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Looking for the “Hard Part”

September 7, 2004 by Leave a Comment

Occasionally, a student (or teacher, for that matter) may get stumped on a seemingly easy lesson. He (or “she”; education is not sexist) just cannot seem to understand the obvious. This is often a very bright student, which only adds to the frustration. What went wrong? Quite possibly, nothing.

What is usually the case is that this bright student is looking for the “hard part” of the lesson and can’t find it. The student has a preconceived idea that this particular subject matter will be difficult to understand. When a lesson is presented clearly and simply, many times the student can grasp the concept readily and move on. In this particular case, however, the lesson has seemed easy to the student, contrary to the reputation that preceded it. The student has understood the entire lesson as presented, but feels insecure in that knowledge simply because it seemed too easy. The student gets confused, claims to understand the various parts of the lesson when questioned, but is reluctant to do the assigned work. The student may even attempt to do the work, but do it incorrectly, further proving his own belief that the lesson is too complicated. What was presented simply in the lesson has become confused in the student’s mind when combined with the preconceived notion of difficulty.

Most often in our homeschool, this happened with math, but do not be surprised if it occurs with some students in other subjects as well. Most of us give math a bad reputation, often without realizing it. How many grandparents have been heard to say, “Oh, I never could figure out algebra.” Moms may casually state, “I think I can teach anything else at home, but when it comes to high school math, I’ll get someone else to do it!” Even peers and siblings may influence your student with, “I hate math. It’s too hard.” Therefore, it is not surprising to have some students think there should be a harder element to a lesson: they have been conditioned to expect difficulty, and they get confused when they do not find it.

If you find your student is stuck looking for the hard part, review the lesson’s parts with him and encourage him on his ability to understand the lesson well, and then help him to see that he can move forward. Use this as a confidence-building exercise: congratulate your student that he learned something faster and easier than he had expected to learn it! After a few similar incidents, your student may be able to catch himself “looking for the hard part,” be able to recognize his problem, and move on without the former frustration setting in. When he reaches that point, offer him your praise and congratulations. Your student has just made a gigantic leap forward in teaching himself, and that is its own reward!

Filed Under: Encouraging Your Student, Homeschool How-To's, Math

Your Children Will Not Always Be Like This

September 3, 2004 by 6 Comments

Attention — all parents of multiple children, especially those with babies and/or toddlers, and definitely all new homeschooling families — raise your right hand and repeat after me: “My children will not always be this age.” Repeat this exercise as often as needed to maintain your sanity. It can help to realize that today’s problems will not be tomorrow’s problems. (Do not even think about what problems might happen tomorrow — especially if today has been particularly problem-laden. You just do not need to go there right now.) Concentrate on the good things that your children do, focus on what they have accomplished, and hold tight to those thoughts. It may be the only thing that gets you through to the next fill-in-the-time-period-of-your-choice.

You are hip-deep in diapers and baby food jars, your house looks like a Fisher-Price obstacle course, and you can not step anywhere without crunching some formerly edible substance underfoot. You may also be pregnant. Or trying to become pregnant. (The wisdom of which you may currently be calling into question.) And just when are you supposed to find the time, patience, and gentle spirit to lovingly instruct your older children? Not in this lifetime, you scoff?

Again, raise your right hand and repeat the pre-stated oath. Babies will eventually detach themselves from Mom’s chest, toddlers will eventually learn to obey the Voice of Authority, and the preschoolers will eventually get the cereal poured into the bowl instead of directly onto the floor. Your job right now, Mom, is just to survive today with a little dignity intact. You might even get a lesson explained. Ok, half a lesson. But you have just started, and by next week things will go a little smoother. I promise. (But notice I did not quantify “a little.”) Remind yourself as often as needed that your children are growing up, they are maturing, they are learning. (Also remind yourself that anyone daring to criticize your homeschooling and/or housekeeping skills probably does not have the same number of children underfoot that you have, or they would know enough to keep quiet.)

