Confessions of a Reluctant CC Mom {pt. 2}

On Wednesday, I began explaining how our family started the 2016-2017 year with our first foray into Classical Conversations. Today I lay out how and why we’ve stuck with it.

After our second year of CC, I was satisfied that we would be moving on. While I had made CC work for us, fitting the Memory Work into our learning lifestyle and putting the emphasis on those beautiful things we had come to love and enjoy about our homeschool, I was ready to get back to the business as usual rhythm we had established over more than a decade and a half of homeschooling.

God threw a mighty wrench in our plans by making it clear that we were to return to CC for a third year. And I’m not going to lie, it was a tough pill to swallow. I really couldn’t understand why we couldn’t go back to the simple, home-based learning that had carried our family through nearly two decades. Read-alouds. Historical fiction. Literature-based science. Living math. Yes, I had learned to sandwich CC into all of that, but it was work.  And I really wasn’t sure that it was worth it, to be honest. I mean, the kids were learning, they were thriving, we were part of a bigger network of friends, but… did we need it?

I started the year with a much better attitude than I expected, and sometime around late fall found that all that work didn’t feel quite so laborious. I had a rhythm in place, and I was clicking along. We were getting things done. It was working again, this CC/CM hybrid combo I had cobbled together with living books and other resources. Not only that, I had friends! Real, actual “hey, you all want to come over and have dinner?” friends that my whole family enjoyed. I dove into a life enriched by fellowship and purposed to enjoy the year God had in store for me.

If you can believe it, I still wasn’t sold. I was still convinced that this was our last year, primarily because of my inability to figure out how to work Phineas and his extreme special needs into our meeting day. Around Christmas, I told my husband that I was praying over options, and he agreed. Maybe, we said, our time in CC was actually, really, and truly done.

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know what came next. January happened, and my 6 year-old was terribly, terribly ill. February happened, and my mother passed away. Simon was still sick. Then February happened again, and we had record-breaking flooding.

It was our CC group that carried us through that patch. And it was that stretch of time that God used to show me that the thing that had brought us to CC in the first place was the thing that was keeping us there: community.

I’m going to be brutally honest and say that, as a long time homeschooler, I know for a fact that you can find 350 Classically-centered curricula on the market. It’s not CC’s carefully crafted history sentences that matter most, or the infectious list of pronouns the kids chant. Classical Conversations isn’t perfect. It has weaknesses. It’s not The End All Be All, and it doesn’t work for everyone. What sets CC apart, in my experience, isn’t the Latin, or the Timeline song, or the way you can tweak it to be whatever you want at home.

It’s the community.

A friend once told me that she was bothered by the focus on community that she heard at Practicum. We both agreed that CC wasn’t where Christians were first meant to find deep, meaningful fellowship. That role was originally designed to be filled by the local church. But guys… the church can be really, really bad at that job. It has fallen so far away from being that place for many people that finding an oasis of safe, inviting community anywhere—especially amongst fellow Christian homeschoolers— is deeply refreshing. Does that excuse us from remaking our local church bodies back into the hospitality centers they were meant to be? Not at all. But does it mean that we can’t link arms and walk with the body of Christ where we find it… even if it’s not in a “church”? Nope.

Something shifted deep inside of me in February. It had been coming all year, peeling back in slow layers. God had been patiently prying my fingers back for years from a thing I had held onto like an idol: my perfect, soft-focus vision of How We Homeschool. He had been stripping away all the crutches, leading me to a place where I could finally focus on the New Thing He was doing in my life, and the lives of my children. He intertwined our days with the lives of others seeking His will and His path, purposefully, through our involvement with CC.

So, guys… we are a CC family. It works for us. It’s the framework of the rest of the Charlotte Mason-flavored goodness with which we surround ourselves. Do we copy, word for word, what you see in the catalog here at home? Truthfully… nope. This summer, you’ll find me working away on our lesson plans, which I piece together to fit our family’s interests and calling. This fall, you’ll find me back in the front of a class, tutoring, loving the connection I get to have with other families seeking to follow God on this journey called homeschooling. You’ll hear my kids singing insanely catchy songs about Napoleon, and you’ll see us rocking some pretty cool t-shirts that highlight our focus this year... and I’ll be using this space to discuss what’s working for us, and what isn’t, as usual.

I hope you’ll continue to journey along with us, no matter how you school your kids. As I’m reminded again in this season, it’s the WHY, not the HOW that binds us, and pulls us deeper into relationship with one another, and with the Father in heaven who has ordered our days.