Schooling When Tragedy Strikes

Our schooling very recently hasn’t looked like the schooling that we usually do. Although I got close to scrapping it all and saying that we had missed over a week of school, I realized that I just needed to embrace what we had done, and not what we hadn’t done.

Though we did sit down just a couple of times with our math books and language books, and we also worked on some read alouds from Farmer Boy, that was about all that we did that looked more like what we typically work on.

What Did We Do?

• We explored nature on five acres (half of which is wooded).  The kids, who live in a well manicured neighborhood, were beside themselves with the ability to go exploring so often.
• We learned that you need to look for ticks after you’ve been out exploring, and took turns checking each others hair.
• We found out that looking for ticks is actually important when we learned first hand all about deer ticks after removing one from my eight year old son.  (I would like to say that we learned not to freak out when someone is removing a deer tick from you, but that was not a lesson that was learned, apparently.)
• We worked on other first aid skills for some other bumps, cuts, and bruises that people seemed to pick up along the way.
• We all learned to watch for what the dog leaves behind in the yard, since we don’t have a dog of our own.  (This lesson wasn’t learned by everyone, apparently.  And then I learned about removal of such things from the bottom of a highly-treaded shoe.)
• We worked on money skills after each of the kids was told that they had some money to spend on something for having been such good kids for a week.  (Thanks to their Great-Papa.)
• The kids worked on living life without the TV, Internet, and their game systems (except their Nintendo DS, which they were so grateful to have).

But, those aren’t the most important things that we worked on or they learned.  I think that they most important things that they learned about during our week and a half away were probably as follows:

• They saw what the end of life process can look like.
• They watched as many of their family members stopped everything else going on in their lives to be able to stay round the clock (or as much as possible) to care for the family’s matriarch.  This included a hospital bed in the living room, lots of hushed voices, turnings every two hours (around the clock) when bed sores developed, and all of the other surprises of the week.
• They saw how a family comes together, with everyone helping where they can and nobody whining about it.
• They learned how hard it is to say a final goodbye.
• They saw all of the hard work that goes into funeral planning (and a dinner for a funeral when you’re from a family that always over does meals).
• They saw how much their Great Grandma was loved, especially when their own Mom (who cries at Hallmark commercials) and their Aunts (who are just about as emotional) all managed to get up and read selections they wrote at Grandma’s funeral.

Yes, I really thought that I should scrap that week of school.  “We haven’t worked on anything,” I told my husband who was states away.  But, then when I really looked at it, I remembered that not all schooling looks the same. And, even if this didn’t look like our typical week, they kids left with a lot of lessons that I never could have taught them otherwise.

As a matter of fact, I think I left with a whole lot of lessons too.  It was one of the hardest ten days of my life, but I wouldn’t have traded it all away.

Angie can be found writing at Many Little Blessings about faith, family, and household management.  She is also the founder of The Homeschool Classroom and Catholic Mothers Online.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged as: mortality, tragedy, written by Angie