Reminding your children of their accomplishments can help them to recognize their own growth and maturation process. They may see themselves as being unchanging centers of the universe with all others present only to dote on them. It can do wonders for children to learn to see the world through others’ eyes. Try using their outgrown clothing as a tool to show them how they have grown physically, and then ask them to “think backwards in their minds” to how they acted when those clothes were new and fit better. Do the same thing with older examples of their schoolwork and artwork to see how handwriting, spelling, grammar, or drawing may have improved. Point out how they have matured in their thinking, in their behavior, and in their learning. Praise them for the great progress they have made and help them to imagine what changes may come next. Help your children to set a realistic (start small) goal or two for themselves, whether personally or in their schoolwork. Rejoice together over their little accomplishments and celebrate big-time when major milestones have been conquered.

Your children will not always be this age. Yes, the problems will change as the children change, but you do not have to worry about tomorrow’s problems just yet. You can better deal with today’s difficulties by realizing that they will not continue forever. And you can put your hand down now.

Filed Under: Encouragement for Parents, Encouraging Your Student, Family Unity, Homeschool How-To's, Parenting, Preschoolers

Teach Your Students to Teach Themselves

September 1, 2004 by 1 Comment

Believe it or not, there are (so-called “successful”) students in the government system who do not know that a dictionary contains word meanings, word forms, and pronunciation guides. These students have no clue what an atlas is or how/why to use one; they are clueless at map reading. They would never guess that the lesson concepts are fully explained in the textbook — they assume that only the teachers’ books have the explanations in them. If someone does not tell them what to do, they cannot decide what to do on their own, and even then, they only do exactly what they have been told, and no more. They possess no “critical thinking skills.”

When a student can teach himself, there are no limits to what he can learn. When a student can teach himself, learning becomes a life-long endeavor. When a student can teach himself, you (as the teacher) are then freed up to attend more to younger students, household duties, or even (dare I say it?) spare time activities of your own choosing.

The biggest hurdles for any student learning to teach himself are:
1) How do I know what to do in this lesson? (reading & understanding directions)
2) Where should I look for more information? (research skills)
3) What should I do when I “get stuck”? (problem-solving skills)

So how, you are now asking, do you teach a student to teach himself? Refer to The Biblical Model of Discipleship: “Let them watch, let them help, help them do it, watch them do it, leave them doing it.” As you are teaching him to read, also point out each word of the directions on any workbook pages or math papers that he is doing as you read those directions aloud and then explain what the assigned task is. That will begin to make the connection for him that those words mean important things, too. We need to convey the concept that the words in storybooks are not the only words in life that count. The same thing can be done with the Sunday comics, captions for interesting photos in newspapers and magazines, and even the cooking instructions on convenience food packages. Gradually, the idea will be grasped that with reading ability comes the knack for finding the necessary words to read. (Newspapers, magazines, and the adult world in general can be overwhelming to a new reader: so many words and no clue for how to navigate through them.)

As the student gains reading ability, he will begin to be able to read those directions for himself. If he is still not able to make the transition from reading the directions to understanding the assignment, have him read the directions aloud to you. Then discuss the meaning of the sentences with him until the student understands how they are explaining what is expected of him.

Begin to slow down your response time in explaining the assignments, allowing the student plenty of time to think about what he is reading and process the information. Remember that this is a new task for your student, and like any new task, it takes time to learn.

With more complicated instructions, such as those found in upper lever math lessons, point out to the student that everything needed to understand the lesson is found in the book. The complete explanation is in the lesson (some details may have been covered in previous lessons). The most important concepts will be in bold print, italics, underlined, or set apart in a box to capture the student’s attention. Example problems should not be merely looked at (unless the student is especially gifted in math), but copied step-by-step into the student’s math notebook (noted with page and problem numbers), in an effort to understand what is being done and why. (We remember more of what we do, than of what we just see or hear.) All math problems should be written in a notebook and kept, so they can be referred back to when necessary for additional help — problems written on a chalkboard or whiteboard are lost forever once they have been erased. When a student encounters a math problem of a type that gave him difficulty before, he can then look back through his notebook to find the previous example. Studying its completed form will help the student see what step comes next for the current problem.

