Category: Life

Learning Outside the Box

I’ve always found it hard to explain to questioners what we do as homeschoolers. Not because I don’t know what we do, but because most questioners have preconceived ideas of what constitutes education. They want to know what grade a child is in, what their letter or number grades are, what subjects they are taking, etc. Even babies and toddlers are expected to learn according to curriculum and schedules. The concept of learning in any other way is foreign to most of the modern world.

The truth is that all those preconceived ideas are a relatively recently created box. Once upon a time, education occurred from reading living books, experimenting, discussing, researching, and writing. The concept of grade levels did not exist; tests and scores would have no meaning. Mastery was determined by how well ideas learned could be practically implemented by students, or by how well a student could reason using what they had been taught. A successful education was considered to be the ability to think, discuss, and work, rather than the ability to regurgitate disembodied facts or fill out an answer key.

In the past the difficulty and expense of dispensing information restricted education to those with the means to pay such costs, but much has changed since that argument was used to support the founding of public school systems. Books are inexpensively printed on paper that costs pennies; photography and digital recording have replaced the tedious work of sketching anything to be studied later, as well as made records less destructable, and both can be done by anyone from a handheld device at the touch of a button. Technology has advanced to the point that communication from any point to any other point can be instantaneous with a miniscule cost. Because of the many tools now available, the education coveted and treasured by our ancestors lies at the tip of our fingers, and yet we can no longer comprehend its nature.

So, when I say we don’t know our grade level, I really mean my children are motivated to read books of greater difficulty in order to research their interests. When I say we don’t use a scoring system, I really mean that we work together on projects and correct mistakes until we understand all the elements of the project and produce the appropriate results. When I say that we have never taken a test, I really mean that my children can carry on an hour conversation with anyone who will listen about minute details of complicated subjects. When I say they haven’t memorized standard lists of facts, I really mean that they are capable of reasoning and arriving at conclusions on their own, often putting me to shame. When I say that I don’t have lesson plans or assign lessons, I really mean that my children have the desire to know and keep up with their own educational activities in special journals with my supervision and approval.

This is possible because not only do we function outside of mental boxes, but my children do not spend most of their life in the physical box of the classroom. As a mom of five, I can attest to the difficulty of monitoring, interacting with, and teaching discipline to only five children with five separate personalities and sets of needs. The classroom box renders such attention impossible and reduces everything within it to either rote and drone or total chaos. Neither lead to actual education, no matter how dedicated and caring the teacher; there is simply no space or time to do more than establish the ability to fall in line.

The world desperately needs a return to learning outside the box. I’m grateful for the freedom and the tools to pursue it.

It Takes a Village

A baby is born. Immediately he is whisked away to be poked, prodded, chilled, blinded, and confused by strangers. He is wrapped in a thin blanket and placed alone in a plastic bed. When he squalls he has a strange plastic thing shoved into his mouth out of which comes far too much food for his tiny stomach in hopes that he will remain contentedly alone for longer. He is strapped into a hard, fabric covered device for transport to a new location, where his parents, exhausted and confused, continue administering far too much food at a time, placing him alone in a large empty space for long periods of time, strapping him into various moving and noisy devices, and isolating him from all outside contact. On occasions when his parents find it necessary to take him in public, he is strapped and covered so that no one can possibly engage. He cries with confusion. The parents weep for lack of sleep, struggle to maintain the normalcy even of cooking and cleaning, plan daycare arrangements, and spend their workdays pumping coffee and feeling only overwhelmed loneliness.

A baby is born. He is immediately placed on his mother’s chest where her arms encircle him and her lips touch his forehead. Grandmothers and aunts wrap both in warm blankets and create a cozy nest for snuggling. A tantalizing smell draws him to suckle the first taste of his mother’s warm milk, just enough to soothe his newly hungry body and send him to sleep in his mother’s arms. They rest together while sisters and friends cook nourishing meals and put the house in order. When he wakes he suckles again, then is carried in the arms of a grandmother to be cleaned up, rocked, and sung too while his mother rests. When not suckling or sleeping by his mother’s side, his heart rate and temperature regulated by her warm, steady beat, he is held and kissed by aunts and friends who take turns ensuring his mother rests, eats, and heals. His father hovers nearby whenever possible, taking frequent turns at tending his newborn child and imparting whispered promises of the future. When the time of healing and bonding is complete, he is carried in soft folds of fabric against his mother’s chest as she goes about her daily tasks, rested and strong. Her voice sings softly to him and her lips continually find his cheeks. When she is tired a sister takes her turn at carrying, cooing, singing, and kissing. He rarely cries.

