Global School | Tara Edelschick

Our two weeks in Costa Rica comes to end this afternoon. We head back to the states (where we get to spend the night in the Syracuse airport!), and life as usual resumes.

If I had known in the fall that we were going overseas, I might have added this to our list of objectives:

Experience the world as a navigatable and hospitable place.
Understand that the glory of God is expressed in unique ways in different places and with different people.

Of course, if you have objectives like that, then you might feel like a great big loser. Because my kids never indicate that understand anything even close to this. If I bludgeon them over the head with ideas like this, and add ¨Don´t you think?¨they´ll give me the obligatory mmmhmmm, but the dead look in their eyes tells me they are far more interested in watching cartoons in Spanish than they are in reflecting on the glory of God as expressed in the rainforest or in loco soccer fans. Why do we bother with trips like this?

I had a similar moment of despair last summer when we were in China. Were they too young for this to be a meaningful trip? Would they remember anything more than riding in cars without seatbelts or all of the hours they spent in the hotel pool? When we came home from China and people asked Zach if he had a good time, he always replied, “Yeah, it was great. I got a wallet!”

Responding to one of my whiny emails about my unreflective, ungrateful kids, a friend wrote with the following:

Remember that memory is malleable. You have just begun with the memories for the boys. When they feel misunderstood at school, pull out that photo or re-tell the story of playing with the kids when there was the language barrier…Consider your Chinese experience as part of life’s textbook. It is even more interesting when it is read, not when it is written.

Yes! This was so helpful to me. The story is better when it is read than when it is written.

This philosophy led us to study China for the entire fall semester. We would shape the boys´ memories (and ours) by the stories we chose to read, to retell, to write. From science to service projects and history to health, we would learn more about the country we visited while we continued to reflect on our time there.

During the first three months, we worked on our scrapbooks, which was a master memory shaper. Afterall, I had control of which pictures to print! There is no picture of and no more talk of that stupid wallet. Now, if you ask them about China, they are likely to talk about the Forbidden City or the food.

Here´s some more advice from my friend, for those of you who, whether or not you homeschool, think in terms of ´teachable moments:´

The thing I have found most helpful with our family when we have engaged in a should-be-meaningful activity is to write up or speak about “what I learned.” We started with letters to the grandparents. “Honey, they’ll be glad to see the wallet. Tell the story of how you bought it.” So one postcard gets the wallet story. The second postcard will have a different one. Our kids have learned how to look back and remember something. (You can see more of her ideas here.)

Today on the plane, we will all write in our journals. Our prompts are: