Perfect Homeschooling, Curriculum Choice, and Regretting Decisions

A new homeschooling mom on our local list had some questions about tutors, curriculum, and generally freaking out because she can’t figure out the perfect way to get started because she’s afraid of regretting her decisions

I responded to her, and I thought I’d pass this along for those of you who are struggling with fear, regret, perfectionism, or self-doubt. Or, if you are interested in being a stronger, more resilient homeschooler, this post might interest you.

Dear “Alysa”,
I have been reading this thread with interest. After your last email, I thought of some things that might relate to your situation:

1) There is no way to make everything perfect. Letting go of that expectation now will go a long way in making life as a homeschooler, and as a parent, less stressful. Also, expecting things to be perfect is a great excuse for not taking any risks and avoiding responsibility. Own your decisions by knowing that every choice has a risk. Even choosing public school.

2) I understand about the idea about not wanting to regret your choices. The best way to not regret your choices is to understand two things: 1) That you ALWAYS have the option to change course. When you make a bad choice (and you will eventually, we all do), it’s not about the result of that choice that makes us who we are, but whether or not we have the resilience to stand up, dust off the dirt, learn from what we did, and move forward. If you know that you can recover from any choice, then making choices is easier, and more empowering. You’re also more likely to make good choices, because they will be made based on your integrity and love of life, not from fear. 2) You can’t possibly know whether a choice is going to be a good one or not until you’ve made it. Doing research is important. And listening to others’ with experience is also important. But in the end, the choice you make is yours to own. Even if other people might wag their finger at you and say “I told you so,” sometimes we have to make certain choices to really understand where to go next. Listen, absorb, then make a choice, and know that you have lots of other options available for you if that choice doesn’t pan out.

3) Tutors and curriculum: It’s obvious you are very very new to homeschooling. I say that because once you get involved in the homeschooling support groups, go to a couple conferences, subscribe to a few magazines, read a few books, and generally get some experience in the HSing world, you’re going to look around and say, “OMG, how can I possibly choose from everything there is to do???” and you’ll probably look back and laugh at yourself that you didn’t know how to get started with tutors/curriculum. Remember, there is NO rush to get started with these things except in your own mind. Wanting to have a handle on exactly who to follow, who to pay, and what path to take is like trying to hold on to the sand on the beach so as not to get swept away by the tide. It’s better to stand up and let the sand be there to make a sandcastle, not to save you. Tutors and curriculum are FINE. Use them, do them, but don’t let them be your master. Don’t rely on them to show you the way or to make you feel less panicky. They won’t. They will only be a baindaid for that fear. The fear doesn’t come from not having these things. Figure out where the fear is REALLY coming from, and the tutors/curriculum/classes and other concrete learning tools will be there for your enjoyment.

It’s totally normal to be hyper when you’re starting out something SO new, an interesting, and BIG, and fun, and scary, and all that. So, enjoy it. Sign up for everything, get really going. Then, when you feel yourself burning out, back out, do less stuff, and relax. Whether you start by relaxing or start by going into overdrive, you’re still doing a great job and learning about your role as a homeschooling parent.

In the end, there are only 3 things that matter for a child in today’s world of technology and global culture:

1) Relationships, relationships, relationships. This trumps everything. All the tutors and curriculum in the world cannot make up for relationship issues in the family. So, when making decisions, always choose to favor strengthening the relationship you have with your child.
2) Love and curiosity about the world. If a child has this, it doesn’t matter how much or what a child learns. A child who is in love with the world, and curious about it will succeed.
3) Knowing where information is. It’s not what you know, but who, where and when you know. If you know where to get info, that is a much more important skill than actually knowing things. In fact, knowing too many facts can give us the false impression that we don’t need to know any more. (This is part of why kids in school often don’t do a lot to study above and beyond what’s taught to them.) It’s important for people to know they don’t know everything, and that it’s not a life requirement to know it all. Having a strong grasp of available resources allows us to let go of feeling like we aren’t good enough because we don’t have all the president’s names and dates memorized like our cousin Sam does.