A woman is dying. She long since ceased to be able care for herself. Her children, caught up in the business of their own lives, found themselves unable to fill the gap. They lived too far away and lacked the time and resources to provide for her increasing needs. Her house with all its memories had been sold, and she lies in a colorless room beneath the handful of treasures the nurses half-heartedly leaned on the lip of her plastic headboard. Electronic beeping is the only sound in the room. A nurse just checked her vitals and won’t be back for an hour; she has too many others lying in similar rooms to spend much time here. Her children have trickled in and out all week, having driven hours to pay their last respects. Their visits were brief and devoid of contact because policy cannot allow any possible contamination. A long ragged breath leaves her and the beeping lengthens into one endless note.

A woman is dying. The quilt she made for her granddaughter is tucked under her wasted arms although she no longer feels its warmth. Her son’s hand strokes hers and he sings softly, the lullaby with which she so often sang him to sleep so many years ago. Great-grandchildren play in the next room, unsure why the adults wipe quiet tears but happy to see cousins. A neighbor drops in with a pot of soup and prays with the family before slipping away next door. Friends come with hugs and memories to share that trigger tearfilled laughter. Her daughter gently slides a faded gray wedding photograph under a limp hand as a long ragged breath stills every other sound.

It takes a village to love.

Polaroid Moments

Last week was long. My husband and I had so many responsibilities and obligations that our days began to blur together. There wasn’t enough time for daily chores or time with kids, and certainly not enough time for fun.

We ended the week with a wedding. My husband officiated, my five year old participated, I monitored kids, and the kids were stuck tagging along with nothing much to do. By the end of the day we were too tired to do much more than sit and stare. But there was the polaroid photo booth.

Such a simple thing. A few old hats and old fashioned handbags. Costume jewelry. Thrift store elbow gloves. A little attitude. And a moment of fun so desperately needed.

The polaroid photo looks a little bit like our busy week. It’s blurry, scarred, and has glaring spots where the exposure was too high. It’s the perfect vessel to capture that simple, silly, crazy, exhausted moment. It’s perfect for our life. Here’s to more polaroid moments.

Mama’s Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Day

We all have them. The days that you know you should have just stayed in bed. Instead you dragged yourself out of the comfy covers and made your sleepy, grumpy kids follow suit.

The day that your morning prayer with the kids is an exercise in desperation because in the ten minutes you’ve been awake you’ve already fielded ten fights. The day that not even prayer lifts anyone’s mood. The day that the simplest of breakfasts takes half an hour to prepare because mood.

The day that someone didn’t turn the dryer on bit washed another load so wet laundry sat in both washer and dryer all night. The day that you used every pot and pan in the house to make last night’s dinner but you don’t own a dishwasher so you have to wash them all by hand. The day that you have to remind the kids a hundred times to do the most basic of chores.

The day that it’s ninety by mid-morning and the kids, who begged to go outside, won’t stop running in and out because they’re hot. The day that ocd rules and adhd rages. The day that someone pulls a dozen books at once out of your freshly straightened bookshelf.

The day that you decide to paint your kids’ bedroom because you spent two days making sure it was spotless, only to find that you might as well have saved yourself the two days. The day that you realize you can’t paint a straight line after committing to stripe the room in three different colors. The day that an inexplicable puncture appears in the bottom of your paint can while you are standing on a chair holding it several feet off the ground painting the top of a wall.

The day you finally give up and plop on the couch to watch people on TV have bad days. The day you decide to wait for a new day to clean up after this one. The day you decide to blog about your troubles because really what else was there to talk about? Yep, we all have those days.

Ruts

My husband and I love to go fourwheeler riding. Anyone who does any kind of off-road riding knows that trails develop because they have been driven over. Someone found a way through the woods or whatever terrain and others followed the tracks because the first person proved that path was passable. Enough vehicles pass that way and the dirt packs too hard for plants to grow, leaving an obvious dirt road. Dirt turns into mud, tires plow through it and dig channels, more tires follow the same channels because obviously the first guy didn’t sink there, and the ruts get deeper and deeper.

At first it seems so much safer and easier to follow the same path that everyone did before you, but eventually something else happens. The ruts get deeper while the ground between them stays the original height. The tires going through the ruts carry vehicles, and eventually while the tires could go through the ruts the vehicle frame can’t make it over that middle hump. It’s stuck. The tires keep spinning but the vehicle doesn’t move.

The only way a stuck vehicle is going anywhere is being pulled out by another vehicle. Sometimes the process of being pulled out breaks important parts on the bottom so the vehicle doesn’t run anymore. Suddenly using those established ruts became very expensive and caused a whole lot of trouble for more than one person. The problem is usually fixable, but going the easy established way isn’t easy anymore.

