A Lesson on Homeschooling from Sally

At the end of last week, I posed a question to our wonderful Homeschool Classroom community.  I was very honest and shared my confusion and heartache over our homeschooling not looking like I always imagined it would.  Well, believe me — I got some wonderful comments.  I was so moved.  So moved, in fact, that I shifted posts around so that this week I could publish a few of the comments as posts instead (after getting permission from each commenter).  It seemed to me that a lot of us could use some encouragement.

This week won’t look like a normal week on The Homeschool Classroom.  However, I hope that this week of posts encourages you in your homeschooling or makes you look at it in a different way.

Today’s post/comment is by Sally from With Eager Hands

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Oh, my sweet sister! Thank you so much for pouring yourself out like this — letting us know you are real….but I know that it was hard to share, so thank you.

This homeschooling bit a hard, girl, HARD! Know you are not alone in your struggles to create the kind of homeschool you want.

I have to share my perceived Fail in homeschool. Until a month ago, I blogged at Adventures in Living and Learning and you’ll see how much I tried to provide a Waldorf education to my children. Ahem.

Friend, I have full notebooks, FULL notebooks of the stories I would tell, the rhythm of our week, all the earthy projects we would do, and the home would be a lovely, quiet, TV-free space of tingly bells and …blah blah blahity blah.

Yeah, right. Four years I tried this gig. Mm-hmm, that’s right, four years basically squandered because of my all my pie-in-the-sky planning and dreaming and money-spending on nice sketch books and esoteric texts and yadda yadda yadda. I was trying to create something that, however beautiful and twinkly it looked on other Waldorfy blogs, didn’t exist in my world.

We don’t have TV, but rhythm? Ha!

Keeping the color and grain and scent of the day? Are you nuts?

Norse myths in 4th grade? Why, for Pete’s sake?

I love so much of Steiner/Waldorf pedagogy, and all the lovely (albeit somewhat superficial) stuff that comes along with it – simple toys of natural materials, wet-on-wet watercolor painting, weekly bread-baking, storytelling, beeswax modeling, songs as markers for transitions.

I love the idea of block scheduling, where you teach one subject for a month and all other subjects fall into the shadows. Where you delay reading until they are ready. Where you tell stories instead of read everything. Where you have Baking Day, Painting Day, Washing Day. Where all you work is in beautiful Main Lesson Books, and the books are unlined sketch pads (I never braved buying the expensive Main Lesson Books) and the writing and drawings were with beeswax crayons.

I have no less than 20 of those “beautiful” sketchbooks. In a closet 90% empty.

Not more than a handful of stories told. No Painting Day. Washboard stands in the corner, dry as a bone.

Four years later, my oldest daughter’s “Waldorf education” was a big, fat FAIL. As a matter of fact, because I planned, but had no execution, no follow-through, my oldest’s main learning came from just reading books. I have Stockmar paint that is waiting to be used, watercolor paper aging, beeswax for modeling that is getting dusty.

Why do I say all this? Because I wanted my homeschool to look a certain way, and for all my planning and desires, it didn’t come to fruition. But here is where the story is so sad to me – I was so bent on doing it the Waldorf way, to the exclusion of all else, NOTHING else was done.

Here I am today, slowly recovering from whatever delusion I was under. Charlotte Mason’s work called me from the beginning, and fits my oldest perfectly – remember how I said she read so much? I just stamped that calling out for the grooviness of Waldorf. We don’t do much of what I want to. We don’t do Artist Study or Composer Study. Our Nature Studies are incredibly hit and miss. There is very little group singing in our home (okay, none) or poetry recitation….but if you want the lineage of cats in the Warriors series, we have you covered!

I am a woman rambling over here — so sorry! I share all this to tell you that IT’S OKAY! Compare yourself to me and feel better.

For whatever you have done or haven’t done that you think shouldn’t have been done, or should have been done, take it to God. He knows our need, we only have to ask it. Clarity, peace, direction. But know this — you are absolutely NOT alone. And feel confident that however like School your homeschool feels to you, and however far that is from your vision, the FACT that you are WITH your children trumps everything. The fact that you are there to answer questions, offer help, go through the motions as you say.

You. Are. There. Traditional School At Home, or something totally oppposite, whatever you do, you are with your children and THAT my dear woman is critially important.

So take a lesson from Ole Sal here. Planning and dreaming are great. This method and that method are dandy. Follow-through is really key, but more important is that you are where you are, doing SOMETHING, and doing it WITH your children.

Dear one, I am praying with you for whatever it is you need to bring you around this bend.

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Thank you so much, Sally, for sharing your experiences with us.  What a wonderful encouragement!

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