The past few weeks have been hard. More than hard. We’ve been sick a lot—unusual for our family—and then we experienced the unexpected death of someone very dear to us. That’s all another story for another day, but let it suffice to say that we have had a lot of emotional upheaval, travel, and sick time. “Book work” has not looked like I thought it would lately. We’ve missed most of our regular extracurricular activities.
One part of me wants to freak out, while the other is tempted to throw up my hands and say, “Oh well, the kids are learning other valuable life lessons, so I am not going to worry about it.”
Neither option is the right one. One of the greatest beauties of homeschooling is our ability to stop without panic when these things arise. And my children are indeed learning precious lessons. They are spending time with friends, family, and mentors that we wouldn’t see under ordinary circumstances, they are learning (through their own sadness) how to come alongside those who are hurting to love and support them, they are learning to press through sickness and tiredness to do what needs to be done. Through the wonderful life of the friend we lost, they are learning about what it looks like for a young person to live well and leave an impact on his world. With my whole heart I wish they could learn this lesson some other way, but as we find ourselves in this position, one of the graces is that they are encouraged and inspired to live a worthy life, no matter how long or how short it is. They have traveled, which is its own education.
And also, they have taken up their own interests in the void of “regular” work. A., my 11 year old has been writing a novel and has had the opportunity to sit in on a seminary-level Bible class. She is studying Portuguese vocabulary on her own. W., my 8 year old, says that he wants to write a devotional and has been copying Bible verses and thinking through this idea. He and his sisters have been practicing archery. My 6 year old daughter, E., has been playing 2nd grade school games on the iPad, religiously. They have all been watching the educational show SciGirls (science), along with Man vs. Wild (outdoors, survival) and Cake Boss (business, attitude). During the month of February we had a “Fall in Love With Reading” challenge and all 3 of them met or exceeded their goals. The 11 year old set a goal of 60 books, and the younger children each read 10 or more. (I did give a few days of grace for the 6 year old because we had so many unexpected detours.)
None of these activities stand alone as full education, in my opinion. Maybe I am just a skeptic, but I don’t trust their interests to lead them exclusively, like unschooling families do. However, I do see that during times of stress and challenge, learning continues to happen. It doesn’t come to a grinding halt, and not only that, but we are able to gracefully move into other areas of learning even in the midst of difficulty. I am getting more and more of a picture of a lifestyle of learning. I am trying to break both myself and the kids out of the mindset of “doing school” vs. “not doing school” and to see all of life as an opportunity to grow intellectually and in other ways.
So where do we go from here? With the exception of a few days, we have managed to keep up with the 3 R’s each day. We are getting back to our regular routine, and I plan to push science, geography, spelling, English, and history a bit more. It’s not so much a matter of “catching up” as it is just devoting some extra time to those subjects since we have not been able to do them as much lately. I’m trying to frame this positively for both my sake and theirs. Thanks to these and other interruptions, we will probably be schooling year-round this year. As I move toward a “lifestyle of learning” mindset, though, this feels more like flexibility and stress relief and less like some kind of punishment for not meeting arbitrary goals.
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