Sometimes life can be like that. It’s so much easier to just follow established paths without really paying attention. It’s what everyone else is doing, so why change anything? We don’t even notice we’re in the ruts until we’ve sunk ourselves so deep we can’t go forward or backward. When we finally manage to get out of the roubles we caused, often we are so broken we still can’t go anywhere and the need to heal consumes the time we could have used to reach our goals.

Don’t follow the ruts.

The School Closet

Homeschooling is such a fluid undertaking. Unlike in a traditional classroom, where teachers repeat roughly the same lesson plans and teach the same skills year after year, homeschooling goalposts shift constantly as children develop and learn. Although some families maintain special “schoolrooms,” most of us don’t have the space in our homes for such a thing, and with the deeper understanding of our children’s learning styles that comes from the time we are able to spend with them, many families like mine would find that confining learning to a single room would be difficult.

Instead, our homes fill up with random collections of paper, art tools, science kits, memory tools, and of course books. Where others cover their walls with carefully chosen decor, ours are hidden behind bookshelves and child-made art. The household linens share space in the hall closet with school supplies.

The bookshelf situation will be a project for another day, but today our school closet got a makeover. With middle school approaching and STEAM taking over the house, the supplies needed to be updated and reorganized. Paper needs are hovering in a weird transition between construction paper and graph paper. Crayons and markers grudgingly yield space to colored pencils and paintbrushes. Coloring books were purged to make way for an entirely new category of supplies, a box full of microscope, chemistry, and magnets.

And yes, we count board games as school. Don’t you?

Memories

My youngest turned five this week. It’s an odd feeling to realize my last baby is now officially school-age. I thought about trying to throw a big bash to mark such a momentous occasion, but with all the fullness of life we have going on right now that just wasn’t gong to happen. Fortunately she had other ideas.

Birthday traditions in our family are pretty simple. At first it was a matter of being newly married and poor, then having small children and poor. But then it became something so powerful and precious that we could not change it. At first it was a box mix cake decorated the best this unartistic mama could manage in the birthday kid’s favorite theme of the year. Five dollars worth of tablecloth and paper plates to match the cake. Family only. As the kids got older they started wanting to help with the cake, and the tradition evolved into me doing the baking and providing materials for a cake topper while they decorated the way they wanted. However the cakes might have looked to outsiders, to the kids they were birthday masterpieces.

This past December our tradition underwent a new evolution, one that is proving to be the most precious of all. My oldest learned to bake, and with that knowledge begged to make her younger sister’s cake from scratch. She baked, the birthday girl decorated. Today we had the third birthday since this new development. Our days of boxed cakes are over for good. My days of creating the magic are over; I’ve been relegated to the rank of supplier. Instead, I watch my children excitedly creating their own magic, working together to produce a vision of their own imagination. I get to watch them make unforgettable memories.

Folded Paper

What image comes to mind when you imagine a person who likes origami (the art of paper folding, in case someone doesn’t know)? I can tell you I did not envision my nine year old son’s face. I was wrong. I’m not even sure how he was exposed to the idea, but for about two weeks now he has been rapidly draining our supply of construction paper.

His usual approach to tasks is wildly haphazard. Impulsive is an understatement for his personality. This new interest in origami has shown me a side of him I have been desperately trying and failing to find. He used the search engine on the old phone our kids use as a tablet to find instructions for folding ideas he dreamed up, read them carefully, and followed each step with painstaking care and accuracy. On his own he realized that construction paper isn’t square like origami paper and carefully measured and cut to create his own squares. Our house is filling with paper dinosaurs and weapons.

As parents and teachers, often we have a tendency to pre-judge our children. Daydreamy, wild, stubborn, unfocused, the list of paper boxes we create continues. We wrap our own ideas and expectations around our children like bubble wrap in preparation to ship them off into the world we recognize, ensuring they can’t move or bounce around as if their value might go down for a few scuffs and bruises.

The truth is our children are not commodities to be packed into paper boxes and shipped in whatever direction we choose. They are beautiful, unique, and surprising souls, folding their own lives into the image they choose. Sometimes they will fold incorrectly and leave marks on the surface of their lives. Sometimes they will cut or fasten in the wrong place, leaving nicks and scrapes. Sometimes their delicate constructions will be dropped and stepped on and have to be reinflated and smoothed. Sometimes they will fashion themselves into many different forms before discovering the exact set of folds required for the structure they are meant to have. The finished product will have been wrinkled, folded, torn, stapled, taped, glued, and crushed, but without all of that, it could not be the unique masterpiece of a human soul.

Balanced, or Teetering?

Parenting often feels like walking a tightrope. Without a balance pole. Meeting physical needs of growing bodies can alone feel like an insurmountable challenge. That pair of shoes you just bought last month that already don’t fit. The three hundred dollars worth of food that didn’t last a week. Then there are the emotional needs, theirs and yours. Because in the middle of all the midnight wake-up calls you might lose your sanity. One of the most difficult juggling acts of 21st century parenting is the seeming war between the digital world and the physical world.