Good luck to you and enjoy your child. I hope you’ll come to the HSC conference. There you’ll find out more than you ever want or need to know about curriculum, tutors, and other things you can teach with. Until then, relax and enjoy your new life of freedom.

Making Room for Little Deaths

I wrote a post today about my experience at Easter, thinking that I was going to tie it to homeschooling (because, well, doesn’t everything relate to homeschooling in one way or another?)

Well, after I wrote it, I realized it belonged on my zen blog, not this one. So, if you’re interested in hearing about my Easter experience, and little deaths, head on over to ZenPizza. Feel free to comment there or here, if you feel so inclined.

Fearless Homeschooling in Times of Stress

“We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them.” - Epictetus, 1st century Greek philosopher.

When we think of fearlessness, we often think of daredevils like Evil Knievel or Derek Hersey; people who regularly, and intentionally, put themselves into dangerous situations either for fun or profit.

There are indeed people who like the thrill of danger, but that is not what everyday life fearlessness is about. The kind of fearlessness that we can have in homeschooling and in life, is an acceptance that life is naturally a series of events, some of them “good”, some “bad’, and that we are capable of dealing with the bad things that happen. With this kind of view of life and of homeschooling, we aren’t afraid of events because we are confident in ourselves to take effective and sensible views on these events. Fearlessness is a state of being comfortable with uncertainty, and a knowledge that nothing, no matter how horrible, can destroy us. And if it does destroy us, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it right now, except live the best we can.

It’s OK to be afraid once in a while. But what we are truly afraid of is not that bad things will happen. We KNOW bad things will happen. It’s the way the universe works. The pendulum between good and bad swings back and forth, and also changes as our views of the world changes. What we might consider “good” one day, will turn to be “bad” the next, simply because of changes in our own minds.

No, when we are afraid, we are not afraid of the events. We are afraid of our own lack of personal power to deal with those events. We are afraid of ourselves.

To be fearless, we have to be in a state where we trust ourselves, and we know that if we are presented with stressful events, we can deal with them. We don’t have to convince ourselves that everything will be OK, or that we can even fix anything. It’s a confidence of our own mind, that we have the mental capacity to let go when we need to, and act when we need to. As the saying goes, the only fear is of fear itself.

Becoming fearless is an internal process of self-understanding. It’s an internal process of self-like and self-appreciation. It’s also a process of losing our attachment to thinking that things outside ourselves define who we are.

Accept that:

- things will happen. It’s inevitable. And we won’t like some of those things. We will deal with it when it happens. We will make reasonable precautions to avoid certain kinds of things we don’t want, but sometimes, those precautions won’t work, and that’s just how it is. Having emotions and reactions to things that haven’t happened yet is detrimental to current lives.
- we are capable and smart individuals. Everything we need is inside us.
- we have friends and family who will support us. A huge step in becoming fearless is to create a strong structure of support.
- fear is a natural emotion. If we feel it, get comfortable with it. Accept it. Embrace it. Get to know it. We’re getting to know ourselves when we accept fear along with all the other emotions we have.
- we can’t handle everything. Most things aren’t our responsibility to deal with. If we feel like we are spinning our wheels, we probably are, and it’s time to get off the bike.
- if we mess up, it’s a learning experience, not the end. It’s only the end if we decide it is. It’s only “bad” if we look at failure that way.
- we have internal truths that only we have access to, and can never really be expressed. Other people’s judgments of us never change that. Other people can only distract us from those truths, and only if we let them.

Being fearless requires that we know ourselves, face ourselves, and most importantly, trust ourselves. When we are fearless, we accept fear, we accept that things fall apart, and we move ahead anyway. The more often we do this, the more often we fail and recover, fail and recover, the more we learn how to be successful. It’s when we fail, and then lose ourself in that failure that we get stuck in fear, and it becomes our master.

