A couple of years ago, when Ian was a baby, I was talking to a friend from college who was far away, but sharing the same life of homeschooling little kids with a baby added into the mix.  We were commiserating about how little it seemed we really could get done in a day and then she said something that has stuck with me.  “I guess on those days, the baby is the lesson.”

The baby is the lesson.

That little phrase has been running through my mind a lot these past few weeks.  A new little person takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of love.  It’s given me a lot of opportunities to tell the other kids what they were like as babies, how I learned to read their cues and figure out what they needed, how I thought there never could be anything cuter and more precious than they were.  And, more often than I ‘d like to admit those math lessons are replaced by, “Will you please jiggle this screamer while I change the poopiest-poopy diaper ever made by a human 2 year old?!”

At first, when I’d think of this phrase, I was looking for ways the baby was the lesson for the kids.  And, naturally, there were lessons in seeing to another’s needs before your own, diaper changing, laundry washing, the miracle of a milk-making-mama-body, but this time I’m realizing there’s a lesson or two in it for me.

Seize the moment.  If everyone is sleeping in, sleep in too.  If the baby is peacefully napping and the bigger kids are happily playing, take a shower.  When brand new eyes focus on the mesmerizing ceiling fan and get the little guy to start cooing, get right over there and coo along.  When a fussy baby is hungry SIT DOWN, put your feet up, stare at his perfect little face while he nurses, and call another one or four over to snuggle along and read a chapter of a book.

Go with the flow. While it is important for me and the kids to have a routine rhythm to our days, it is okay if that rhythm slows down.  Instead of keeping time, we just flow through it.  That may mean that the morning song, prayer, stories, and scripture study don’t start until after lunch, and that’s just fine.  We flow with it, embrace it, no stressing out allowed…

Think of reasons to say yes, rather than no.  Someone wants to do a “science experience” by mixing some of everything from every kitchen cupboard together.  The 2 year old wants the 4 year old to read his stories, rock him, and sing his song at nap time.  They all want to jump on the trampoline in the snow.  Why not?

I guess for all of us, especially the mama, the baby is the lesson.

One thing that is so hard about writing is that you can only say one thing at a time.  I feel like my decision to home-school spills into every other area of my life.  It’s this big spherical complex thing, but I can only go at it from one angle at a time leaving out what’s on the other side and leaving my explanation incomplete.  But you know that as you read, right?  Obviously my personality played a big role in how I perceived my public school experience.  There was potential there for me to really have a rich learning experience, and I did at times ( it is hard to sum up 13 years in one paragraph) but I ended up learning HOW to learn on my own, and much later in life than I wish.

I think the way public school is set up makes it primarily a socializing tool.  People get that– I can tell by the concerned questions they raise.  “Aren’t you worried about your kids’ social skills?” or in other words “Aren’t you scared your kids will turn out really backward and weird?”  I hardly ever get asked “Aren’t you worried about your kids getting the academic learning they need?”  A lot of responses run through my mind like, “When was the last time a real person did real work in the real world and they were segregated by age, the 31-year-olds in one room, the 45-year-olds in another?”  and “Kids generally turn out to be like their parents.  There are backward and strange kids in public school and out of it.”  To me it seems the most real world, natural place for kids to be, especially young children, is in a family.

For young children, school sets up competing authority figures.  What if the teacher says one thing and Mom and Dad say another?  Who’s right?  How is a child to decide, especially at such a delicate stage where they are figuring out who they are, what they’re good at, what’s right and what’s wrong?  School can also put children in social situations they aren’t mature enough to handle or understand.  I think of Robert and Kevin, twin brothers in my elementary school classes who were mercilessly teased.  We knew it was wrong to pass “cooties” around after someone touched one of them.  It was not okay in any way, but no one was there to know, intervene, and help us think through the consequences of our actions.  As we grew older the teasing ended and we were full of more compassion, but what had been said in earlier years could not be taken back and I’m sure have had lasting impact on those boys forever.  Misunderstood social situations can happen in the early years, but what about those irrational hormone drenched middle school days?  I know for my brothers and I that was a dangerous time.  School was almost purely social– with concerns of poplarity and fitting in paramount, and immature decisions made that proved pretty disastrous.