I have sometimes questioned my own performance as a homeschool educator — did I do a “good enough” job? I see things that my children “missed” and wonder why I did not press those lessons more. Then again, I realize that I learned as much as they did during our homeschool career, and they will learn more as they begin to homeschool their own children in a few years. My students did learn how to read and how to understand what they read. My students learned how to do research. My students learned how to solve problems, often coming up with unique ideas that I would not even have considered. My students have become young adults who will continue to learn for their entire lives, because they learned how to teach themselves.

Filed Under: Encouraging Your Student, Homeschool How-To's, Scheduling

Using Your Household Staff

August 25, 2004 by Leave a Comment

“She gets up before dawn to prepare breakfast for her household and plan the day’s work for her servant girls.” (Proverbs 31:15) I do not have a staff of servant girls (and I am rarely up before dawn!), but I do have household servants. So do you, although yours may differ slightly from mine. I have a crock-pot, a bread machine, a clothes washer and dryer, a dishwasher, etc. These make up my household staff. If I have a load of laundry in the washing machine, another load in the dryer (or on the clothesline), the dishwasher is running, and the crock-pot is crocking away, I know I can sit down for a few minutes Guilt-Free, because tasks are being taken care of for me! Clothing and dishes are being cleaned and food is being cooked, enabling “me” to be in several places at once.

I try to get “my staff” working as soon as possible each day, because then I can feel quite productive — even if I am having a rather “slow” day personally. I can sit down with my students to practice their reading or play a game, knowing that chores are getting done.

Back when my children were small, I used a cassette tape recorder to capture my voice as I read favorite storybooks to my toddler. Later, when Mommy just could not be there, that tape could be replayed — allowing Little One to spend time with Mommy, hearing those favorites over and over again, making the tape player another valued member of my helpful staff. Incidentally, my daughter got as much enjoyment from hearing her own reactions on the tape as from hearing me. I had also tried just reading stories into the tape recorder — without the child on my lap — but the result was undesirably flat and just no fun to listen to.

My children are also valuable members of my staff — Mom should never be working alone when all others are recreating! I enjoy free time as much as the next person does; I just seem to get less of it. Kids can fold towels, sort underwear, scrub potatoes, and do plenty of other simple jobs so that Mom can be freed up for higher-skill jobs. Many times I have agreed to make a costume or other special request for one of my children only after they agreed to take over specific Mommy-tasks in order to give me the time required. Barter is a great tool — use it to your advantage!

Many years have passed, but I still remember the shock on my friend’s face when her daughter wrote a paper for school about the hobbies her family members pursued. The daughter had listed Mom’s hobbies as cooking and cleaning. I knew that woman as being a very artsy person who loved craft projects, decorating, sewing, and scrounging through garage sales. We had great fun together going to those garage sales and parks with our children or at couples’ parties with our spouses. I knew she had many interests — why did her own daughter only see the cooking-and-cleaning side? Perhaps it was because Mom had never pointed out what leisure time activities she did enjoy. Perhaps a little job-trading activity would have helped to clarify the fact that some chores benefit the entire family and can therefore be accomplished by anyone in the family with the required skill. More than once I have accepted the offer of kid-prepared scrambled eggs for supper in return for mending something that child wanted to wear the next day.

We all need to re-examine how and why we do the things we do. Are perfectly folded towels really all that important once we close the linen closet door? Will my family notice (or even care) if the cake they eat after supper has been imperfectly frosted by the Junior Chef or will they just be grateful for the rare treat of dessert? How much better will I feel at the end of the day knowing we have clean underwear for tomorrow AND Little One got to snuggle on my lap through several storybooks? Making use of timesaving appliances and a little work-together time can also save me some sanity and let me get on to enjoying some Guilt-Free activities that I have previously only dreamed about.

