Findings

My goal when I started homeschooling was to cultivate the love of learning in my daughter. By streamlining instruction so that it’s one-to-one, and cutting wasted or dead time, I thought that I could make school something she would look forward to.

That hasn’t happened. She doesn’t wake up eager to hit the schoolbooks. Sometimes other mothers seem to have children who are really enjoying the school part of homeschooling, and I feel like a massive failure. As my husband said the other night, “She loves learning, but doesn’t like school.” In other words, the same dichotomy exists in homeschooling as existed in her public school experience. I haven’t succeeded in meeting my goals.

As I’ve thought and prayed through this, I’m starting to see it differently. “I’m a failure” is an easy conclusion to come to. It’s my default mode. But there are other ways of seeing this issue, too.

Personality type. For one thing, is the love for school I see in some other kids always the product of their mothers? Or is it also a product of their personalities? When I look at my daughter (7), I see someone who’s not at all a passive or compliant person. I don’t mean that she’s in rebellion, or cops an attitude. I mean that she’s filled to bursting with ideas all the time. It’s been this way since the beginning, when she was quite happy in the playpen and could amuse herself handily there. She never wakes up in the morning wondering, “What will I be taught today?” Instead she wakes up with a multi-point agenda, a list of things she wants to make, do, experience. School — an agenda imposed from without — interrupts this. It doesn’t matter if the materials are dull or ingenius.

I’m not an unschooler. And I accept the Charlotte Mason life-as-learning idea. But I’m not about to give up all structure in our schooling. That strikes me as a way of turning a potentially major strength (being an idea person) into a potentially major weakness (being a person who either doesn’t respect others, or doesn’t recognize that there’s a body of knowledge outside herself. She doesn’t know it all, and has to learn to learn.)

Looking around me, in my own world and the larger world accessible to me through reading and other media, I see plenty of people who didn’t like school and grew up to be major influencers and leaders, people of genius that end up blazing the trail that many lovers of school ultimately follow. Maybe I need to reformulate my understanding of “love of learning” so that it doesn’t insist on “love of school.” Can I be okay with my daughter being who she is? Can I accept that her room is always tilting toward a state of entropy, and teaching her to maintain order is a constant effort? Can I accept that every night as I tuck her in she’s making plans for what we’re going to do tomorrow with the Model Magic, not the math workbook? Can I celebrate the fact that as she’s learning to draw, she’s always eager to get through the lesson so she can draw horses? If so, then maybe I can begin to see that she has an absolute passion for learning — even if it isn’t there for the curriculum insisted upon by the State of New York, or for skills and knowledge in areas she’s not naturally attracted to.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work to find the best materials possible to fit with our children’s learning styles. I’m just saying that it’s conceivable that even the best materials won’t transform certain kinds of people into lovers of school, and maybe, just maybe, that’s okay.

Making peace. I’ve been talking about making peace with her personality type. In reality, it’s also making peace with my own. I’ve spent a vast majority of my life in an academic setting, and went into homeschooling with the idea that I am a lover of school. I thought, “I will absolutely love teaching my daughter!”

Well, yes… and no. Truth be told, I love certain kinds of learning, much like my daughter. For instance, I have a doctorate in English, because I love to read stories, not because of generic love for school. I could never read a textbook to save my life, all the way through college. The number of pages my eyes have dutifully but disinterestedly plodded across over the years, reading the words while my mind wanders, retaining nothing — it numbers in the thousands. I’m beginning to love and devour nonfiction, but only of certain kinds. I was put into accelerated math early on, but wasn’t interested enough to ever really stay on top of it. And I still remember my 7th grade teacher slapping my exam on The Hobbit down on my desk and saying, “It’s a good thing you can write!” Unspoken: “Because you obviously didn’t read it.” Nope. Didn’t. Not till much later in life, when I wanted to myself — and then I loved it.

Do I “love” teaching my daughter? Yes, on the “my daughter” part. I went into this in order to build our relationship, and I thought offering her my academic side (my “best side,” I believed) was a good way to do that. Our relationship is getting built, but not so much because of anything to do with the academics. It’s because when you homeschool there’s really not much left to hide behind; I have to face and engage with my children even in areas where I’m unsure of myself. It’s been great to begin reaping the rewards of that in our friendship.