In Deschooling Gently: A Step by Step Guide to Fearless Homeschooling, I talk some about these concepts in relation to the ins and out of daily homeschooling life. But these precepts are also true about life in general. Once we are fearless in homeschooling, it starts to trickle out into everything else.

Pema Chodron has two books on fearlessness that changed the way I think about myself and about dealing with difficult emotions and events: When Things Fall Apart and The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. I invite you to seek these out. They might even be at your local library.

What are you afraid of? What is keeping you from being a fearless homeschooler, a fearless parent, and a fearless person? If you consider yourself fairly fearless, was it always like that?

Stumble It!

The Search for Homeschool Curriculum

Little do people know that when they are on the search for homeschool curriculum, what they are looking for isn’t the best book or superior materials — they are searching for themselves. When they find that perfect curriculum, and that perfect set of activities, projects, approaches to education, they have found what was already inside them. They have found themselves, and they have found their children.

When we know ourselves, and we know our kids, the search for curriculum stops, and it becomes a process of endless discovery.

When we search outside of ourselves for the answer, we will look forever, until we find the thing that mirrors back onto ourselves. When we get that mirror, we can give the outside thing the credit, or we can admit that, in fact, that thing is what we are looking for because it showed us who we are. Everything we need is inside us already. It just sometimes takes things on the outside to show that to us. Then the question is, can we be honest about it?

Searching for the right curriculum for our kids at home is a worthy search, so long as we realize it’s a search for discovering our children, not a search for a way to make our children be the ideal person we want them to be. If we have an ideal of who our children are supposed to be, we’ll be searching for the right curriculum until our children leave home.

I propose that we change our search for curriculum into a frame of mind of discovery. When we see it as a window into our children’s world, and into our own hearts, it will become an entirely different process. And the best thing? It creates less grief. Because instead of being frustrated that a curriculum doesn’t work, instead, we can be glad because it has taught us something about ourselves and our children. Every trial and error we make adds to the equation, and no effort is worthless, no time is wasted, and probably the most important, no money is wasted.

Curriculum is not the enemy. It’s not any more an enemy as the proverbial hammer is to a new carpenter. How and why we use any kind of non-experiential curriculum (i.e. workbooks and textbooks) is far more important than whether or not we are using it in the first place.

Stumble It!

WWWDD?

What Would Wayne Dyer Do? Apparently, being a jerk is something he’d do.

A couple of days ago in a post about freedom, I quoted Wayne Dyer. His words made me think about my own children’s freedom, about the freedom I ask for myself, and the freedom I allow other people and things to take away from me.

I read the rest of his book, Pull Your Own Strings, and I found myself becoming less and less enchanted with Wayne Dyer’s idea of freedom. In the name of freedom, apparently, it’s perfectly OK, and even encouraged, to be a jerk.

You see, I learned from this book that there are people everywhere who want to victimize me. And little did I know that people are sneaky about it. And although he didn’t say it outright, women are the worst about it! Because women talk about things, and want to understand each other and get to know people. That’s apparently a trick to get people to be weak. Don’t let people do that to you, Wayne Dyer warns! They’re just trying to get you to say things about you so they can manipulate you!

At the apex of his two chapter long diatribe about how people use mind games to get at us, he proves his point by describing a parent who has learned not to be victimized. This parent asked his teen to take the trash out not once, but twice. He didn’t get mad, or beg his son to comply, or, God forbid, explain himself. He simply dumped the trash on the teen’s bed. The teen got the message that his dad couldn’t be manipulated or victimized.

What the hell?

I was livid after that example, but I calmed down and went ahead and finished the book anyway. After I put it down, and breathed a little, I reminded myself that before I reached the chapter on How to Be a Jerk How to Keep People From Manipulating You, I really liked what Wayne had to say.

