Tag: homeschool

Self care and homeschool so far

I’ve shared before that the 2017-18 school year was not our best. It wasn’t our worst but it wasn’t our best either.

I was doing a lot of stuff that I needed to do for me and time is finite. I’d let myself get into such a self care hole that I had to take a lot of time to dig myself out. So, without getting into all my various issues, here’s what I did last year.

February 2017, I started Therapy about 1x/week. Therapy is about 35 minutes away, I budget about 45 minutes (10 minutes for parking/paying/etc.) plus another 30 minutes after to journal in a quiet place by myself. I found that I couldn’t go straight from dredging up all my crap in therapy back into the chaos of my house around dinner time. It was just too much. That means that all in, Therapy takes 3 hours out of my week.

October 2017, I start CrossFit because I started to realize how much I’ve let my strength and physical condition go. It turns out, if the most athletic thing you do over the course of about 10 years is give birth (which cannot be discounted), your strength and muscle tone and general physical condition go downhill pretty drastically. This has lots of implications for the regular, non athletic things that you want to do. Things like be able to keep up with your kids at the park or be able to bend down to tie their shoes or get up off the floor. I started CrossFit because there’s always someone telling me what to do and it was super close to my house. Each session is an hour plus shower/recovery time when I get home. The class I went to was at 9, I’d get home at 10 and actually be ready to start doing school stuff by 10:30-11, depending on how badly my butt had been kicked at CrossFit. That means no getting started until nearly 11am 2-3 times per week.

Then I overdid things at CrossFit and ended up with some tendinitis issues that made it difficult to do little things like sit or stand. I started seeing my doctor with more regularity to address these issues and even when those appointments aren’t long, they still take little bits of time out of our week.

Then there’s all the regular stuff like co-op, field trips, dentist appointments, occasional illnesses, etc. All of this eats into our school hours.

So, what is a homeschooling mom to do? Do you ditch school and take care of yourself or do you say screw it to self care and focus on the kids while you deteriorate? Neither of these is a good option.

So here’s the thing, I know how hard it is to do self care when you have little ones dripping off of you. I used to read those silly cliches like “you can’t pour from an empty cup” or “put on your own mask first” and roll my eyes because it’s so freaking hard to get yourself to the gym or therapy or anywhere when you have little ones. I totally get that and I’ve been there.

But here’s the other thing, you matter too. Your mental and physical health matter too. You are not just a caretaker and educator. You are a person and your health is important and it’s worth taking time for. When you neglect it, you neglect you and you settle for less than you could be.   That will have consequences. It may not be today or tomorrow but a day of reckoning will come.

That day of reckoning will look different for a lot of us but it will come in one way or another. Mine came in decreased mobility and energy and a decreased ability to handle my life. It came in a shortened temper and a stressed out marriage. None of those things had to happen, they are not inevitable consequences of being a wife, mother or homeschooler. They come when you would rather watch Netflix and eat than think your own thoughts or deal with your sadness. I used TV to numb myself out because I was too mentally tired from carrying my baggage to actually deal with things enough to be able to put it down.

So, here is the kernel of advice that all of my bloated prose has been leading up to.

  1. Take care of yourself, even when it’s hard.
  2. Understand that it is worth it, even when it’s hard.
  3. Find ways to make it work, even when it’s hard.

This is the advice that I wish I had heeded in the years before I hit my day of reckoning. I read a thousand blog posts about the need for self care, probably written by women who were then at the stage where I am now. I didn’t listen to them then, I don’t know if you’ll listen to me now, but it’s important for me to say.

We are making all this work now by letting go of some stuff, like housework and BS expectations. I’ve been letting the kids choose an educational show to watch while I’m at the gym or in Therapy. Lately they’ve been choosing Popular Mechanics for Kids which I highly recommend. Then I’ve been trying to let the kids choose the things they want to study because it means that they will continue to study even when I’m not there. My oldest taught herself to needle felt this year with literally no help from me. We have also outsourced a few things. My second is seeing a reading tutor and making terrific progress. My littlest ones spend a lot of time playing with legos and making messes and (feel free to judge) watching too much TV because that’s how we are handling things right now. Our life is a work in progress.

