A Blank Page

Educational Choices Are Actually Yours

Amy Barr, The Lukeion Project

The start of a new academic year has arrived. Some hate getting back to academic work as they are forced to abandon the relative freedom of summer activities. Others are keen to get back into the swing of things as they look forward to new challenges. Most see their yearly academic schedule as inevitable, something that must be done, boxes that must be checked, and time that must pass one way or another. Which kind of student are you?

I have found through over 30 years as educator that students who have some educational autonomy will have a better attitude towards each new academic year. Conversely, students who feel they are locked into a parade or generic classes and subjects tend to have less enthusiasm about the work at hand.

A person who works a factory job completing a repetitive chore may accomplish much in a single day but seldom looks forward to his task. Even if he manufactures something he loves, his enthusiasm for it will not last long. Humans quickly get bored with repetition and with a lack of personal challenge. Most humans avoid undertakings that offer no room for improvement, no challenges, no changes.

When I was in high school, I worked for a nice pizza restaurant. I picked that job because I loved the pizza there and thought it might be fun. Wishing to earn enough money for college, I spent most of my evenings for a full year making or selling that pizza. I saved carefully and did indeed pay for my own education with that money. I am glad I had that job, but I went from being a pizza-loving teen to somebody that still dislikes pizza many decades later. You can have too much of a good thing.

Most of us gravitate towards projects that allow us to improve and eventually excel if we choose to put in the work. Good health (both mental and physical) depends on the ebb and flow of seasons, changes, and challenges. If everyone gets the same grade no matter how hard they work or if every day looks the same no matter what you do, boredom will lead to apathy. Apathy will lead to resignation. Looking back at my high school pizza job, I know that my boredom was not just eating too much pizza but the constant sameness.

As you start a new academic year or semester, you might feel you have been given few choices about your classes because certain topics must be covered in the short span of a few years. That transcript is not going to finish itself! You may begin to see what is in store and learn to view it through the lens of sameness and respond with a bored yawn.

You may also see what is ahead and realize that your education is a blank page that you get to illustrate and fill out how you like. Yes, you need an English credit each year of high school. NO, that English credit does not need to be the same one that everyone else completes. Foreign language? Math? History? Science? Writing? Yes! Everyone needs those. Learn to tick those boxes and finish those requirements in ways that challenge you.

Your academic plan is all your own. Prepare yourself for a future that interests and engages you. Even if you do not feel you have a ton of choices over the types of things you are expected to study this year, retain control on how you prepare, the amount of effort you expend, and the level of mastery you achieve. You have more control over your current circumstances and your future than you might imagine. Even small investments towards excellence now will fill out the blank page of your education in ways that only you can control. Everyone has the autonomy necessary to become truly excellent at many things. Start today.Your education is not something done to you or for you but by you.

Autodidacticism

You Have Everything YOU Need For a Good Education

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

The English word “education” comes from the Latin word educare, a verb that can refer to the process of bringing up children to adulthood or providing a wholesome place for animals or crops to grow. Modern usage would have us think that education is a commodity that we might purchase in the form of a book, a program, a class, or whole degree program. When we are done with one or all of these, we proclaim ourselves “educated.” The Latin word does not refer to any of these things, per se. Instead, one’s education is a matter of having a favorable environment or fertile soil for somebody (or something) to grow productively. Education, for much of human history, has been a personal choice and under our own control.

In the Roman world, those that worked on a subject very diligently might eventually be considered doctus by others, meaning they were well-informed, experienced, and clever. Doctus is a passive participle of doceo, a verb which means “teach” (a doctor was a teacher not a medical expert). Somebody who is doctus has been “taught” but not necessarily by others and certainly not in some established program. Remove your modern sensibilities about being taught. The English words we use to define doctus or docta have more to do with how one treats oneself as one builds one’s own learning environment. A well-informed, experienced, and clever person takes the initiative to self-educate regardless of one’s station in life.

The most brilliant men and women in history have been autodidacts who, until very recently, had zero framed diplomas hanging in their offices. Degrees, as such, didn’t factor into anyone’s career qualifications until the far more recent past. The notion of placing a measure (and certificate of completion) on one’s education was not something that most people thought about until public education compelled us to think in terms of something that could be measured, quantified, qualified, and marketed to the human race.