Filed Under: Family Unity, Home Chores, Homeschool How-To's, Preschoolers

Teaching with Preschoolers Around… and Under… and on Top… and Beside

August 19, 2004 by Leave a Comment

“How can I find time to teach the older child when the toddler needs my constant attention?” That is The Big Question that prevents many families from beginning homeschooling — in my mind, it is probably even a bigger concern than What To Do About Socialization! It kept me from diving in for several years. I had known about homeschooling and known many homeschool families before our first child began school, but it was the dreaded Active Toddler who took center stage and made me fearful of my ability to juggle all the homeschooling responsibilities. Once my youngest was also in school, I had no more fear — for some reason, it finally looked do-able, and we finally began homeschooling.

If I had bothered to think things through better, I would have realized that I had many options for homeschooling around a toddler. For some unknown reason, at that point in time the homeschoolers we did know were not willing to share their techniques for getting through the daily grind. They seemed to think I would be better off inventing my own wheel than to adapt their prototypes to suit my needs. Therefore, I now willingly and openly share my trials, tribulations, successes, and failures for your benefit. Learn what you will.

Spend some time with Junior first, then teach the others when Junior gets bored and leaves to play on his own. Indulge the preschooler with his own set of “school supplies” — Laurie puzzles, workbooks of pre-writing skills, washable markers, etc. and allow him to “do school” along with his older siblings. Also provide safe, quiet toys nearby for when he gets bored with sitting still. Nevertheless, be encouraged: Junior will be learning HOW to sit still and be quiet and pay attention for those short periods when he does stay with you. He will also be learning how to entertain himself when he leaves the table. (Keep those “school toys” as a special treat to be used only during lesson times, otherwise they will lose their appeal.)

Use Baby’s naptime for working with the older children. “School” does not have to take place during the same set of hours each day. (see Every Day is a Learning Day) Lessons can even come in spurts — do one or two subjects in the morning, take a long lunch and play break, then do another subject in the afternoon. Teach the older children to work by themselves when they can, giving you more time to attend to Baby’s needs. Save especially-Mom-intensive subjects for Baby’s naptime.

Apply skill-level discretion to teaching tasks: does this need Mom’s personal attention, or is someone else capable of handling it? Older children may practice their reading skills by reading to the toddlers or by listening to beginning readers. A great-grandmother shared with me how she was raised in a large family where each older child was always responsible for a specifically assigned younger child. Child #1 cared for Child #3, Child #2 cared for Child #4, Child #3 cared for Child #5, and so on. That system removed the possibility of anyone “slipping through the cracks” — no one could claim, “I thought YOU were watching him.” A similar approach can be adapted for scheduling the homeschool lessons: student-works-alone time (perhaps for math), group lessons (maybe a family read-aloud book), read-to-the-toddler time (as reading skills reinforcement), help-the-kindergartner time, etc. Remember, the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else, so pairing up older and younger learners helps them both. If the lessons are scheduled so that Student #1 always spends the same time slot working with Student #3, and so on, all students will benefit, and Mom gets to be in more places at once through the added helping hands. The young ones will also learn to respect individual lesson times, knowing that their share of time is coming, too.

Now let’s all repeat the Guilt-Free Homeschooling motto: The “right” way to homeschool is the way that fits my family best — our schedule, our needs, our desires, our abilities. You are free to adapt your schedule to whatever fits your family’s needs. If you need extra time to tend to Little One, you may take it. If you need to wait until 1:30 to begin lessons each day, who cares? If you need to breastfeed while teaching math class, go for it! (Let’s see them try that one in government school!)

Filed Under: Homeschool How-To's, Preschoolers, Scheduling

What Didn’t Work for Today Can Be Changed for Tomorrow

August 13, 2004 by 2 Comments

Some of you are beginning your first attempts at homeschooling right now. My first word of advice is: breathe. Homeschooling actually gets easier with each passing year. (Those of you who are approaching your second September of homeschooling are beginning to realize that you have done this before, and suddenly it does not seem quite so awkward; you’re a veteran now who has a better idea of what to do.) Remind yourself that even though you have never homeschooled your children before, your children have never been homeschooled before either — and you can learn this new thing together. Look upon homeschooling as an adventure that all members of your family undertake as a team. All members have something to contribute, large or small, and it would not be the same without the participation of all.