With digital technology at the center of almost every occupation, and surrounding every aspect of our lives, we have an urgent need to teach our children how to use it, to wire the areas of the brain stimulated by its use to employ the digital world without becoming sucked into it. At the same time, all the skills previous generations possessed to interact with the physical world must also be preserved. Not just the skills of interpersonal communication without the aid of a keyboard, but basic skills and knowledge of the earth’s practical workings. Its a lot of information to cope with, and often the two worlds seem so opposite that they cannot be reconciled.

So, like everything else, these become family affairs. Minecraft wars with Dad become the preferred recess activity. Old phones get wiped and become tablets filled with games, music, approved video content, and books. Always books. Screen limits don’t apply to reading. Imagination runs wild and ingenuity is trained in the midst of shouts of laughter and good-natured competition. Technology usage becomes irrevocably connected to memories of family and lessons learned gently.

When school is over, with the sun at its warmest and responsibilities fulfilled, the outdoors calls. Those creative connections teased by the digital world are tested against the physical one. The flotsam of the passing winter becomes the building material of childhood games. Sprouting plants will be examined, tested in mud pies, and transplanted into fairy gardens. Fallen branches will become the tools of the trainee woodsman, deadwood and rocks a boy’s rickety fort which will fall down and be rebuilt more securely from the mistakes of the first. Emerging insects and amphibians find temporary homes where they are studied and cared for until the dusk brings release.

Tomorrow it will rain and there will be no outdoor afternoon play. Perhaps they will be lost in the digital world longer than today; perhaps they will transfer their creative energy to dolls, legos, or art. Maybe we will use the extra time for a more thorough cleaning day. Another day will be too beautiful for concentration, and not only the digital world but physical responsibilities will be discarded, forgotten for the joys of dirty hands and outdoor adventures. The acrobat teeters from one side to the other, almost plunging to the ground below with every step, yet using the swing back and forth to stay balanced on that tiny wire that connects us to platform from which our children will be able to stabilize themselves and begin on their own tightrope walk.

The Family That Works Together

It’s a lost art, families working together. Here and there you will find a small family owned business that includes the kids, but thanks to child labor laws that is rare. Our family doesn’t work together because of business. It’s our life.

Our lifestyle is somewhat non-traditional. My husband doesn’t work a traditional job; he is supported by a relatively small congregation to preach the Word. That means he gets to be around all the time, part of the daily dynamic of our household! We homeschool our kids, which means that they are also always around creating the daily dynamic of our household! I don’t work outside the home; I clarify that way because I can assure you that I do indeed work! I choose to stay home with my children because I know God gave them to me for a reason, and my family is my number one priority. We don’t live in a large, up-to-date, fashion-plate mansion (although I certainly wouldn’t argue with the space!). Being a one-income household means that we have what we need, and we have learned over the years what need really means. We never go without and often have extra for some things we want, but by now our wants are actually pretty small.

We do not have central heating/AC in our small, rather ramshackle house, which means that inthe winter we crank up the wood heater. We are blessed to have access to family-owned property where we can cut our own firewood, which saves us hundreds if not thousands of dollars in heating bills every year. Cutting firewood, however, is a big job, which is where the whole family comes into the picture.

That’s dad out in front, setting the example of how to work hard and efficiently. Everyone has a job to do. Dad carefully chooses and fells the trees, cuts them into manageable logs, and makes sure we fit as many of those logs in the wagon as it will hold. The kids fetch and carry, then push and pull. Mom supervises the fetchers so that no one breaks his or her back trying to pick up something too large or tries to get away with carrying less than they are able. (Believe me, both have been attempted. Often.)

These winter afternoons of working together have created some of our favorite memories of family time. Movie nights, game nights, family dinners, and other “normal” modern interactions are all more enjoyable becauseofthebonds and lessons that are built from thise memories. Our kids get along better because those family jobs teach them the skills involved in cooperation. They learn to be observant of other people’s movement in the space around them so they don’t fall over each other or cause injury. They learn to assess a task and figure out the best way to complete it. They learn to communicate with each other in order to work as a team.

Lest you leave this blog thinking that all this gives us perfect children, let me assure you that no one has cleaned off the dining table today and there are toys all over the floor. And you haven’t heard my six year old’s ringwraith screech of fury or seen my four year old’s crocodile tears. As you can see from the photo below, capability does not always equate with desire. That might bother me if I wanted perfection, but I don’t. My children will grow up with values of hard work and family instilled in them both by example and experience. That’s a goal worth taking the time to fulfill.