But the “teaching” part? Not a thrill to teach first grade. No. (Such a relief, typing it out loud.) First grade math, spelling, handwriting, language skills? Pretty slow going. I do like history, as I knew I would going into it. And of course I love all the reading we do together, and feel absolutely delighted to see her develop the skills to take off on her own. I’ve also enjoyed feeding her interest in horses. I love some parts of it but not others — much like her. We study all of it, but we love parts. And once we love it, somehow in my mind that part sheds the category of “school.”

Revise the goal. Maybe I need to revise “cultivate a love of learning” as a goal, since when I say that I’ve seemed to mean “cultivate love of school.” Maybe it would be better to make the goal “encourage her creative energy while equipping her with skills and knowledge she needs.” Or… something.

I’ll find as many ways as possible to set that energy free in the context of academics, but in the end, the creative energy is the most valuable thing on the table. It’s the essence of who she is, the core from which most of her deepest satisfactions and accomplishments will flow. And yes, math and spelling are important in their way, but they’re not the heart of educational success. Far from it. 

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at The Common Room. My curriculum review is there, along with the usual variety of posts to ponder from homeschoolers. Click on over and take a look!

We’ve finished our first year of homeschooling, and I want to get some thoughts down while it’s fresh about the curriculum used in the different subject areas for first grade.

Math: I started with Singapore but switched to Saxon, mainly because I needed a bit more guidance myself in how to teach the concepts. My daughter had completed public school kindergarten, and in accordance with conventional wisdom I started her about half a year behind with the Singapore Kindergarten 2A and 2B workbooks. The lessons were fairly short, and there was no instruction or drill; just the colorful exercises. They worked pretty well, and they lived up to the Singapore reputation for encouraging mathematical thinking better than other programs. But in first grade math, when we switched to text plus workbook, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was teaching.

I picked up a lightly used teacher’s guide, workbooks, and meeting book for Saxon math 1 after our first quarter, and we picked up part of the way in. I didn’t buy a complete kit of manipulatives, just linking cubes and a practice clock. (I already had pattern blocks.) What I have to say about Saxon is not much different from other reactions I’ve read. What I liked:

• It gave me the guidance I needed as a teacher;
• It gave plenty of opportunity for drilling math facts;
• The incremental approach makes the concepts very clear and managable.

What I didn’t like:

Tedious. We rarely did every single problem, and the meeting book as well became extremely repetitious and took the fun out of patterning, weather graphing, skip counting, etc. I don’t see myself switching the curriculum again; I think it would be counter-productive, especially when this certainly does the job. I want to work more next year on modifying my use of the materials so that I present the above-mentioned practice in a way that inspires more motivation. My daughter has pretty good aptitude in math, but this curriculum is geared for lots of practice, and doesn’t lend itself to much adaptation.

Reading: I used An Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. It’s a systematic phonics approach in 231 lessons. We skipped over most of the basic letter sounds because we already had a solid foundation there. I like this text. The lessons are very brief and well-defined, and focus exclusively on reading without combining it with (and making it dependent on) other skills like writing and spelling. It’s also quite simple, without lots of bells and whistles and games and bright colors. My daughter was sounding out simple words at the beginning of the year, but somewhere along the way she really took off. I haven’t tested her reading level but it’s beyond first grade. So the effectiveness of this approach is not a question for me. It works. 

Spelling: Spelling Workout has been adequate for practicing spelling. We finished both first and second grade books fairly quickly, doing a lesson a day, but couldn’t go further at this point with this series because the third grade book uses cursive. So I picked up another Harcourt speller at Barnes and Noble, and we did a few pages a day. It worked well too, incorporating some dictionary skill-building as well as spelling, proofreading, and problem-solving skills. At the beginning of the year it was a real effort for my daughter to sit and work through a lesson, but those fine motor skills definitely developed over the year.

Handwriting: I started with a Zaner-Bloser book using the continuous stroke alphabet, finished it fairly quickly, and have used copywork and other handwriting workbooks picked up here and there just to keep up the discipline of practicing neat writing, and working on the problematic letters that she still tends to reverse.

Grammar: I used First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind for teaching parts of speech, poem memorization, days, months, seasons, and a variety of other skills. She learned without even realizing it. Lessons are short, and there’s repetition built in. We skipped some lessons because they were already familiar territory. This book encompasses both first and second grades, so I’ll be using it next year too.

History: By far the favorite text has been Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World Volume I. My daughter liked it so much that I bought her the audiobook so she could listen to the stories we’d covered on her own. The audio version is read by Jim Weiss, who gives it his characteristic flair. Bauer’s aim in this series is to help children latch onto history as a chronological story rather than a list of dates, and judging from my daughter’s response I’d call it a glowing success. It provides a solid foundation to be built upon with a more detailed and in-depth study when she’s older. We supplemented with the accompanying activity book, and with the many stories and materials suggested in its reading lists.