The primary blessing of homeschooling is being able to adapt all your plans to your family’s needs. If today’s lessons just did not get through to your students, you are free to change your lessons in an attempt to find what will penetrate. Government schools either do not have that freedom or cannot afford the time to exercise the freedom to explore lessons in multiple ways.

We had days when Grandpa needed the assistance (or maybe just wanted the company) of a small boy on a carpentry project. Grandpa became a valuable member of our teaching team on those days. One time he took my son along on a trip to another city to pick up supplies, and they stopped at a large hydroelectric dam on the way home just to enjoy the view. As they arrived, a large group was beginning an organized tour of the inner workings of the dam, and the tour guide offered to include Grandpa and my son on the tour. Grandpa was just as thrilled as my son was at the opportunity of a spontaneous bonus on their field trip! Those are the “adaptable moments” of homeschooling that are just not available in other situations.

“What didn’t work for today can be changed for tomorrow” became our motto for our first year of homeschooling. “Adapt daily” was the battle cry of encouragement I repeated over and over to myself as I struggled to find my way through the curriculum maze. I gradually realized that the “right way” to homeschool would be the way that was comfortable and relaxed and best fit my family’s lifestyle. I could not take this business too seriously; it had to be enjoyable, or we would never survive. I was sure that even my feeble homeschooling attempts would far exceed the twaddle offered by government schools, so I was encouraged that at least I could do no worse.

I had my share of moments (days/weeks?) when I really questioned my ability to educate my children sufficiently. Were we truly doing the right thing? When I would stop listening to the pity party going on in my head and listen instead to the voice of God encouraging my heart, I would hear His gentle reminders of how He had answered our prayers for “the right teacher” for that year of school. He had led us into homeschooling, away from the government institution’s one-size-fits-all approach. Those moments of reflection would give me the confidence to try again, one more time, with yet another method, until finally the lessons would “click.”

Do not be discouraged if today’s lessons did not seem to accomplish anything. You may feel that you spent the entire day talking to the walls, because your students just did not seem to understand any of it. However, you now know what does not work! Remember Thomas Edison’s persistence in trying to invent a light bulb: he tried over 600 filaments that did not work before he hit upon the one method that did work. If Edison had given up after one or two tries, our lives would be incredibly different today. Instead, Edison (whose teacher had kicked him out of school and called him unteachable) considered each “failure” to be a positive experience — he now knew one more thing that did not work, and eventually he would find something that would work.

If today’s plan accomplished nothing, change your approach for tomorrow. If you are really desperate, perhaps you may want to change the curriculum in a subject or two: when the student and teacher are both always on the verge of tears, it is never the fault of either of them; it is the fault of the curriculum. The curriculum itself is probably not bad, just not suited to the needs of you and your students. Talk to other homeschoolers to find out what they have liked or disliked and why. You can glean valuable ideas from other families, even when their children are not the same ages or grade levels as your children. Start fresh with a new vision or a different approach. There are times when we all benefit from a day off — have a video day with movies that fit in with your lessons. Take a field trip, build a model, do some experiments, play games, find a new way to look at the lesson. Be flexible — it is the only way to achieve Guilt-Free Homeschooling.

Filed Under: Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschool v. Public School, Homeschooling as a Lifestyle

Kids Will Be Kids

July 27, 2004 by Leave a Comment

You have heard them, maybe you have even used them — those alphabet-soup-acronym-labels that get tossed around so flippantly today. They have become the easy excuse for not remembering things, for not paying attention when we should, or for feeling restless and wanting to change our circumstances. “I can’t remember that; I have XYZQ.” “She won’t listen; she’s JKLM.” “He can’t sit still; he must be MNOP.” We seem to find it much easier to excuse poor behavior than to correct it. This is not to say that such physiological conditions do not exist, but to toss their names about carelessly demeans any person truly suffering from them.

