The First Question to Ask

Record numbers of families will be homeschooling this fall; by some accounts, up to 40% of students in certain areas will be learning at home rather than in a classroom. It’s the revolution we die-hards have dreamed of… sort of.

I’ve been fielding messages daily from locals, acquaintances, and friends of friends who’ve decided to cut through the politics and unknowns of school-based instruction for the first time and just do it themselves. It’s been heartening to hear the majority of them confidently assert that they know they can do as good of a job as a certified teacher, especially one with her hands tied behind a host of Covid hoops they can forgo in their own home. I love helping them match their child to good curriculum resources, and hearing them flesh out some scenarios I offer up for them to discover their own teaching style and how homeschooling is going to fit into the rhythm of their families.

But I always start with one question, one I don’t hear being asked out loud in homeschool circles or see being posited in online pages where newbie questions are flying fast and furious and the advice is flowing from experienced moms like an avalanche. It’s a question that I think matters more than any other, one that changes the track of the general,  “Welcome to the club!” accolades and math options to a different sort of conversation. It’s pretty easy to ask, and I think most new homeschoolers have some idea of the answer even if they don’t know for sure.

Are you planning on homeschooling just until this crisis has passed, or do you feel like you might be in this for the long haul?

No, I don’t expect a written commitment. And I recognize that many will start the school year and home and fall back to the classroom within a few weeks, just as many will start one a one semester trial and find themselves hardcore advocates running local homeschool support groups ten years from now.

It’s still an important question, and here’s why: if homeschooling is a stopgap, finger-in-the-dam measure for you, it fundamentally shifts the dialogue. You do not want the 2nd grade curriculum plans of a Charlotte Mason-informed homeschool mother for your son if he will be back in a classroom when the bell rings for grade 3. You do not want the gentle, “let it happen, follow the rabbit trails,” advice of a lifeschooler if the peers your child will sit alongside next fall for fifth grade are following a scope and sequence that isn’t built around your kids’ passions. You do not want to spend a year waiting for your child to show signs of developmental readiness for multiplication if next fall, all the other kids will have been instructed in that foundational groundwork and are adding layers of more advanced work.

Institutional schooling works by different rules and assumptions. And if you’re putting your child back into the institution, then I believe you owe it to your kid to give him a daily diet fairly close to the menu you’ll be expecting him to eat from next school year.

Does this mean that you can’t use a literature rich approach to history instead of the dismal textbook he would have encountered? Absolutely not. But maybe instead of following his interest towards ancient Egypt, you add a few supplemental books on that time period to the American history selections you’ve based off the plan for your local district’s expectations for 6th grade. Does this mean you have to use the Common Core aligned math book your 1st grader would have had issued to him in a classroom? Not at all. But you’re going to want to present those out-of-left-field sum estimations anyway, because all the other kids will know it next year and his teacher will give a quick refresher, yes, but she’s not going to re-teach the entire unit.

If your plan is short-term, and you expect your child to return to the race, you owe it to him or her to keep pace with the flow of the river he’ll be asked to wade back into at some point.

If I’m being totally honest here, one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is entirely selfish. If, after a year of schooling at home, Covid disappears from our collective radar and the institutional system is flooded with the return of those masses who opted out of the public sector, I don’t want to hear or feel the shock at how “lost” the year was for many kids, or how “woefully underprepared” the homeschoolers are to advance. This looks bad for all of us, but especially those of us who have staked not just one year, but decades of our life on the idea that homeschooling is not just equal to, but in many regards, superior to an education designed and implemented by an uninvested third party. A wave of reckoning that “proves” homeschooling is “less than,” results in burdensome legislation and social backlash for a movement whose very nature of shaking off government intervention already sets us up for harsher scrutiny.

So, veteran homeschoolers, please… ask the question. Base your recommendations appropriately. Encourage newbies to forget trying to squeeze a school day schedule into the rhythm of their home. Help them learn what’s actually developmentally appropriate for children of various ages. Introduce them to lapbooking, and Jim Weiss reading Story of the World, nature journals. Give them a taste of what it’s like to count as school happy hours reading chapter after chapter of a novel about the man who led the first tours of Mammoth Cave (affilliate link) while nibbling cookies and playing with Legos, then loading into the van with Dad to see the place in person. Let them meet homeschooling.

But remind them that this works because it’s a long-range plan, being played out over years in an environment that is organically shifting to stay shaped to the life and learning of our whole family. They can have it. They can! It’s not an exclusive club by any means. If you dip your toes in and like what you see, we want you to come in to the deep water. Join us. Be a part of our tribe. We love to wrap our arms around new families with kids of all ages and show them how homeschooling can radically change everything. We have had our eyes opened to the possibilities of education and friends, you will never be the same.

If you’re fairly certain you’re here just until the storm passes, though, you need to carefully construct the semester or year ahead based on your final destination. Let us give you the tour and help you select the tools that coordinate most closely with the ones you need in your box right now, as you face the unexpected wind and waves. We want to help shelter you until you can get back to doing what works best for you and your family. We’ll encourage you to stick with “grade level” math programs and to keep the experimenting to the extracurriculars.

I fully expect some backlash for saying this out loud. I’m ok with that. It’s not generally smiled upon in homeschooling circles to steer new homeschoolers back to the shallows, or to help them make plans for re-entry into the system. But if you know me in real life, you know two things: I am passionate about homeschooling, and I am passionate about helping families follow the unique call God has placed on them. I feel that in order to do both right now, we have to be willing to face the realities we’re being confronted with and call it what it is. Just as the families forced into zoom lessons and online assignments this spring weren’t actually homeschooling, many folks declining to send their kids into classrooms aren’t homeschoolers in the sense we’ve ever known before. Out of respect for them, and their children, we need to be willing to ask the question– Are you planning on homeschooling just until this crisis has passed, or do you feel like you might be in this for the long haul?— and meet them where they are, in love.