It's that time of year, the one when you really just want to sit around and watch cartoons all day and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until your face is sticky. That time when homeschooling feels a bit like it just might not be working the way it's expected to. And then maybe all those thoughts are just leftover vestiges of being in school. Because now is the time of year when the final grade is about to happen and things are due and you are desperately trying to make sure that you can move on to the next level of learning and not have to spend another year repeating things that weren't so interesting in the first place.
Personally, I was a straight A student, with B's and C's not showing up until I was in college and graduate school. So I have quite the history of expecting myself to have things done in a year's time. What a crazy thing to think about, as if life really works that way. Imagine if you thought that you should have all the ins and outs of home keeping figured out in a year. Or if you thought that your relationships were failures because they didn't progress as expected within a year. Put in that context, the idea that some of the things that I'm trying to teach my daughter aren't as far long as I had hoped don't seem so tragic after all.
It's difficult to get out of this frame of thought that the end of the school year means that things should be completed, the books closed and that we should move on to new things. But the truth is that we are constantly moving on to new things even when what we've started isn't completed or going as well as hoped. We are constantly moving towards who God has created us to be. We don't have to close the book, we just have to keep on writing new chapters and living new adventures.
I really like making bread. It's fun to get your hands dirty, but I understand that yeast is a scary thing for people who don't have experience with it. Somehow, I started using it when I was young and too immature to understand the fear that comes along with wasting time, money and energy. I had time and energy in abundance. My first real forte into baking was in the 7 th grade. I must have cooked before then because I choose to see which flour rose the highest using a cinnamon roll recipe. I made a lot of cinnamon rolls that year and when I turned in my report, there were questions asked of me that I had no idea what she meant. Questions about the weather and the heat of the oven. Things that I didn't know could make a difference in the baking of bread. Lots has happened since that first memorable baking. Today, I invited a friend over to make bread. I was kind of concerned about the strength of the yeast, because we bought a huge stash of it last year someti
Keep thinking positively, you know your stuff. Shoot, you have more education than most teachers do.
ReplyDeleteWhen I said yes to homeschooling, it never occurred to me that my kid might be something other than a "let's do our lessons and find out our grade for the day" type of person. But she is almost the polar opposite of that kind of person. Very hands on, not interested in grades or status updates, she's into the relationship more than the final result.
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