Every morning, round about the time that I begin to type little nothings like this, I hear the tiny ding of my inbox and click over to see what has come in. 6:38, every morning, delivered precisely on time, an email reviewing the newest and best curriculum available right now. One day it will be a couple of math curricula, the next day grammar, and certainly sometimes art and music. For any subject that you could ever desire to bring into the life of your child, there are reams and reams and reams of different and wonderful kinds of resources. Something about me, whether good or bad, requires that I always open the email. It comes in, and I immediately look at it and read the reviews and consider clicking to find out more. It has become one of those rituals that holds the day in its place. If the email were not to come in, who knows how I would cope with reality.
But, of course, clicking on the email bears its own consequences. I’m sure you can imagine what they might be. As one scholastic circle draws to a close and I turn my eyes forward to the next year, I am really grateful and happy to have lists and lists of stuff that has, apparently, worked for many others, and to be able to read the details of lessons and format and method. Whereas, when the new year has just begun, and I click, and then read, and discover that I chose one thing, but seemingly the entire educational world has moved to this other really cool and fool proof thing, well, it is a bad opportunity for panic and despair. I sit, stupefied, imaging the horror of my own life without this new thing, considering the pit of devastation that will definitely befall my children if I don’t change course in the middle of our school work and do something entirely and completely different.
Sometimes, if something looks so awesome that I did actually click for more information, I then spin off into the fabulous and never ending delight of googling homeschool blogs to read real life accounts of whatever is working or not working. I surf, transfixed, moving from one blog to the next, wandering away from the particulars of the actual curriculum, into that great sea of other people’s lives. Oo, I think, look, those people do table time and then circle time and then each child sculpts a copy of David whilst singing the complete bible in song and the children are so satisfied and intelligent they naturally calculate the weight of the sculpture, and it’s area, and then they sell it and give the money to the poor, and also to the church. Then I blink and cast my mind’s eye over what we did yesterday, which, because it was Monday, was nothing. It doesn’t matter that Monday is our day off and we are supposed to do nothing, I weep silent bitter tears of rage and jealousy anyway.
Obviously, this is no place to actually live. You have to make a choice and stick with it, at least until it’s obvious that it’s not working the way you planned and then, and only then, go looking for something new and different. I don’t throw away all my furniture and go buy new every time I walk into someone else’s beautiful house. I admire their lovely arrangements and then come home and continue to enjoy my own. I have painted and arranged my house to my own liking. I don’t want to live in anyone else’s house, not really. In the matter of house arranging, I am secure and untroubled. But when I comes to the education of my children, I turn into a chia seed pudding of tragic insecurity.
It’s one reason I have lately been so reticent to blog about homeschooling at all. I assume there are some people out there who might look like they have it together, but who, like me, really believe in the depths of themselves that they don’t. And I don’t relish the thought of someone looking at my life, at some functional and lovely description of “something that really worked” and then going back and rearranging their own lives thinking that what I did was a magic bullet. I live in the twilight of failure, not because I am actually always failing, but because I am unwilling to take any credit for true success. Anything good that happened I count as a fortuitous accident in the moment, but, as I gain distance and perspective, I understand to be the providential gift of God. I can only look backwards and see that God gave what was needed at a particular moment, and then be grateful and satisfied. The more this happens, this looking backwards, the less insecure I become. For real, this morning, I read about a perfect and wonderful grammar program. I enjoyed the description. I thought it was lovely. And then I went and read something else completely unrelated, because I am pretty happy with what we’re doing for grammar and I wouldn’t dream of switching for any reason right now.
Also, it is pretty amazing–which can only be discovered through painstaking toilsome time–to find, when once you finally picked something, and then didn’t give in to the temptation to switch, but stuck with it, and kept at it, and then, after a really long time of suffering, you saw that it worked. It was the kind of program that you hoped it would be. The child responded in the way you imagined he would. You were able to move through the material in the way you envisioned. That is a pretty charming and satisfying moment.
And on that note, I am going to go write spelling words on the board, because that is working, in a way that nothing else has yet worked.
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