With the renaissance of homeschooling in the early 1980s came a trickle, and then a flood, of books and magazines about homeschooling.
These were eagerly read by homeschooling parents wanting to know how others were teaching their children, because there weren’t many homeschoolers around to talk with.
Today, reading about how other families homeschool their children is almost too easy. There are more magazines and books than ever, plus countless blogs on the Internet where parents reveal every last detail of their homeschooling journeys, or so it seems.
There’s a very real danger here, however. With so much personal revelation out there, it’s way too easy to compare your family and your homeschooling experience to others. This is not a good thing!
You can always find someone whose homeschooling experience sounds far more successful than your own. It’s way too tempting to think, “We have so many struggles, and after reading about this family, it’s obvious that I’m in over my head in this homeschooling thing. Her kids are doing so many wonderful projects, and I have to fight to get mine away from the video games to do anything. I give up!”
The fact is that every family is different, and no family can imitate another and come up with the same results. It’s not fair to compare another family to yours: different kids, different parents, different financial situations.
When you read about other homeschooling families, try to think about which of their ideas would work for your family instead of imitating everything they do in a misguided attempt to “succeed.”
Besides, homeschooling success is defined in many different ways. For one child, it’s getting to college on a full scholarship. For another, it’s making his or her way in the world on their own. For a few, like my teenage son, it’s functioning to the best of your abilities despite multiple disabilities.
So go ahead, read all the homeschooling books and magazines and surf homeschoolers’ blogs. Visit the Carnival of Homeschooling each week. Glean as many great ideas as you think might work for your family. Discard those that turn out to be wrong for your family. And always keep in mind that there’s no one right way to homeschool. The beauty of homeschooling is that it can be tailored to each family, each child, and each parent.
I spent a good chunk of last week (Spring Break) going through boxes from our storage unit as we try to pare down our possessions, part of the downsizing exercise we began nearly two years ago when we moved from the five-bedroom house where we raised our kids to a smaller home in another state.
I thought I’d gotten rid of my two big kids’ schoolwork before we moved, but I found more boxes last week, including one full of Peter’s workbooks and notebooks from age 5 on. (Boy, I sure spent a lot on A Beka in the early years of homeschooling!) And I think it’s ok to get rid of all his schoolwork, LOL, seeing how he graduated from college two years ago. I think he proved he knows a few things. But it’s hard letting go of the past. I’m forcing myself to only keep a few notebooks and other papers with his writing.
Even with some of the stuff pitched already, it stunned me to look at all of the books and papers and realize that this was the evidence of what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-some years. We moms are accustomed to having what we produce disappear: folded stacks of laundry and racks of homemade cookies evaporate soon after we produce them. So to see even just a portion of the work we produced over all those years of homeschooling kind of takes my breath away….and makes it that much harder to pitch things. But I was strict with myself, and we overloaded the garbage man last week.
Of course, old schoolwork isn’t all I’m finding in these boxes. I’ve been addicted to newspapers for almost my entire life, and as a result I’m the queen of clippings. Seems like there’s always something interesting in the paper that I need to tear out and save because I might want to read it again sometime. This explains all the clippings stuffed in boxes (along with old magazines I kept meaning to read). Not a good thing years later when you need to go through it all.
I can’t possibly read all of that stuff now, but as I sorted, I kept the articles I just couldn’t resist, and reread them all at night, when I was tired of going through boxes. And I learned something interesting: the articles found in the newspapers and magazines of the 1980s and 1990s are a lot more useful than what you see these days. There were plenty of solid, informational articles, as opposed to the tidal wave of celebrity worship and high-priced decorating ideas seen in recent years. No wonder newspapers are dropping like flies these days.