He talked about how we can be trapped by our past. He described different ways of handling criticism. He talked about how we have a choice whether to be happy. He also went into how our own negative judgments of others are a voluntary way to victimize ourselves. Some of the examples he gave were spot-on and gave good tools for how we can choose to live more peacefully.

And I’ve read a couple other books by him as well, that had a lot of good to say. (I haven’t yet read “Your Erroneous Zones”.) Should I reject everything he’s said, or never read a book by him again, because of these two paranoia-inducing chapters?

No. I needed be OK with cherry picking.

Yesterday at church (OMG, Tammy goes to church! Shhh… don’t tell anyone), the speaker’s topic was about cherry picking. His cherry picking had to do with the bible. See, the church I go to doesn’t use the bible. In fact, there are some people in the congregation who really abhor the bible and anything to do with Christianity or religion at all. (There are others who are very Christian. A truly mixed group.)

Anyway, the speaker, Ross Blocher, said that even though there is a lot of violence and other passages in the bible that may not resonate with our beliefs, there is also lot of good to be found in it According to Ross, we shouldn’t reject the bible if we aren’t Christian (he isn’t Christian either), but rather to cherry pick the best parts and appreciate those parts for what they have brought us (while also having a critical mind for all of it).

Now, I might have just alienated my entire Christian audience, and I hope I haven’t. I don’t want this to be a discussion about religion. My point is that even though parts of Wayne Dyer’s attitude towards people makes me glad he’s not my friend or in my family, he does offer a lot of good ideas I can cherry pick and appreciate.

I’ve struggled with this idea because I couldn’t see how it could be done without being insincere or manipulative. I’ve been struggling with being able to appreciate people and things for the good parts in them while recognizing with equanimity that bad parts exist too. I have always felt like that if I say I “like” something, it’s a tacit approval of every single part of it. It’s either I support everything, or I support nothing. I don’t feel comfortable saying I like a speaker, a teacher, a book or a method, unless I like all of it. One wrong word, and it’s tainted everything else he or she has said or done in the past (and future).

Pretty limiting way of looking at things, isn’t it? If I keep going like this, I will never have any friends (because all people have faults), I will never be able to appreciate an author (because no writer is perfect), I will eventually run out of things to like at all (because all things eventually show “their true colors”). This idea that once someone or something has shown their “bad” side, I can no longer offer my appreciation, is just plain dumb. What’s the matter with me? Part of it is that for most of my life, I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

I think this idea of all or nothing is purpetrated in our society. A perfect example is our political attitudes. But we can also see it in how reluctant people are to accept homeschooling (or even to accept each other within the homeschooling community), or in family members who turn their backs on each other, or in people’s product loyalty (Can we say Apple vs. Microsoft?) Let’s not even get into the whole monster of “patriotism”.

I struggle with cherry picking when it comes to being a homeschooler, even. Because even though I support homeschooling, there are certain aspects to it that bother me. When some ugly part of homsechooling comes out, I start to feel that knee-jerk mental withdrawal. Almost as if I had been betrayed. In fact, a few weeks ago, I read an online discussion about homeschooling, and I was appalled by some of the comments my fellow homeschoolers made. And, to be honest, some of the non-homeschoolers in this particular discussion brought up some really astute points about the problems with homeschooling. For a while after I read the discussion, I wanted to just throw in the towel, and be done with it all. Of course, I can’t do that, because I have to pick some kind of educational process, so I continued on homeschooling.

And, on the flip side, even though I don’t send my kids to school, there are many things about school that I appreciate. If something good pops up about school, I it’s natural to push that information aside, to justify my continued negative attitude I’m “supposed” to have toward school.

It’s a long, slow process to learn to simply see. There is something to appreciate in every person. I am losing out when I push away ideas and people who have a lot of good, simply because I can’t see past the negative. I have already lost out on much because of that. I’m becoming increasingly aware of that.

