nature Journaling is part one of our options these days because I enjoy it and am interested in it.
I think everyone needs to cut themselves and their kids some slack. Trying to help kids with school while trying to work is bananas. Just a side note.
What’s working this year for us (so far) is taking each day as it comes. Not fixating on what happened or didn’t happen last week (“ugh! I let them have too much screen time! They should have been reading Moby Dick or something”) or worrying about what’s to come (“will they ever end up being able to go to college or live a fruitful life if they aren’t getting enough ________ in school this year?”). Just focusing on the current day and continuing to fertilize their soil with some empathy, love and grace is enough. And I’m doing the same for myself (at least, trying too). Some days we skip all the online assignments and just let the teacher know we needed to be offline that day (let’s hear it for the teachers! They are amazing). The kids helped make a list of “educational activities” that we can count toward school.
When all else fails, and we’re spiraling into the realm of resistance and a “souring” toward all things school, we read Harry Potter, eat a treat, and I get ready to start fresh again the next day.
Grace to you, friends, as we carry on with another unusual school year.
gracebythehour 