Feelings of failure can so easily come creeping in…

On the day we once again push science lessons to the back burner. As I read a paragraph that my 6th grader has written and see that run on sentences are what make his world go round (and round and round and round). When I think about the upcoming ACT for my high schooler and break out in a sweat because there are bound to be questions on the test we haven’t covered, plus I have never even taught him to fill in circles with a number two pencil. When I hear public school friends talk about all they are doing and realize with regret that some of those great ideas never even crossed my mind. When I see that my son who is old enough to know better has written “take food to our nabers” on our Christmas to-do list. (That would be n-e-i-g-h-b-o-r-s. How has he not learned that yet?)

There are doubts that swirl around in the back of the minds of every homeschool mom at one time or another. These are the doubts that keep some moms from choosing to homeschool in the first place. 

• I can’t possibly teach my kids everything they need to know.
• Even though we’re doing a lot, there are so many things I haven’t gotten around to teaching my kids.
• I don’t see how all the other moms get through all the material. I’m not keeping up.
• Other people are doing such neat projects! I’m not doing nearly enough.
• If only I was more organized…
• Will my kids really be prepared for college?

There are so many cool things I haven’t done with my kids, so many lessons that haven’t been taught, so many experiences my kids haven’t experienced, so many field trips that haven’t been taken. We have yet to have a school year in which we actually get through every recommended book on the list. And I’m not proud to admit it, but I just now finally got around to teaching our 8th grader what a synonym is. As you can imagine, his life has changed dramatically {greatly; fiercely}.

Early this fall, I hesitantly enrolled our 11th grader in a college course. Doubts crept in:  Would he be ready? Had I taught him enough to succeed in a college level class? Did he have any idea how to take notes while his professor was speaking? And most important of all, without me there to remind him, would he remember to put periods at the ends of his sentences???

My dear friends, this is what I’ve learned and what all of us – public, private, or home school parents and teachers – need to understand:  Our kids don’t need to know everything. They just need to know how to learn.

Do you hear me? Nobody knows everything. It isn’t possible. We all have different gifts and interests and abilities. We all learn differently. We all retain information differently. As long as we have the tools and know-how we need so that we can figure things out, we are good to go.

Can’t spell? Learn to use a dictionary and spell check. Don’t know how many feet in a mile? Look it up. Don’t know who our 21st president was? Well, you might lose at a game of Trivial Pursuit, but otherwise, if you find yourself in a desperate situation in which you must know this information, I’m pretty sure that a three second online search will tell you that it was none other than Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded James Garfield upon his assassination. (Thank you, Wikipedia. We will all sleep better tonight.)

But back to Asa’s first college class:  Beyond standing up in front of a class full of college students to give about a dozen speeches throughout the semester in his Basic Speech college course, our 11th grader also had to put together thorough outlines for each speech which followed Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. He had to write two papers, following MLA standards. He had to cite sources to show where he got all of his information for his speeches and papers. I had taught him none of this at home prior to his taking the class. So guess what? He studied and researched and asked questions and he learned how to do all of these things.

He nailed this class and is ending the semester with a big fat A. Not because he’s a genius. Not because he’s an above average student. And certainly not because he has had a perfect homeschool educational experience. The kid simply knows how to work hard, how to follow directions, and how to learn.

Asa’s college class experience has been a wonderful enforcement to me that my teaching imperfections and all the holes in our schooling truly do not matter. (And all the parents everywhere let out an enormous collective sigh of relief.)

We’ll keep working hard and continue to give our kids a well-rounded education to the best of our ability. We’ll teach our kids to work hard, to be responsible, and to learn how to learn. We’ll let go of the feelings of not measuring up. We’ll let life be our greatest classroom.

When one of our kids spells barely like barley, we will not fall on the floor in a panic attack, writhing in self loathing wondering how our child will ever succeed in life since he has not mastered perfect spelling of every “ely” and “ley” word in the dictionary.

And we can all giggle together about the fact that as I was completing the writing of this post, one of my kids came up behind me, looked thoughtfully at what I was writing and said, “Hmm. I think you need to put a comma after the word “Mom” in your title. Would you look at that? It looks as if I’ve taught him something after all. (And all the readers everywhere glanced back up to the title of this post to see that indeed, there is now a comma after the word “Mom.”)