My role as an educator requires that I do just that — educate. If I stop the process before it is completed, I have not done my job. Therefore, I will persist in teaching phonics to ensure that my student can read any word put before him. I will teach reading and comprehension to ensure that my student understands whatever she is reading. I will teach math to ensure that my student can perform the various calculations needed throughout life for wise purchases, financial planning, and home improvement projects. I will teach geography, history, and science to ensure that my student can comprehend the importance of news items and current events. I will teach social grace and manners to ensure that my student can converse with confidence and ease in any situation. I will pursue this teaching adventure by trying every tactic necessary to impart understanding to each of my students. I will not throw up my hands in despair when the subject gets tough or my student balks at its difficulty. When my student is confused by a lesson, I will not assume it is the student’s fault. I will instead analyze the material being presented in light of my student’s personality and learning ability and see if there is another way to teach the concept that my student would understand better.

Homeschool dad and speaker Gregg Harris (father of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl author Joshua Harris) profoundly states, “A teacher’s idea of a good little boy — is a little girl.” What an impact that one statement had on me as a prospective homeschooler! At the time I heard Gregg speak, my young son was spending government school Kindergarten on the “Time Out” chair for committing the socially unacceptable sin of being an energetic little boy. Our society as a whole has forgotten that God created our males to be warriors and protectors of their nurturing female counterparts. It is not within their natural make-up to sit quietly, watching life pass by. For me to expect my son to forsake his favorite game of sword fighting would be for me to expect him to deny his God-given warrior instincts. It would also be doing him a disservice to stick a negative label on his natural tendencies to be a “Defender of the Home.”

I attended a seminar once on memorizing scripture. I did not memorize much scripture (ok, any), but I did learn a valuable lesson: before you can find something in your memory, you have to have put it into your memory. Most (all?) of us have trouble remembering things from time to time — it is natural. As life becomes more and more fast-paced, we each have more and more things to deal with and to remember. If the necessary details are not put into our memories, we have no way of pulling them out again. Back when we had only one car, no children, a tiny house, and a slower pace of life, I had no trouble remembering all the things I needed from the grocery store. Now we have a driveway full of vehicles, a larger home, one adult-child leaping out of the nest, another near-adult-child climbing to the edge of the nest and admiring the view, and a website to tend. I often walk to the front of the refrigerator to write something on my grocery list, but instead open the door and wonder why. The only syndrome I am suffering from is the same thing we all suffer from: a busy life.

Right now I could click my computer mouse and instantly be chatting with my dear friends on the other side of the planet in Uganda, East Africa. I can click a few more times and read the reactions of homeschool moms reading my website across the US, Canada, and northern Europe. At no other time in the history of civilization have these things been possible. I remember being very excited as a little girl any time the party-line telephone rang, but having my mother say the call would not be for us… if someone was going to call us, we would know about it. Times have changed. We have so much more to deal with on a daily basis. Back in the days of the party-line phone, my family owned one radio and no television. My home right now has multiple radios, televisions, and computers. Times have changed. We must adapt to survive. Listening means paying attention to what we hear and filing the important details away in memory for later retrieval, or writing them on the planning calendar for future reference.

The point I am so far successfully avoiding is this: Please do not assume that your child’s behavior is the result one of the many alphabet-soup-labels being bandied about so freely today. Your child is, after all, a child — an energetic little person trying desperately to fit into a busy world. Our children emulate us in ways we rarely notice: playtime today is more likely to include “busy” activities, rather than slow, carefree relaxation. A child who does not enjoy sitting still for school time may not be overly-active as much as he may just have a few wiggles to release before he can efficiently listen to a lesson. We have also allowed television to teach our children to want to be constantly entertained without personal involvement, to expect all of life’s problems to be solved in 27 minutes, and to change their focus of thought every 10 seconds.

A child who seems not to be paying attention to you may be deeply involved in thoughts of his own devising: planning out a new invention, playing a game in his mind, or contemplating the details of the last story he read/heard/watched on video. I have suggested to my own family members that we speak a person’s name as the first word of a sentence, in order to break gently into those busy thought-patterns and gain the needed attention, thereby avoiding the need to repeat statements.

