What if we have it all backwards?
If we’ve met, you know I’m notorious for making things harder than they have to be. If there’s an easy way and a hard way, I’ll take the hard way. All of them. It’s not intentional. I eventually choose the better path; I’m just the type of person who has to try all the hard paths before I get there.
I think a lot of us who home educate have similar tendencies. We started educating our children because we knew there was a better option than public schools. Whether we thought we could make it more rigorous, more fun, more supportive, more adventurous, or any other goal, we all believed we could do better. And every one of us have to muscle our way through some hard learnings along the way. And then we have to do it again. And again. And again. And one more time for good measure.
But I think many of us have it backward.
The last few weeks have been rough. I got sick. My son got sick — twice. My wife had to travel for work. We lost our routine. We tried to get back into it, but we had false start after false start. For days we didn’t leave the house, and then suddenly it felt like we couldn’t find time to sit and work. Before I knew it, our time together was feeling flat.
Every day was groundhog’s day. I woke up optimistically, looking forward to a new day. I told myself today was going to be better. By breakfast I was yelling at the kids, for reasons that would normally never bother me. Maybe my daughter was slow eating, or they were bickering. It wasn’t about them; the problem was clearly me.
And every day, before we could even get into a lesson, my son was fidgeting and moving. I was pulling my hair out. Then the same old stories started coming up. “He’s not trying.” “I’m not teaching well.” “What am I doing wrong?” By the end of the lesson, he learned nothing, and I felt anemic. Two weeks of that, and I was starting to panic.
Oh yeah, and we made no progress on the plane. Not one rivet, bolt, or cleco. Nada.
What the hell?
Look, homeschooling is really powerful when it works. It’s truly wonderful. I have so much freedom to create his education for him. I can teach lessons he’s interested in, and skip lessons he’s not. I can create my own curriculum for science, history, math. Imagine a way school is suboptimal, and homeschooling can be the answer. My biggest downside is the immense pressure I feel to “get it right.”
But what if the answer is not to teach? What if there isn’t anything to get right? What if the best way to homeschool is to completely break free from the idea of school at all? To stop thinking we need to guide our children to learn things because we know better than them. Stop trying to instill knowledge and wisdom into their heads. Stop trying to make them listen to us and instead start earning the trust that makes us deserve to be listened to. I can hear you unschoolers saying, “I told you so.”
I’ve still got misgivings about it, by the way.
But something cool happened this week. Instead of trying to make up for lost time, we decided to focus on the plane. School fell into the free spaces, instead of the other way around.
The elevator is most of the way built. It has been for a few weeks, and we’re waiting until it’s polished to finish the last few pieces. I have been spending nights and weekends in dirty work clothes, breathing through a respirator while I hold a circular polisher against the sheet metal. For hours I’m in a Zen state, just sheet metal and me. Then the batteries run out, and I come inside looking like a chimney sweep, with black polish around my eyes and coating my hands. It’s hard, dirty work, but man does it look good. After a few hours on that section, I can see myself in it, like a mirror. I’m so excited to see it all together.
Since I’m holding up the elevator, we skipped ahead to the wings. First it starts with a spar: a single piece of solid metal that holds everything together. That spar is huge, like 12 feet long. It’s heavy. It’s the spine of the plane, and everything connects to it. To that, we’ve been attaching nose and rear ribs, bent pieces of aluminum that make the shape of the wing. In 2 hours a day, we’ve placed hundreds of clecos, pulled hundreds of rivets, tightened bolts, drilled holes, and pieced together pieces of metal into wings.
There’s something surreal about seeing him focus on the smallest piece of metal and knowing this is the gateway to the endless skies.
And here’s the thing: while my boy couldn’t sit still at all for two weeks, with a rivet gun in his hand he’s in the zone. For 45 minutes to an hour, his attention is held by these small pieces of metal, 3/32” diameter. With every rivet pulled, we can see more of the wings coming together. He can see his work, and he’s getting excited about it. When those 45 minutes are up, he grabs his BB gun and spends 15 minutes in complete concentration. He looks down the iron sight, pulls the trigger, sees his BB tear through a playing card, and does it again. He’s not losing focus, or attention, or motivation. With every minute spent in the garage and outside, he’s more alive.
And it bleeds over into those school lessons. He’s excited to show me the notes he took on his science video. He’s playing with numbers and patterns in math. He’s reading Mythos and pointing out what he notices about the stories: what the characters remind him of and how the stories interweave into a whole world. He’s reading The Odyssey in the original Greek with his Greek tutor.
Which is why I think we have it all backwards.
That’s not to say I’m giving up on the idea of a deep, genius level education. I’m not. I still believe in trying to help my son find his own genius, and giving him the tools to cultivate it. But we all have been taught the 10,000 hour rule. We’ve been taught grit and determination and the marshmallow test. For years I’ve believed in all of that. And yet, there’s another model to mastery.
Fun.
Building the airplane this week earned my son’s trust. It gave our relationship a refresh. We both had so much fun. We turned Metallica’s greatest hits on as loud as possible and we worked. And we saw what our work was accomplishing. And as we did all that, my son grew in every other area I cared about. He calmed his nervous system. He made connections to work that he didn’t previously. He found personal joy and fun in it.
Best of all, I didn’t force any of that. I just found a way to have fun with him.
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What do you want to build?
Latham Turner·Jan 17
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Latham, I loved all of this, the writing, the central question, the frustrated parenting (been there, am there), the stand for fun, etc.
And this brilliance: “There’s something surreal about seeing him focus on the smallest piece of metal and knowing this is the gateway to the endless skies.”
Way to go, pal. I honor you and all that you are.
I was so pleased when you state that the solution is play. Frontwards or backwards, traditional schooling or unschooling, the pleasure is that we don't need to choose. Play as a methodology, and do what is called for in each experience. Perhaps an interesting factor/game is, 'How many different ways can you play?'