Update

I've had to put homeschooling on hold this year.  I now have four children, and am seeking to build a better relationship with God.  I've also discovered I'm an empath.  You can start reading my new journey here.

The Hiding Place

I haven't written for a while mostly because my pregnancy was getting harder, and then I had my baby 4 weeks early.  Now he is over 2 months old and I've had some postpartum depression.  A friend recommended I read The Hiding Place.  I was reluctant at first because I already knew the story of the fleas and wasn't sure I wanted more detail about the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But now I am so glad I have read this amazing book. So many things in this book were lessons I needed right now.

The biggest lesson I took from it is "There are no 'ifs' in God's Kingdom."  This statement, found in a few places in the book, to me epitomizes trust in God and the bigger picture that only He sees.  This is something I have struggled with over the years.  I want to be in control of my life. I want to know everything will be okay. I want to lay out my days and know that nothing will interfere with my plans.  As a homeschooling mother of now four children this just isn't possible.  Some things can be planned but most things can't.  Most teaching comes at times when I didn't plan it.  Most outings are interrupted or postponed by something or another.  It can be hard to not get caught up in the 'ifs'.  If my kids had been spaced farther apart.... If my husband had gone to college after high school instead of working retail.... If we had made better choices financially when we were a young married couple and had less debt.... If so many things were different how would things be better or worse?

But when you see that there are no 'ifs' in God's Kingdom and instead of dwelling on 'ifs' you just have pure gratitude for everything God gives you, life is so much better.  Life is full and exciting!  Gratitude for both the good and the bad, and trust that even the bad can be turned into good by God were the lessons I was taught in such powerful ways from this book.  I think it will become an annual read for me.  So many things would be good to be reminded of, and maybe next time I will have a different take away message.  But this time right now I need to just trust God's plan for me and allow Him to work out the details in my life like only He knows how.

If miracles happened even in Nazi Germany, then why not for me right now?

The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism

I just finished this book and wow!  It blew me away.  The outcome for this story could have been so different if the mother had not been willing to break the mold of society, and more importantly allow her son to break the mold.

First off, every parent should read this book.  It is a wonderful story about standing up for your children and allowing them to pursue their dreams and passions.  Once you give them the tools the need to learn the things they are interested in learning any other subjects will fall into place and be brought along for the ride.

I think it speaks so clearly about the need to home school so that kids can have the freedom to follow their passions and learn the things they are interested in learning at the pace they want to learn it. There are much better ways to meet social needs than by segregating children by age, and forcing them to learn the exact same things together. Every child has different needs, different interests, different learning styles, and when you put them together with other people who have a common interest they will be social because they have a common ground to talk about.  Jake's mother was amazed by how little the difference in age mattered when her son was making friends with college students and professors at age eleven.  Having a common ground to talk about made it easier for him to be social than it ever was as a genius kid board to death in a regular elementary school classroom.
The difference between those who believe in compulsive education and those of us who do not is that we who do not believe in it can see that children just naturally love to learn things.  All they need are the tools and encouragement to learn what they have a passion for.  Ultimately what it all comes down to is what is "The Spark" that ignites a love of learning in your child?  Once you find that the possibilities are endless.

Favorite Quote from the book, "If God has a job for you, He's going to give you everything you need to get that job done."

Remedial classes and why my kids will never know they exist

While visiting with my sister and brother-in-law last week the conversation on home school was of course unavoidable (me being a home school newbie and them being 5 year veterans).  But somewhere in it all we ended up talking about a remedial reading class I was dumped into when I was in 7th grade and what I "learned" from it.

I was a slow reader, but I was smart.  I just took longer to get my work done than other students did.  So when I had to take a TIMED reading comprehension test of course I failed it because I could not complete enough of the test within the time limit.  I was in a K-12 charter school, and this remedial reading class was all the 7-12 grade students that had a problem with reading or English.  I was about the only one there that you couldn't just look at and see that they were a goof off.  No one was in the class for the whole year except for me.  We were tested monthly and if we passed we got to go to whatever class all our peers were in.  The other students would come and go as they had a problem and then tested well enough to go back to their regularly scheduled English/literature class.  I on the other hand never passed the test till the end of the year (when I had taken it so many times that I had the first half memorized and I was finally able to move on and get part of the second half done within the time limit), which saved me from being stuck in the same useless class another year.  I told the teacher that I knew all the answers from the first half because I took it so many times, and she brushed it off and said it didn't matter.  I still passed.

The teacher never really taught anything, she just assigned worksheets for our level of where we were at, and whatever problems we were working to overcome.  I learned NOTHING from this class....at least nothing it was designed to teach me.  Actually I learned a lot of things.  I learned that being slow at something is just as bad as being stupid.  I learned that I am even more stupid than the goof off kids who tested out of the class faster than I did.  I learned that sometimes cheating is the only way to get ahead especially if the system is flawed.  (I thought that was what I did by memorizing the answers to the first half of the test.) 

I still wonder why my parents didn't stand up for me and have me go to the regular class.  I became alienated from my friends I'd made in sixth grade, and never did gain the confidence to try to be their friends again.  That year they would talk about the cool things they were learning in their English class about Greek gods and myths, and I sure wasn't learning anything fun like that in my remedial reading class.  I never seemed to consider myself on the same level as them again.

So how did I do in future classes?  Pretty much the same as I did before being stuck in the remedial class.  I got my work done, I did a good job on it, but I took longer to do it than the other kids in my class.  I actually had to work at it. But it was okay that I took so long on my homework that I had no time for anything else because I had no friends to do anything else with anyway.