Many parents become concerned when a child can sit still for extended periods of time for an activity of their own choosing, such as a video game, but not otherwise, such as for schoolwork. Stop for a moment to consider this from an adult perspective: I find myself much more likely to sit with rapt attention when I am enjoying the activity and fidget when I would rather be anywhere else doing anything else. Perhaps a lack of attention during school time simply indicates that the child is not interested in this material or in the way this particular lesson is being presented.

When my own son showed these signs, I knew something drastic had to be changed in order to keep his attention long enough to impart the lessons. We changed reading material to include his interests, teaching comprehension by listing questions for magazine articles covering paintball, military body-armor, and new automotive innovations. It did mean more work for me, reading each article myself and making up questions to ask about the information, but I decided the result would be well worth my effort… and it was. My son’s involvement increased dramatically, along with his reading speed, when he was excited about the subject matter. We also had some unique bonding time as I was able to share his interests in scientific breakthroughs. We took trips to the local library to look for magazines; he chose the articles he was interested in, and I read them first to write the questions for him to answer (nothing fancy, just short-answer and fill-in-the-blanks). We also subscribed to Popular Science for its reports on the latest developments in technology. My son still reads those and delights in pointing out which inventions the magazine predicted would be out in 3-5 years, but the US military is already using, only months after publication.

Another tactic we effectively used was competition in math assignments. Plodding along at his own pace, my son could barely focus enough to do a dozen problems in a day; his time was just too precious to “waste” on math. When he reached a level of math higher than I myself had learned, I felt my responsibility was to learn it myself first, then teach it to him. With Mom as a classmate, he got faster, trying to get ahead of me — knowing that I would have to hurry to keep up. (Unfortunately for him, math is my specialty.) That first year of Saxon Advanced Math went by fairly easily, but he was not looking forward to another year to finish the book’s 2-year-plan. Then my daughter began looking into 4-year colleges for transfer from our local community college and found she could pick up a needed semester of pre-calculus during the summer session. That class was a duplicate of my son’s math class at home, and she convinced him to take the class with her — completing his next year of homeschool math, giving her a companion, and fulfilling their dream of someday taking a college class together.

One horribly-hectic month later they were done: 5 hours of college credit (1 semester) crammed into 16 class days. Class time took 5 hours a day, 4 days per week, and homework took everything else! For 4 weeks they ate with one hand while doing math problems with the other. But they loved it!!! The super-fast pace and the added competition of other students was something my son really thrived on. (However, it was a very small class — only 6 students — and very informal, not at all like government school high school would have been.) It may be that your bored student needs a bigger challenge. If you do not have access to a nearby community college (or if your student is not yet at high school level), try seeking out other homeschoolers who may be willing to do a class together, adding a competitive edge and camaraderie to a boring subject.

I remember an old movie with Walter Brennan as a mule-driver (Skudda-hoo, Skudda-hay, or some such silly name). At one point in the movie, a young punk is trying to move a mule team, and they refuse to budge. As I recall, he wants to get the mules out of his way so that he can use his truck to pull a large fallen tree out of the road. Anyway, the line that has stuck with me for years is when Walter Brennan says, “Mules got pride! They won’t move ’cause they know they’re not needed. You give them a job to do, and they’ll do it!” So Young Punk backs out of Walter’s way, while Walter hitches up the mules to the tree trunk — which they proceed to remove with great effort — and great personal satisfaction. Moral of this story: be sure you are giving enough of a challenge. Perhaps your student is reluctant to do a lesson because it is just too easy; skip on to the harder stuff and see how he responds.

Skipping easier lessons to substitute harder ones, skipping rope (or any physical exertion) before lessons, approaching subjects from entirely new directions, all can help to put a fresh spin on subjects considered “taboo” by your students. Give the wiggles an outlet or channel that energy into your lessons. Explore all these avenues before you jump to conclusions and are tempted to label a student as having some physiological malady. Kids are kids, children are children, and if we expect them to be children, we will all be a lot happier with the outcome.

Filed Under: Behavior, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschool v. Public School, Math, Parenting, Reading, Roadblocks to Learning
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