I know that there are positives about the social structure of school, some very positive things, but as I have envisioned and prayed about what I want the feeling and relationships in my family to be like I just couldn’t get sending my kids away to spend so much of their waking hours away from their sibblings and parents to sit right.  I love that the “peer group” they’ve got is each other, so Jonah will read and read so Brenna will think he’s cool and they can discuss dragons and hobbits and oompa-loompas.  I love that Logan will work really hard to make a Lego jet so that he and Jonah can really play together.  I love that they are each others role models and best friends. I love it that the cool things to do are read, draw, build, ride bikes, collect sticks and rocks and seedpods.  I know some will say we could have created a family culture centered on the things Barry and I love and value while sending our kids to school, but it sure has been easier without that huge amount of interference.  It is perfectly described in this post here.

Now, a little about boys.  I have quite a few of those in my house and I grew up with 4 of them too.  School doesn’t seem to be designed for little boys and so much of what happens in the earliest years totally flies in the face of how kids really develop.  Little kids, particularly boys, need to jump and dig and throw and cut themselves with pocket knives and bang their thumbs with hammers (on accident), not sit in a desk doing busywork for hour upon hour.  When a little boy doesn’t fit the mold, asks too many questions, wiggles too much, or is forced to learn to read before his brain is really ready to tackle that, he doesn’t learn how to learn.  He learns that school is torture, that learning is too hard, and that he must be dumb.  Pushing kids so hard when they are young and compliant is easy, but it isn’t helpful.  Let kids focus on their strengths when they’re little while they’re forming their idea of who they are and what they’re worth.  If they’re best at doing flips and crazy ninja moves then get them books about num-chucks and a trampoline.  Don’t force academics and make him feel like a failure.  That is no way to create a talented, confident, knowledgeable contributor to society.

So, here are some books that say it better than I do:

Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning  It starts with a wonderful discussion of child development and educational theory based on writings of guys like Dewey and Piaget.  I wrote a little bit about it here (I refer to it as “The Recipe” because before the child development stuff was in book form it was just an article called “The Recipe for Success”)

How Children Learn  and How Children Fail by John Holt.

Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gotto who was an award winning New York public school teacher who resigned from teaching with his acceptance speech for the Teacher of the Year award.  That speach is in this book.  Gives ya something to think about.

The Minds of Boys: Saving our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life  This book is aimed at helping traditional schools change to meet boys needs, but is a good discussion about what schools have become, how that affects boys, and what boys need.

Okay, I promise the next post won’t be so long.  And it will have pictures.

The question I get asked more than anything else, from people out in blog-land and from people in real life, is why we home school and how we came to that decision, and to be honest I’ve been asking myself that question a lot since Hunter was born.  Adjusting to life with a newborn, whether it’s the first or fifth, is hard and magical and tiring and exhilarating and emotional and… Well, there have been many times during the past 2 months that I wished everyone would just go away, that the free daycare that is public school has sounded totally worth it.

So, I’m going to take this week to spend some time answering that question and reminding myself at the same time why it is I’ve chosen this crazy ride.  Hopefully this will be helpful to someone out there.  If nothing else, it will be helpful for me.  It’s always good to revisit things.