My kids will definitely be better off at home.  My reading struggles can be traced back to the stupid reader books I was forced to read in second grade. In sixth grade I was starting to feel confident and think I might be a good reader some day after all the struggles I'd had through elementary school, but the seventh grade remedial reading class reassured me I really was stupid after all.  The cure isn't found till somewhere in college when I was allowed to choose to read books that actually interested me.  There is something very powerful about letting someone choose their education.  Why does our society wait till adulthood when a hate for learning is already well established to allow people the freedom to choose their interests and educational goals?  It's a very counter productive philosophy. 

I still don't particularly enjoy reading and whenever I get a non-fiction book about a topic I need to learn about for one reason or another I find myself very impatient with the authors.  I never want to know their story or how they researched and learned about the topic.  I just want them to get to the point as fast as humanly possible without compromising the information I need to learn from them.  I am slowly getting over this, and learning to enjoy learning about new things and accepting the role that reading plays in my learning process.  But this is after years have already been wasted with ineffective learning and damaging self beliefs that have taken work to unlearn and overcome.  Now I find myself trying to make up for lost time at the same time as raising babies, toddlers, and now my first homeschooler.

I hope your road through compulsary education was better than mine was, but if not, lets work to give a better choice to our children.

Common Core

Yesterday my husband read something about Common Core and we were discussing it. I had already seen it, but as we talked about it I said some things that he really liked and wanted me to write it out for him.  So I thought why not write it out for everyone interested.

Most of the arguments about Common Core are irrelevant.  Whether or not it is a little better or worse for this or that kid is beside the point.  The point is that the public school system has never been good at anything more than preparing people for minimum wage jobs.  It has never prepared children for LIFE as good contributing members of a free society. The solution is not higher pay for the teachers, the solution is not more standards, the solution is not more tests, and it is not a new curriculum.  Why?  Because NONE of these things address the bigger picture that is fundamentally wrong with Public Education.  Public Education teaches children not to care about any one subject or passion by restricting their right to pursue it.  It teaches how to socialize (and not always a good way to socialize) and how to pass tests.  And that's just about it. 

 

 How many of us actually remember all the things we crammed into our heads to pass those multiple choice tests we took in high school?  If you do remember you are in the lucky minority who learned something despite and not because of the system.  Most likely you had one good teacher, or parent who inspired you and you took responsibility for your learning and you decided you wanted to learn whatever it is that you remember.  Until we abandon the flawed system for something that embraces giving children freedom to make their own educational choices, and consequently the responsibility that comes with it, we will NEVER find a completely successful reform.

Every child is different and inspired by different things.  And that is GREAT!  A successful community is built by many people who all have different talents and ways to benefit those around them.  You may be a parent whose child had a great experience with Common Core this year in school.  Great!  Does that mean every other child that had a terrible experience should be forced to fit into the same cookie cutter that your child miraculously did fit into?  As a parent with unique children who all have very different strengths and weaknesses (and I only have three) I say, "Not for me and My house!"

Why I chose to home school part 2

Another reason I chose to home school was because of the research and information I learned about Common Core.  First I will say that whether or not Common Core is good, it is power that belongs locally, not to the Federal government.  I as the parent of my children should have a say in what they are taught.  Common Core takes that power away from parents as far as public schools are concerned, and home schooling is my way of taking it back.  There shouldn't even be a Department of Education in the Federal Government, but I know it has been around for a while now.  That's a battle for the American people that has already been lost.

There are many examples of why and how Common Core is bad, and I leave it to the reader to do their own research and draw their own conclusions.  I am not here to debate the matter.  I researched and found it to be not good for my family.  I found that it is designed to raise a generation of followers.  People who will blindly obey the orders of the government without discerning whether they are right or wrong, just or unjust. People who think the government's job is to give them stuff and provide for their needs, rather than protect their right to get up and provide for their own needs.  And I want to raise Leaders.  People who can think for themselves, who know the difference between right and wrong, and are willing to lead out in standing for the right.

The problem with American education is not that there isn't enough standardized testing, it is that there is too much.  The problem isn't that we need more government involvement, it is that we already have way too much government involvement.  Read A Thomas Jefferson Education.  It will open your eyes if you let it.

Why I chose to home school part 1

First off, my sister, now the mother of seven, started home schooling five years ago, and has been progressively working on me about it ever since.  She started homeschooling when I had my first baby, so it has been somewhere in my mind all along.

I went to college to be an art teacher, and the further I got in the program, the less I liked the way things were going with American education.  I decided to change my major to visual art, and completed my degree online after having my first baby.  I decided my dream job was really to teach art lessons for home school kids.  I could do my own thing and only have to worry about the kids and their parents and not bureaucrats.

As I started having more children and they started getting older and closer to school age, my oldest was developmentally delayed and qualified for services in a public preschool program (half day five days a week with speech therapy twice).  After her first year she was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) however she was on the High Functioning (HFA) side of the spectrum.  I thought this meant I couldn't meet her needs through home school.  But Public School (PS) was a nightmare.  Every time there was an irregular day off she threw a fit wanting to go to school.  Then if there was a long enough break, (Summer, Christmas, Spring) when school started again she threw a fit not wanting to go back.  This was very hard on her, me, and her various bus drivers.  One day I just kept her home, because she refused to go and I felt like a terrible parent trying to force her to go away from home to socialize, just so she could have a good attendance record.  She did learn a lot over her two years of preschool, but next comes all day kindergarten, and I just don't think five year old children need to socialize all day five days a week.

I looked for other home school parents of children with HFA.  Many others like me, had bad experiences with sending their children to public school.  When they pulled their kids out and home schooled their HFA child thrived in the one on one teaching and more predictable environment their parents were able to create for them.  This gave me hope.  Yes, it will take more effort to make sure she has sufficient opportunities to socialize, but it will be worth it.  So I told my husband about the research I had done, and together we prayed about it, and felt right about home schooling.