Science: We divided the year into 4 subject areas. We started with animals, taking one species a week, using the Kingfisher’s My First Animal Encyclopedia as a base text and supplementing with library materials. Judging from how often my daughter took this book to bed with her, I’d pronounce this our most successful unit. After this we tackled the solar system using Kingfisher Young Knowledge’s Solar System. Again, we took a planet a week, then filled out the last few weeks with other space phenomena. She had less interest in this subject, but the book has the same strengths as the animal encyclopedia: it’s methodical, nicely illustrated, and provides some good basic factual material for a young learner. From there we moved to DK’s First Human Body Encyclopedia, studying one system a week. I found this book to be interesting, but more difficult to break into hour-long sessions; most systems are spread over several pages. The information and illustrations are good, though, and when I broke into a cold sweat at my daughter’s choice of the reproductive system one week, I needn’t have worried. It’s accurate, but not explicit, and leaves room for you to explain some of the technical details according to the questions asked and your own discretion. We’ve completed the year with a hands-on gardening unit using Laurie Carlson’s Green Thumbs, which is full of activities and experiments related to growing things. It’s weak on information content, but it’s a great activity guide.  

Art: I’ve used several activity books. I started with Mona Brookes’ Drawing With Children. Though I love the approach and thought it contained lots of wisdom, it was killing the spontaneous joy my daughter takes in creating. I made an executive decision to go no further with it at this point.  All in all I’ve offered little direction in art, as she’s constantly churning out artistic projects of her own, but recently I purchased a dvd curriculum in drawing to begin offering more guidance. I haven’t used it enough to evaluate it yet.

Music appreciation: I’ve used Stories of the Great Composers. At the beginning of the year my daughter wasn’t much interested in this, and I shelved it. But more recently we’ve taken it out again with good success. It contains short chapters on a dozen or so composers, providing some factual information, an imaginative story, and an activity of some kind for each – a crossword puzzle, word search, or matching activity to solidify what we’ve read. It comes with a cd that gives examples of each composer’s work. Its strength is that it humanizes the composers, and the compositional process, and it has been effective at making classical music accessible and building a solid foundation.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up, hosted this week at Walking Therein. There’s plenty to ponder for homeschooling parents as we wrap up the schoolyear. Head on over for some wisdom and encouragement from homeschoolers, and for more info about the Carnival.

A friend gave me Sally Clarkson’s Seasons of a Mother’s Heart, and I’ve been savoring it over the last few weeks. It’s a book written by a homeschooling mother of four who also runs the home-based endeavor Whole Heart Ministries. Using the four seasons as a principle of organization, this book addresses the attitudes and challenges that Christian homeschooling mothers face.

My friend commented to me, “Sally Clarkson has a neat heart. It’s not really an intellectual book, but it’s inspiring.” I would agree. It’s not a book that showed me new things so much as a prolonged exposure to a positive attitude about already-familiar things. At the end of each chapter is a short Bible study section providing passages of scripture to read and an opportunity to write your thoughts down.

The only places I felt defensive were in some spots where Ms. Clarkson makes it sound like homeschooling is the only biblical option. “If my decision to homeschool is because I am being obedient to the design for motherhood and family that I see revealed in Scripture, then I have no other options,” she writes near the end. I feel my hackles go up just a bit, because I’m not necessarily in agreement with that. I start formulating arguments about how not everyone is cut out for homsechooling, or can afford to live on one income, etc. I think she would probably agree with that on its face, but if you really think homeschooling is the ”design…revealed in Scripture,” and you live by Scripture, then do you see those who choose not to do it as disobedient?

One other spot where I found myself disagreeing was in a chapter on discipleship where she writes, “We can love our children dearly, teach them diligently, train them effectively, live with them day-in and day-out, and yet still not really have a relationship with them. We can occupy the same space with them in our home, yet fail to fill the relational space between their hearts and ours.” 

To which I reply: “Huh?”

This seems to set an abstract ideal as a standard. I think someone who is really doing all those things surely has a relationship with their kids. Case closed. Please don’t give us something else to wake up at night wondering about. Frankly, that whole list of parental activities is a definition of a relationship. Sure the relationship can be worked on and improved; sure we need always to avoid defaulting into being mechanical. But it seems that “loving our children dearly” is the best, and only necessary, safeguard against really going off the rails in that respect.