I’m just going to write what flows today and we’ll see where that leads…

When I graduated from high school I didn’t feel very “educated.”  I just felt like there was something missing– that I hadn’t really internalized much real knowledge or fully developed my talents.  I graduated with good grades, did well on my AP English and Art exams, had a decent ACT score, but all that good paper seemed empty.  I knew that I could count on one hand the books I had actually read, even though I had written lots of good papers about books I merely payed attention to discussions of.  I knew that more of the time I spent in the art studio was wasted on listening to music and goofing off with my friends than it was getting an understanding of what art is and the art I was meant to make and then actually making it.  I didn’t remember much from my science classes, even the ones where I had gotten the highest scores on the final exams.  I knew that for all my thirteen years the thing I had most internalized was how to play the game, how to get teachers to like me and tell me I was smart by giving me good marks.  I also knew that as a result, my sense of self worth was largely based on what others thought of me and the attention and recognition I could get for the things I did do.  I did have a few classes that gave me a vision of what real learning could be.  I fell in love with the scriptures during my LDS Seminary classes.  I learned how to identify universal principles that could be a guiding force in my life and then test them by actually applying those principles in everyday living and making those principles an integrated part of my being.  My AP English class my senior year was life changing.  I found my voice in writing, found a community of friends that could really think about things and discuss them, and learned that learning comes from reading, pondering, discussing, and then producing something in response to really make the knowledge mine– to make it a part of me.  For Honors American Government we dressed in professional clothes and went daily to the state capital to sit in on committee hearings, watch debates on the floors of the House and Senate, write articles about what was happening there, conduct mock floor debates to see and feel like a part of real things happening that affectedreal people’s real lives.  But, apart from seminary, these experiences happened the very last year of my public schooling, and I was one of the lucky ones.  It was a small minority of students that had experiences like I did.

I went to college expecting that those classes my last year of high school were just a glimpse of what college would be like, that inspiring learning would be waiting for me at every turn.  For the most part, though, it was a return to playing the game as usual– figuring out how to regurgitate information just the way the teacher wanted it.  I did learn how to learn in college, though.  There were a handful of classes that I got that from, but my best teacher was the enormous library within walking distance of where I lived.  My deepest learning came from reading everything I could about a topic I was interested in, trying to do it or apply a principle in my life, read some more, do some more… I learned to knit, bind books, to tell the difference between art work by Fra Angelico and his students, about identifying birds and trees.  I realized that no one else but me was responsible for my learning.  Teachers and professors could ask questions, suggest angles from which to see something, prescribe reading and writing, but when I actually learned something it was because I was intensely interested in it, spent a lot of time reading and dreaming about it, and wrote or made something in response.

And over the course of these years of really wanting to feel like I was getting an education, learning and knowing things, I was also in the middle of dreaming up what I wanted my future family to be like, and actually getting married and starting that family.  I kept asking myself, “Why does school have to feel like so much wasted time with little jewels of inspiration, light, and knowledge sprinkled in?  Could it be the other way around?  Could the process of getting an education be FULL of inspiration, growth, real internalized learning with maybe a little monotony sprinkled in instead?”  If it was possible, that was the kind of experience I wanted for my future children.  I wanted to create a family culture of wonder and appreciation for nature, each person’s unique talents and abilities, and that anyone could learn and gain mastery about anything they studied, applied and tried.

Then a friend introduced me to the ideas in A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille.

She told me the seven principles of facilitating a good education are:

Classics not Textbooks
Even though it is hard work to study original sources, it is best to know what Darwin or Aristotle or Dickens actually said, than what someone said someone said Darwin or Aristotle or Dickens said.  A classic is any work that you can return to over and over again and keep learning from.  Books can be classics, works of art, music, nature… original works that bring us face to face with the greatest the world has to offer.

Mentors not Professors
A professor lectures and tests—mostly from his own point of view.
A mentor works with a student, giving suggestions, asking hard questions, helping the student set goals, and holding them accountable for what they say.

Quality not Conformity
Mentors only accept excellence.  They help guide students to reach their unique potential, not just beaurocratic standards.

Structure Time not Content
School needs to be held at a set time everyday. (suggested 3 hours/day)  Kids choose what they study.  Remember all truth is intertwined—and kids don’t compartmentalize the way adults do.  They will learn a diversity of subjects, even if they choose to study motorcycles for weeks!  Be creative in helping them, and they’ll learn everything they need to and more.

Inspire not Require

Great teachers set the example and show their excitement about learning.  They ask themselves, “What can I do to get my children to WANT to read or do math etc. etc.?”  They pray hard and work hard because children do what they see modeled.

Simplicity not Complexity
As curriculums get more and more complex, children learn less and less.

Great education occurs when students study.
Students study when they choose to.
Students choose to study when they’re inspired.

And then I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling something missing from my educational experience and I needed to set out to do something different with the children that would come into my family.