Discouraged as a homeschooling parent?

Today, let’s talk about the foundations of this discouragement. We will never be able to come up for air, to feel like we are swimming in the lake on a bright summer day (i.e., homeschooling with joy), if public school culture guides the foundation of our homeschooling.

They will be holding our heads under the water. If we do what they tell us, we gasp, struggling for breath during our homeschooling journey.

The truth is teaching kids isn’t as complicated as we thought.

Teaching kids is sort of like the scatological habit of rabbits. (Yes, scatological means poop. Stay with me.)

We have an amazing little bunny that runs all over our house and currently only poops in two locations- in her little toilet and on my husband when he is sitting. If she only pooped in her little toilet, this would be a perfect analogy, but we can’t have perfection. We’re homeschooling!

My point is that you can train rabbits to use their toilet.

Our rabbit has almost attained this lofty goal. But there’s a trick to teaching a rabbit to go to the bathroom. This same trick (well, nearly!) helps us homeschool our kids so that we don’t constantly feel like drowning.

The rabbit decides where she will go to the bathroom.

Similarly, kids decide, at least in part, how (or what or where) they will learn.

Understanding how to work within the nature of rabbits’ scatological habits and kids’ learning habits is the key that sets us free.

I’ll explain.

Pet rabbits were traditionally kept outside in pens, as it was assumed these animals couldn’t be toilet trained.

Someone brilliant figured out that if the rabbits are allowed to choose their place to go to the bathroom inside your home, they will go to that one place with proper training. If a rabbit owner decides on the location of the toilet for the rabbit, complete with carrots, rabbit toys and treats of every kind, this won’t work. They won’t become toilet trained.

But if we set the rabbit free in our home and wait, a fantastic thing happens with some training.

The rabbit chooses her location to go to the bathroom.

So when you find a large pile of about 100 poops (because rabbits poop about 150 times per day), don’t despair, rejoice! Put your little rabbit toilet in that location and let the training begin.

Kids are identical to the pooping habits of rabbits.

If we believe the Ministry of Education that kids need to learn over 300 discreet and tiny bits of information every year and that this changes every year depending on the child’s age, we might as well put the kids outside in those rabbit pens and forget about homeschooling them.

It’s impossible!

Sure, if you have 30 kids exactly the same age and leave them in the same room day after day this could work . . .  (Wait, that analogy breaks down. This approach doesn’t work in the classroom either, if we’re honest. But that’s a discussion for another day).

The point is that this approach will kill our kid’s love of learning, our love of homeschooling, and maybe even change how much we like our  students (which happened to me once) if we work diligently, trying to do what they tell us, and how they ask us to teach our kids.

Instead:

1. We dig around the soil of the little plants that we have been entrusted to steward, our children, and we transplant their little minds and bodies as often as possible to the place where their joy in learning can be protected.
2. Sure. We also jump through the hoops and play the game of doing what we are told if we have the energy, but we try to minimize this as much as possible. Required to teach your kids about the Solar System in Grade 3, but they’ve already moved on to studying Astrophysics? We spend half an hour filling out a worksheet if this keeps our teachers happy, but we minimize this as much as possible. (Sometimes your rabbit needs to be in her pen).
3. Sometimes, we accept the perception of defeat for a more significant cause. For example, our kids might look like idiots for a while because we are after longer-term goals. So be it.
4. We sit back, put our feet up, and watch them learn. Just like toilet training a rabbit, joyfully homeschooling our children is possible when we let them choose the where (or the how or the when) as often as possible.

How specifically to help them do this while we put up our feet with a cup of tea and watch our rabbit use a toilet inside will be discussed another time.