I like books that engage me, so I didn’t mind my quibbles with this one. Probably my favorite point the book makes is about the way the homeschool movement has become an often complicated, bewildering array of philosophical approaches and curriculum packages, and sometimes the shared vision gets lost. I don’t believe that anyone would intentionally take shots at my approach to teaching my children (my approach is classical, by the way), but whenever I go to a meeting or a curriculum fair, I’m immediately assailed by doubts and anxieties. A month or so ago, I went to one where a certain language arts product was on display. I found the colorful array of cd’s, games, books etc. quite dazzling. Beside it stood two women agreeing fervently that they would swear by it.

My kids are missing out on all of that. And I’m missing out on the price tag, which I found eye-popping. My approach is simpler, less colorful, less “fun-looking.” Shoot, I suddenly felt gypped myself not to be playing all those fun games and everything, and so are my poor children… Guilt, guilt, second-guessing, more guilt.

But have they learned all the same material? Yup. Have I followed through on my goals set at the start of the year? Yup. Would I buy the product if I had it to do over again? Nope. I would have liked it more if I could have sat down with those two mothers and talked about why they were homeschooling, and what their struggles were, and what their favorite parts were.

Which brings me back to Sally Clarkson, who talks about those very things in this book. With apologies for lapsing into sports metaphors, she “keeps the main thing the main thing.” That’s what I appreciated most about this book, and that’s why I’m glad it’s a keeper.

If you’re looking for ideas about homeschooling from those in the thick of it, this week’s carnival is up at Po Moyemu — In My Opinion. Looks like there’s plenty of variety in this week’s posts.

When I was a graduate teaching assistant, I had to be observed by a senior faculty member each semester. One of my first observers left me with a lasting piece of advice. “You have lots of great stuff to give them – great ideas and information,” he said gently, “but you need to let them do more of the work. That might mean you have to settle for less good ideas. But they will learn more.”

I’ve reflected on that often, and I find myself mulling it once again as I conclude my first year of homeschooling. I suffer from a very strong case of “Do it myself” that continually lurks in the wings and threatens to short-circuit learning on the part of my young students the minute my guard is down. It’s not that I step in and do the math worksheets, or give the answers to spelling questions, or do the handwriting exercises. It’s more of an impatience that surfaces in other ways: picking up messes I didn’t make, straightening a bed sloppily made, feeding the dog rather than calling the child to do it, giving verbal correction without the supporting backbone of discipline.

All of this falls under the heading of directing character development. I’m not sure why it is, but the things I care most about, I’m very ambivalent about taking a purposeful approach with. (It’s the same with teaching my daughter to play the piano. I really don’t want to blow any potential love for music… so I don’t push her at all. We’ve had maybe 3 lessons in a year.) When it comes to character, I’m not always sure how to shape and educate my children. They both have wonderful minds and a natural sweetness and generosity, but they can also be self-centered. They can be prideful about what they know, or can do well. They like to help out when it’s their idea, but not so much when asked by someone else. 

In short, they’re human beings. 

So how do I address these “heart issues” without labeling them or nagging them or guaranteeing years of therapy for OMI (Overbearing Mother Issues) later in life? How do I “let them do the work” and be shaped by it? What follows is a loose, baggy monster of a post consolidating some of my answers to that question… and I’m hoping for more good suggestions and feedback! (Edited to add: It’s a given that modelling is the most powerful teaching. These are attempts to think through the ways I might make a more conscious effort in addition to that.)

House Rules:

I keep a simple framework of five house rules, and refer to them often so that we envision our life together in these terms:

1. In our house we share and that’s that. (Leave it in your room if you don’t want to share it.)
2. Keep your hands to yourself.
3. Respect each other. (We have lots of discussions about what this means in different contexts.)
4. Have good manners at the table. [I've found it necessary to spell these out separately... :-)]
5. Do your chores. (Chores are spelled out separately.)

Biblical Training:

As a Christian, another way to let them do the work is to acquaint them with the biblical source of my view of people, arming them to think about it. It’s hard to imagine a greater respect for human life than is modelled in this story of an infinite God becoming one of his creatures. Not only that, but he becomes a servant, washing the feet of his disciples. Respect, humility, and helpfulness are all primary here. So are the fruits of the Spirit listed in the Bible: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

However, the Christian life was never intended to be lived from the outside in; it’s not a system of ethics and rules that you can implement on your own. I’ve heard other mothers complain that their children aren’t kind enough to each other, a problem they address with lectures. But kindness, and the other fruits, are by-products of a genuine and growing relationship with God. This means I need to be very careful not to give my children the impression that it works the other way around by setting up the rewards and punishments according to their successful performance of a set of “religious” rules. That would be the worst thing I could do for them, and would set them up not just for a self-righteous mode of living, but a lifetime of doubt and uncertainty about what they themselves believe. Faith, if it’s real, is activated through choice; it isn’t superimposed from without. It’s theirs, not mine.