In the end, I can decide to appreciate a person, a book, a theory, a perspective, a method, a political group, or even myself, without having to be what gamers call “a fan-boy”. I can cherry pick. I can’t tell you how much freedom I suddenly feel I have from this one simple idea that most people probably already “get”, but it took me a long time to finally allowed myself to accept.

Wayne taught me more by example, than by his words. By being a jerk, he taught me about how to be free.

5 Homeschool Must-haves for 2008

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. But I do like to reassess my life and make adjustments when the time is right. Jan 4th is a great time to reassess; the holidays are over, it’s almost time to start classes again, and I have a huge deadline in a couple of days. So yes, it’s time to get my head on straight (again) and move forward.

5 things in 2007 made a difference for me. And for 2008, they will be must-haves for our homeschooling success.

1) A place to work. I’m not super neat, although I like clean spaces. And I’m not obsessed with keeping the house organized, although I am comforted by knowing where things are. The one thing that keeps us sane, is having one clean space where we can do our projects. If we can have 3-4 clean spaces, even better. It worked well in 2007 to focus on the key points in the house that need to be clean, and letting the rest go.

2) My own hobbies. It may not seem like having my own hobbies is important for homeschooling. But in 2007, the times I was anxious, nervous, or over-worried about my kids were the times that I felt like I had no purpose. Scrutinizing my kids became my purpose. The times I had my hobbies in order, and felt like I had my own meaning, I was a better parent, a better teacher, and our homeschooling was overall more effective.

Case in point: I’ve been learning about social networking and social bookmarking. I’m pretty tech savvy, but this is giving me quite a bit of a challenge. There is just so much to know. I feel like there’s a wall that I have to get over. Once I’m over it, it’ll all make sense. It’s so important that I go through this, because with this experience, I am reminded what my kids feel like when they are learning something new. What they really need during this time isn’t for me to try and pull them over the wall. It’s a whole lot easier to help someone get a foothold and boost them over the wall when they want to do it, than it is to carry dead weight over it. I didn’t learn about social networking before now because I didn’t want to. My husband tried, but I wouldn’t budge. Now, I’m willing to put the effort in, and every little boost is welcome.

My own hobbies = understanding how to help my kids better.

3) A hug in the morning and a hug at night. This is a ritual I promised myself I’d do when my kids were born. First thing in the morning - a hug. Last thing at night - a hug. 2007 was a great year for that. I did slide here and there because of being sick, or falling asleep before the kids did, or being grumpy. Overall, it was a good habit. The morning hug is like a reset button for the day. The nighttime hug helps us all sleep better. Being close is our number one priority. 2008 will be another year of hugs and love.

4) Tape, paint, paper, pencils, markers, marbles and paper towel rolls. We’re fans of pre-fab activities and projects. But nothing gets a workout like the random open-ended materials we have on hand. 2007 was pretty good with that. So I’d like to do even more with this. Maybe even get a big clear box, that can hold lots of small boxes, each with a different kind of material to use. Glue, paint and other messy things will be in a separate box. All of the working materials in the big box. And have it near our clean space. What do you think - which cheap open-ended material could I store in there? The possibilities are endless!

5) Free time. Scheduled time is easy to come by and easy to manage. It’s the free time that we all need more of, and we all need to (continue to) learn how to enjoy. Time is a commodity that we can never have more of. Asking for more time is like asking for the moon. All we can do is rearrange the time we have, choosing to spend it in different ways. Free time is when I get to work on those hobbies, in my clean space, while giving the kids hugs. Free time doesn’t happen on its own, we gotta make it happen.

2008 is going to be great! Equipped with these five homeschooling must-haves, we’re ready to have a fantastic year.

Stumble It!

Three Tenets to Homeschool By

1. Everyone is a genius in their own right. Great mathematicians and artists are not the only gifted ones. There are those who are gifted in communication, in motivating others, in dealing with stress, in explaining things, in remembering details, in managing people and projects, in being organized, in seeing the true nature of people… There are so many ways to be gifted, and most of them are overlooked because they can’t be measured.