However you need to do this, it’s worth it. Wake up early, go to bed later (pick just one of those), hire a babysitter, ask the hubs to come home earlier or take over bed time, find a way to exercise with your kids, just find a way and stick to it. Don’t quit on yourself when it’s hard, find ways to make it easier, or find the fortitude to do it anyway.

You. Are. Worth. it.

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Follow your Bliss???

I went to a talk in Pittsburgh last week. I got lost twice on the way there and then went around the block three times before I found the parking garage which was far more obvious than I was expecting.  I told you real life was messy, especially so when you are me.  I was there 20 minutes late but I was able to get the gist of what this very fancy educational guru was talking about.

Said guru’s name is Ted Dintersmith and he’s written a couple of books on education. I’m reading one of them now and it’s making me want to completely change the way we home school next year. I feel like this is a frequent thing for me to feel toward the end of a school year so bear with me if this is a passing phase.

Mr. Dintersmith talked a lot about empowering teachers to do what was necessary to engage their students passions. He said that our economy has changed and we need to teach students to channel their creativity through their passions to be the innovators of tomorrow. He explained that the way our schools were set up was to produce reliable employees who didn’t mess up and performed their job without complaint. Our country was in the middle of the industrial revolution at the time so we needed people who could reliably do a job. Our economy doesn’t look the same as it did back then but our schools use the same structure and system. Technology and automation have driven many of those rote jobs out of existence so now we need to find other uses for ourselves.

The way we do that is through creativity and innovation so we need lots of creative and innovative people. The problem is that our schools are turning out lots of graduates who would be really good at memorizing facts and taking tests but who’ve had all the creativity drummed out of them in the interest of remembering the answer to a series of useless tests.

The basics of our education system as it stands do not work for this new economy and policy makers keep coming up with silly ways of trying to patch this leaky boat.  Now we have more and more standardized testing, our teachers are evaluated on how well their students do on these tests and larger and larger portions of the school day are taken up by prepping for and taking these tests on which we base so much.

Mr. Dintersmith posits that maybe the test doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. In the age of the internet when the whole body of knowledge for the entire human race is available at our fingertips, why do we need to have all that information stored in our heads to be recalled on a test and then completely forgotten about a moment later? If we need to know about the war of 1812 in our future life, we can look it up. Why would we need to memorize its starting and ending dates? Is this really the best use of our students time?

It’s what we do with the knowledge that we have that will make us successful later on. How do we take our knowledge of history or math or literature and turn it into something that is actually relevant and needed in our life today? So maybe what we need to be doing is allowing kids to show us what they are really interested in and then teaching them the full depth and breadth of that topic. This could cover may different disciplines and students would actually end up retaining more information than if they were just told to learn about these things.

For instance, every year our homeschool group does a project fair. The kids all pick a topic and do their own research and then have to present it to some judges (other people’s parents) who tell them what a great job they did. This year my daughter did needle felting. She takes wool and shapes it and agitate it until it’s the proper size and shape that she wants and creates all these cute little sculptures usually of animals. To do this for the project fair we looked at the biological properties of wool (each strand has microscopic scales, did you know that?), micron count (how soft and fine it is) and the history of felting (shepherds in the middle east stuffed wool in their sandals to give them some padding, when they finished their journey, the wool was felted and probably pretty smelly.) These things will stick with my girl far longer than if I’d read her something out of a text book or made her look it up because the curriculum said she was supposed to do that next.

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I couldn’t help but think that I’ve missed a lot of opportunity here. I am already empowered to engage my student’s passions. I have the freedom and the opportunity as a homeschooler that most public school teachers can only dream of and I haven’t used it to its fullest advantage.  I allow my kids to engage their passions (outside of extracurricular lessons) on one school event a year.

All this has got me to thinking, what would it look like if our whole homeschool was more like project fair?  What if my kids were allowed to follow their passions and I was more their cheerleader and helper and less their teacher and taskmaster?  If I am serious about wanting to give my children the best education that I can, why am I not taking advantage of the freedom we already have and turning them loose on the vast stores of human knowledge? Why am I worrying about my kids keeping up with a system that is failing the kids in it? Shouldn’t we be playing a different game here?

So, all that is a lot of questions and I’m working on answering them. They all seem like leading questions but I honestly don’t know how all this will look or if it will work for our family but I find myself more and more convinced that the way forward in our homeschool doesn’t look like our previous years of schooling. My kids need less of my educational priorities and more of their own for them to be effectively learning.