To me this means that my biblical instruction has to confine itself to the limited goal of informing them, and then leaving them free to recognize their own fallenness, free to feel sorrow or need without defensiveness, free to choose. I need to keep the context of rule-bound behavior as simple and spacious as possible. For me that means sticking to the 5 house rules.

Good Books:

I can “let them do the work” better if I have a clear vision of what “the work” is. I’m not very good at reading self-help books, but they can really clarify the issues. My ever-so-brief bibliography of parenting books needs expansion, so this is basically a call for suggestions. So far my favorite ones are:

• Boundaries With Kids, a very practical treatise on taking the long view of a child’s character. (Here’s a link to my review of this book.) 
• The Well-Trained Mind, a book outlining a classical method of homeschooling but one that includes lots of helpful and realistic information about children’s development. It’s more a book for my educator persona than my motherly one, but these days they can be hard to separate.
• Shepherding a Child’s Heart. It’s been awhile since I read this book, but it’s one I have mixed feelings about. I appreciated its focus on the heart rather than just its outward manifestation in behavior, as well as its exposition of the ways we can go off-track disciplining our kids and end up aiming for control instead. But I disliked the discussion of spanking. It seemed complicated, impractical, and in some ways worrisome (parents reiterating that they get their authority from God every time they administer punishment, for instance).

Lavish Praise:

Last but not least, if I want my kids to repeat their best impulses till they become a habit, I need to offer lavish praise when they rise to the occasion. Letting them do the work means valuing their efforts as they are. “Let me see those hands!” exclaims my mother-in-law whenever one of my daughters helps. “Those are helping hands!!” I’ve been struck lately by how easy it is to miss such opportunities due to:

• Perfectionism, with its grudging, snobby attitude toward elevating effort over result. Their character isn’t being formed as much in their grasp of math concepts, or their sense of the sweep of human history, or their love for reading, as in their eager use of those helping hands. It really doesn’t matter as much that the bed be wrinkle-free as that they make it without being asked and without complaining.
• Impatience; often the best moments are small and easy to miss. Last night I was vacuuming. I was in a hurry to get it done while supper was in the oven, but just as I was about to switch on the cleaner, my 4-year-old said authoritatively, “Mommy, I have something to say to you.” I looked up, and I’m sure “what now” and “hurry up” were written all over my face. “Mommy, I’m thankful you clean this place up,” she said, spreading her arms to encompass the whole house. Wow. I almost missed that little explosion of encouragement from a sweet heart. More importantly, I almost missed my chance to reinforce it with a hug and a smile.
• Forgetting their uniqueness. A friend reminded me recently that our greatest giftedness often lies in those areas that frustrate others while we’re growing up. I joke with my daughter about Templeton in Charlotte’s Web when I look under bed that provides safe haven for so many things that should be thrown away… But she who leaves an endless trail of drawings, of saddles and bridles made out of everything from pipe cleaners to playdough to yarn to discarded (and hoarded) toilet paper tubes, is surely destined to be a creator of something big!  I catch myself so often shushing my other daughter, who speaks with such boldness and animation and effervescence to strangers, and who simply cannot be awake and be silent, but she is surely destined to be a great communicator, a great channel between people. I need to let them be.

I’m thankful for the good advice of a faculty observer years ago whose insight reaches far beyond the bounds of a freshman comp class, and into the very different world of my household incubator of minds and hearts. As I look back over this post, I see that “letting them” is one part of the equation — letting them be themselves, letting them fail, letting them know what’s expected of them — and ”do the work” is the other part — household chores, trial and error in relating, thinking and searching for truth. Maybe the better image of them is not containers to be “instilled” with character, but tumbling rivers that flow between the guiding banks of their parents on the way to a much larger and more complex sea of human life.

The story of my life as a mother is the peeling back of layer after layer of selfishness. The birth of my children released a new kind of love in me: fiercer, more helpless, more inescapable than any I’d experienced before. But its effect has been to shine a bright light on the paltry, flimsy supporting muscle-tone in my character.