2. It’s far easier to fill an adult’s academic and knowledge holes than it is to fill a spiritual or emotional one. A child’s enthusiasm for life, emotional life experiences and how he is supported is far more important and influential than the facts he learns along the way. A child who has a positive attitude towards himself and the world around him will grow up to do great things, no matter how much he is capable of academically.

3. Education is a family adventure. Learning and growing is not just for kids. Parents who pursue their own learning and growth foster a love of true education in their children. When mom and dad are learning just as much as the kids are, and show a genuine interest in the world around them, it’s contagious. A parent who is curious about her world on many different levels, and shares that with her child, makes her job as a homeschooling parent much easier.

What are your 3 homeschool tenets? If you blog your answers, link to your blog in the comments.

Do Homeschoolers Have a Better Chance at Success Because They Can Create Their Own Luck?

I don’t believe in luck. Good things and bad things and neutral things come at us all the time. It’s our choice on how we interpret these things and how we respond. What we choose to see. What we choose to react to.

My husband is a good example. He is a lucky guy. It’s how he responds to his universe that makes him that way. He takes a ‘wait and see’ approach and then responds only to the things that are positive. He doesn’t do it consciously (perhaps that’s why it looks as if he’s so effortlessly lucky).

Since homeschoolers have more flexibility and choice in their lives (both kids and parents), do we have a better chance of being lucky? Because we can choose to?

J.D. Roth over at ZenHabits would likely agree. If you look at his list of how to attain good luck, it’s pretty darn close to the lists I’ve made here about how to have a more successful homeschooling life.

One of my many favorites on his list:

4. Wake up — before your dreams come true. When I was a boy, I loved computers. Computer programmers, like those in WarGames and Real Genius, were my heroes. But when I finally got a chance to program computers, it wasn’t anything like I had imagined it. It was drudgery. I gave up my dream and moved on to something else. Pursue goals, but be sure to reassess your progress and your priorities at regular intervals to prevent yourself from becoming trapped in a reality that is nothing like your dreams.

As homeschoolers, we can pursue our dreams as soon as we have them. And since we have endless time, we can determine quickly what works and what doesn’t. Homeschoolers can have many, many dreams. We aren’t limited to the one dream we have all of our lives “when we’re finally done with school”. We can do what our dreams are now. And find out, for real, if our dreams are what we really want to do. (Kids and parents too, BTW.)

This is just one of the many parallels I can draw form his list. I encourage you to read it. And create more luck in your life, because you are free to do so.

Homeschoolers Being Prepared for the Real World

Oh, for being prepared to handle the real world. What is the real world anyway? And how do we really prepare for it? How do we prepare for a visit to another country? How do we prepare for the real world of parenthood? How do we prepare for the reality of losing a loved one?

The whole focus on the “real world”, and how to prepare for it, is absurd. Yet, here we are, in a society that’s obsessed with whether our children will be ready for it. Instead of focusing on the reality that is already here, we’re too busy preparing, as a culture, to see how important the now really is.

Here’s a discussion about this topic, and some really good commentary.

On preparing children for the real world by making them go to school all day, by Gentlemaitresse:

If we were to make this kind of prediction for school children, we could easily say that they won’t be prepared to be on a board of directors because they do not practice parliamentary procedure in the classroom each day. We could say that they will be unable to compete in sports because a professional athelete must work out in the gym for hours each day.

People forget that children are children, and their needs are different from those of adults. While we want to keep the goal in mind (of preparing them for adulthood), that is vastly different from treating them as if they are already adults who can sit still and write notes all day.

Intellectual Jam Session - That’s What Homeschooling Can Be, You Know

I have a (relatively) new post up at LifeWithoutSchool. Cuz, you know, to us, homeschooling is an intellectual jam session.