The Ultimate School Project

Posted by Aubrey Lively | 0 comments

I have realized a sordid thing about homeschooling: I am not the student. As much as I hated public school growing up, it has been astonishing to me to realize how much there was to enjoy…about learning, about being the one who gets to have the ideas, make the projects, choose the colors and the deeper points of study for papers and such.

Maybe that’s part of what made the early years of homeschooling so difficult: I saw homeschooling as the School Project to End All School Projects. My dioramas could fill my whole house; I could use the oven to prepare coordinated foods; I could make costumes and find music and books and art and field trips to enhance it all. I could submerge my “audience” in the richest experience of ancient Egypt ever created. Or Greece—I was up all night one night making a 3-dimensional Greek Parthenon, spent a week drawing a life-size Cyclops for a game of “Pin-the-eye-on-the-Cyclops,” and assigned bedtime readings from The Iliad to my husband.

But my audience had changed. Instead of a beaming teacher holding a straight A or a gold star, I had these little children—only 5 and 3 years old at the time of the Parthenon debacle. They were not impressed with projects they had to watch me put together on their behalf; I was dismayed when they ruined my first lapbook with their imperfect handwriting.

It has been a long journey from 5 years old to 10: I’ve done a lot of growing up. That’s not true—I still pout about being left out of the fun, but this year I’ve at least provided myself with my own paper for art class instead of hovering over theirs. But I don’t get to display mine for my grandparents, and I have yet to get a gold star.

Some of us go into homeschooling because we love learning, but passing that passion to our children can be a tricky business: it’s easy to get in the way. It can be tempting to ask questions too deep, take over the writing of papers, or simply push the kids aside to read the books we never read without the bothersome distraction of wiggles and giggles and sighs.

Some of us go into homeschooling because we want our kids’ education done better than the public schools can, but “doing it better” can be tricky, too: it’s easy to kick out imperfect kids along with imperfect schools. Don’t be offended—it could be just me who gets angry when a kid doesn’t understand math that seems obvious the first time I explain it. It’s probably just me who gets annoyed at a kid who’s so overwhelmed with an assignment, he won’t even try. Silliness on purpose, even when a child is very young, goes against my perfection, a thing which sometimes blinds my mama heart to the preciousness that’s there in immature humor.

The problem with perfectionism, of course, is that there is never a gold star. Friends usually do not want to hear about ancient Egypt or look at your chicken mummy. Tell them about your kids doing it, and—if they’re homeschoolers—they’ll probably want to go get coffee and continue the conversation. But you can’t bring your narrations to Ladies’ Group or pass them off as your kids’.

You might have a sympathetic husband, but if date night is as rare as it is in most homes, he might not appreciate spending every one of those hearing about your new knowledge of the Beaker People.

So the student must learn to become the teacher and finds that it is more painful than she expected. Her creativity must make room for someone else’s. Her ideas must sometimes be quiet to hear others work out their own. Her school-related passions may end up neglected if they are not her students’ passions. Shakespeare has to wait for bigger ears.

Teaching is like group work, and if you are a perfectionist, you hated group work in school. But when the student sets herself aside to be the teacher, she gets the ultimate reward: she gets to be the student.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mama with a loud one-room classroom filled with four children, aged ten to two. She likes a Saturday morning with her husband and his guitar, a good cup of coffee, and a fresh sheet of paper. She has a BA in Literature and a MEd in Teaching, but more importantly, she thinks outside the box. (She believes the box is a conspiracy.) Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.