First it was the piano. When my first daughter was not quite 1, my grandmother passed along to me the lovely Mason & Hamlin baby grand that had been cherished by my grandfather. It brought me a rebirth as a musician. Someone had given me an old, 1970’s vintage Fender Rhodes years earlier — the kind that has all 88 keys and weighs a ton, but works for an apartment-dweller. It kept my musical persona breathing. But the acquisition of a piano with dynamic range and with all the responsiveness and body of the acoustic instrument at its finest was a continual temptation. I remember that often, while my daughter was in her playpen, I’d take a basket of laundry down to put in the washer, and the piano would whisper, “Just run through that song one time.” An hour later I’d dash guiltily back upstairs to find her asleep.

Then it was the worship team at church. I’m a classically trained pianist, but as part of a large, contemporary worship ministry I developed improvisational skill, and I was totally infatuated with the wonder of being able to play the same set of chords in a zillion different ways. I played more at home, and more and more frequently at church, maxing out at three services every other Sunday, preceded by a Thursday night practice. There was a seductiveness to belonging to that artistic community, and I rose to leadership. More time went into it. More heart went into it.

Then the experience went sour, and with it, the piano. We left that church, having lost confidence in it as a spiritual community distinct from some other kind of big corporation. The pull of the worship team, and of the piano, evaporated. We’ve searched for, and (dare I say it?) found another church home. But I’m not feeling drawn to music there. Why? Partly scar tissue, but also: I’ve discovered blogging. Blogging is all me, all the time. My life looks orderly here. Now this computer, and this small patch of cyberspace, has a gravitational pull equivalent to a black hole in my universe. Now as a result of blogging I’ve experienced a reading renaissance, which is great – but when my nose is in a book I’m not accessible. Now when I bring a load of laundry downstairs, it’s the computer, not the piano, that sucks me into a place where I don’t notice time passing. (I seem to have a thing for keyboards…) 

Is it any wonder that lately I’ve found myself questioning my convictions about homeschooling? I’m not doing a very good job, I reason; the academics are going fine, but my heart’s not really in it; they know more about young children’s development at the school around the corner; this isn’t my calling.

This is a personal question that each family answers differently, but in my case, the foregoing line of reasoning is me rationalizing my selfishness and fear. I think there are a couple of false lines of thought embedded in it. One is, “I have a need for creative expression.” That’s partly true. I’m a right-brainer, artsy-type, dyed-in-the-wool, down-to-the-bone expressionist. But does it follow that I need to be spending these hours here, at this particular kind of expression, serving (let’s be honest) no real purpose beyond myself? My deepest “need,” right now — speaking for myself and no one else — is to fulfill my role as a mother wholeheartedly. I know this, because I know how many nights I lie awake tweaking my mothering, praying for my children, battling my way toward understanding them. What will it be like in 10 years if I don’t give them my best during my waking hours now, while they’re here and young?

Somewhere in there, too, is the lie that I can’t. I’m not sure if this is true for all mothers, but many times during the day I’m intensely aware of my deficiency of inner resources — of wisdom, of gentleness, of words that go to the spot of heart that needs them, of long-term perspective, of simple physical energy. I’m certain that for me, this computer is a place to hide, a personal “napping room” where I check out of engagement. The reason this is a particularly ironic problem is that one of the main reasons I’m homeschooling is to offer myself to my kids, to not hide from them, to be present to them in all my glorious imperfection and absurdity. That’s love, isn’t it? That’s why I’m doing this.

When we first started homeschooling, it was an idea my husband liked but wasn’t pushy about. I made the decision to go for it myself. But now, he frequently and confidently says that it’s my calling in life. Is it? After a year of it, have my grand ideals held up?

Not sure. Not sure it’s my calling in life. But I am sure it’s what I should be doing now.

I don’t remember Shrek, but I know the movie contains a statement about people being like onions, many-layered. My layers are all pitifully self-involved. But somewhere in there is something non-onion that feels the sorrow, weeps at the peeling, and envisions something better than my selfishness can supply. It’s the part of me that appeared out of nowhere when my children were born. It’s the part of me that’s hoping resolving to bring my blogging back into its rightful place, and my children into theirs, starting today.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Principled Discovery. This is the 121st edition of a weekly publication that’s packed with resources from other homeschooling bloggers. Today’s issue is organized in honor of “the homeschool bag lady.” Zip on over to the Carnival to satisfy your curiosity about what that means!

The Carnival of Homeschooling will be hosted by Nerd Family today.