I love witnessing “lightbulb” moments in homeschooling parents. It happened again recently to a mom who returned her child to school after trying homeschooling a few years ago. She has started homeschooling again, and wrote the following note to me.
I’m sharing it with her permission, and with her child’s name removed. Her struggles with homeschooling (and why she decided to send her child to school) are common, and she describes her new understanding beautifully!
I think the first go around with homeschool two years ago wasn’t with xxx but with me and my “schoolie mindset”. I thought I had to schedule xxx’s day to make sure he was learning something. I had us so scheduled, and things divided into “educational” and “not educational” that even the educational stuff that xxx once liked became “school”. I’d ask him if he wanted to watch Discovery Channel with me and he would be like, “isn’t that science? I just did that.”
So right now, I am thrilled to say that at this moment in time we are happily deschooling and may do so for several months to come. We have a lot of road blocks that traditional created so getting through the “mind junk” is goal #1.
I am starting to pull back and when I do I see that xxx is really learning by doing the things he loves. . . .
It’s a process and a struggle to understand how homeschooling can be different from school. Her big breakthrough was when she realized that schoolishness was making him not want to learn anything extra because he’d already studied that subject. I hope her experience encourages you!
