Reality Bites
Or welcome to August, dear students and educators!
I love summer. Unapologetically. Even though it makes me sweat, never glow. There is just such joy about throwing out most rhythms and requirements of the regular school year and cutting loose, spending whole days at playgrounds, the splash pad, and the zoo. Indeed, considering how many times we’ve visited the Cleveland Zoo this summer alone, the guerillas and the kangaroos may just know us by name now—or at least recognize our dulcet tones whenever we approach their habitat yet again.
But, as Mary Poppins was fond of saying, "All good things come to an end, sometime” (and by the way, my nine-year-old read through P.L. Travers’s entire series this summer and loved it!). August is here.
On Tuesday, our new homeschool year will begin. We ride at dawn.
Okay, not really. We like to sleep in and have a slow breakfast in pajamas. I am thinking of making a French toast casserole (like this one but using chocolate chip brioche—for self-explanatory reasons) with homemade whipped cream and strawberries to top it off.
The methodology is distinctly Pavlovian: I want to start this school year off on the right note for us, and if we associate school with delicious food (carbs! chocolate! whipped cream!), everyone will somehow be much happier about it. Including me.
Because of my experience with education at the collegiate and graduate level at one extreme and homeschooling littles at the other, I routinely get asked for advice this time of year. To be honest, it always makes me feel uncomfortable, perhaps because I firmly believe that homeschooling is a family affair. This means that you really need to figure out as a family what works for you and for your children. Advice from others will only take you so far—and might not work for you anyway.
In particular, whenever anyone asks me about curriculum recommendations, I get itchy all over. Thinking of homeschooling as mainly curriculum choices is rather limiting. Homeschooling is what you make it to be, so why get bogged down by what someone else through a comprehensive curriculum-in-a-box tells you it should be?
If you can’t tell, we’re verging on unschooling here (wrote about it last year).
That said, I’m going to hazard below a few practical tips for the new school year for both college kids and homeschoolers—and for the adults who are educating said kids (at all stages of education. But if you want excellent (and wide range) of insights from other homeschooling moms, check out
—oh, and please tag anyone I missed (and my apologies for doing so)!Tips for the new school year: For College and University Professors
Your office needs a designated snack drawer, where you could put some non-perishables for those days when you’re teaching and running from meeting to meeting, and then it’s suddenly 4:00pm, and you realize that you never had lunch—and maybe not breakfast either. I used to keep a jar of peanut butter and/or a jar of Nutella in my office for this purpose. Some packets of instant oatmeal, if you want to be healthier. Some nuts for protein, and maybe a few granola bars.
Have you heard that joke (or seen the meme) about college professors in August vs. May? August is optimistic. You say YES to all the things. Then later in the academic year, as all the deadlines converge, naturally falling during the exam period when you also must grade approximately 300 essay exams in 48 hours to get grades in on time… well, you have strong words to relay to your overly optimistic August self.
Anyway, it is a really good idea to plan out your year in advance right now: What conferences will you go to? What research and writing do you plan to do? When will it all fit in, allowing you time not only to teach and serve on gazillion committees—but also be present for your family, church, friends, etc.?
Tips for the new school year: For College and Graduate Students
Time management is key—it will be your secret superpower, if you only let it. The best advice I’ve seen comes from Lysa TerKeurst’s book The Best Yes. Based on her advice, here’s the exercise I used to do with my college and graduate students on the first day of class:
We all start with 168 hours in every week (24 hours per day times 7 days in a week). But this includes time spent sleeping, so subtract it (e.g., if you aim for 7 hours a night, subtract 49 from 168 — you are left with 119 hours.
Okay, now subtract the hours for your classes and other required campus activities, including commuting to campus. Let’s just say, for math’s sake, that’s 19 hours. You’re down to 100 hours.
Now, figure out how many hours per week you will need to dedicate to class assignments. The general recommendation for undergraduates is 2-3 hours of study per 1 hour of class time. So, if you’re taking 15 credits this semester, you should be spending up to 45 hours per week on study. You’re down to 55 hours.
You do need time for household tasks: laundry, food shopping and prep (plus time spent eating this food), paying bills, etc. This may average to, say, 2 hours per day, with extra time for the shopping day, so we’ll say 15 hours. You’re down to 40 hours.
One more thing. You do need a Sabbath. Taking off one day per week entirely or mostly off—to go to church, spend time with friends or family, to recharge—is important. But this does mean that this will take out maybe another 15 hours (most of your waking hours on Sunday. You’re down to 25.
So, if you have to work part-time, you might be able to swing up to 20 hours per week—you really should leave some margin in this calculus, especially since we didn’t even include in the above calculations such ordinary activities as showering, exercise, entertainment (okay, you’re a student, there’s no time for that), and margin for the points in the semester when a lot of things are due all at once.
Tips for the new school year: For Homeschool Parents
Choose joy! I know this sounds like something cheesy on a plaque at Hobby Lobby, but it’s true (and good and beautiful). It’s important. What do you want your kids to remember from their childhood and time homeschooling? So, how will you cultivate delight in learning and in relationships in your home? This is a question that you will have to answer, based on your knowledge of these image-bearers you’re educating. But also, this means that you must take care of yourself—so you will be rested enough to educate them!
I know it’s become popular in deconstruction memoirs of former homeschoolers to complain about all the household work that their parents made them do and counted as school. But hear me out. You wouldn’t believe just how many college students I taught who had never done their own laundry or cooked their own meals before they arrived on campus. Some never learned to cook at that point either. Anyway, chores rule! And plenty of kids show an interest in cooking etc. beyond just helping out a little bit—so why not develop those skills further for them? My husband (who was homeschooled) cooked dinner for the entire family twice a week when he was growing up. This skill has served him well.
Your kids need friends, but so do you. You need conversations with other grown-ups. And, like all educators, you need time for professional development—reading, journaling or other writing, museum visits—which will only equip you further for the task of educating. So, join a co-op or a play group or start a moms’ book club! I’ve heard wonderful things, for instance, about Well Read Mom—basically a homeschooling co-op, but for the moms.
Tips for the new school year: For Homeschool Students
You could just get all of your structured schoolwork for the day done early, and then you have the rest of your waking hours to play. Think about it.
Look at the books and subjects your parents have selected for you, and then think: what else would you like to learn this year? Are there any particular books you’ve always wanted to read? You can, you know! You really do get some say here. My 5th-grader is starting Latin, because he wants to.
You really would like life and other people better if you still took a nap sometime around 3:00pm. Yes, I know, you’re five years old, and you know better (you know everything, you’ve told me just last night, as I was trying to put you to bed!), and you think naps are only for babies. But I wish you’d try them again.
Godspeed, friends! This will be wonderful! Or maybe, as
suggested, it might kill us all. One of these two, for sure.
WE RIDE AT DAWN.
Haha!