Greek philosopher Plato once said, “The first and best victory is to conquer self.” Aristotle, Plato’s student, listened carefully to his master’s words for 20 years and then reversed his opinion on most of Plato’s teachings to form his own thoughts. He famously said, “Through self-discipline comes freedom.” As he too would become an educator of famous people like Alexander the Great, Aristotle would also say “What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.”

Education today is not something our Classical fore-bearers would recognize or condone. Today we view education as a set of stairs. We climb up some of those steps and celebrate when we’ve arrived at a certain stage while we earn a slip of paper that some institution has issued to say as much. Leaving behind all that was accomplished before, we climb a new set of slightly more difficult stairs and look for new affirmations of completion until, armed with seemingly enough certificates, we are deemed qualified. Those that didn’t climb those particular stairs are not authorized to form opinions or advice in that area. Such people are merely amateurs, a word that comes from the word for love (amare) in Latin. 

Modern education is a lucrative system that is jealous of all forms of competition. We are told we aren’t qualified to do our own research and we aren’t qualified to educate ourselves. Those who are home-educated must simulate a public education by jumping through similar hoops in hopes of being issued a graduation certificate which, despite numerous studies that prove that home education is the far superior method of learning, is often considered sub-standard by many secondary institutions. Many top universities are slowly understanding how valuable our home educated autodidacts are! The top skill mastered in home education is how to educate oneself, a skill that becomes a game-changing advantage in college, graduate school, career, and life. Those that don't want any part of that type of conveyor belt system are benefited as they teach themselves how to live the kind of life that interests them most. 

Autodidacticism (self-education) is and has always been the most reliable method to become well-informed, experienced, and clever. Our own interests and passions are a powerful tool to compel us to excel. Autodidacts are never sated with mastering a single body of knowledge. Having learned one and then two, self-educators are driven to learn by their own interests. They choose to master more and still more. While such people often go on to collect a variety of degrees because they are still constrained by our modern system, they will always continue their own learning process provided they have life and breath.

As Plato points out, your first task is to master as an autodidact is self-discipline. Rising above your own lazy instincts to sleep more or play more means you’ll have the ability to push on, to persist in your efforts to master some topic or skill. If you have enough self-discipline to persist, there are no limits to your goals or ambitions. This is true freedom. The choice falls on you. You have control over your own timeline, effort, and skill. Degree programs might require a set number of years and certainly a prearranged fee, but a self-disciplined autodidact has control of his own time, her own effort, and the quality of all outcomes. Armed with far more educational materials and opportunities than history’s brightest minds, the best education today can be free, or nearly so.

 

 

One Size Fits Few

Try Home Education À La Carte

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

If you are new to home education: Welcome! If you are thinking about it but haven’t committed to the process, maybe this piece will help. We will discuss whether a comprehensive home school curriculum is right for your family or if à la carte is the better option. As a savvy reader, you might already suspect where my opinions lean so here I’ll offer some observations from the standpoint of a quarter century teaching my own kids plus a few more on top of that teaching everyone else’s kids as well. 

If you’ve never been to a major home education conference, add one to your schedule this coming spring or summer. Assume you’ll be overwhelmed by the flood of home education information and prepare to pace yourself. Attending all days of the conference will give you time to collect information, browse, attend sessions, and browse the vendor hall several times more. When we attend as vendors for The Lukeion Project, we regularly have new home educators stop by our booth. We can tell they are new to the process because they look a little shell-shocked. Most have no idea there are so many options available for educational help. 

Home school vendors can be like any other salespersons. They sometimes create a need and then offer to fill it for you. With new home educators looking for so many answers at once, they’ll suggest that it is preferable to buy into a system that is a one-size-fits-all curriculum to solve all education concerns for every child throughout his 12+ years of study. This notion is, of course, ridiculous if you’ve ever met any actual children. I only had three to educate and they couldn’t be more different. Being able to customize what they learned and when they learned it was the most important virtue in their home school experience.  
A one-size-fits-all education is a major drawback of an institutional education. Only the slenderest slice of pie on the pie chart of educational styles will claim robust triumph in an institution. A far larger part of the pie chart represents students that merely learned how to function in such a system. These usually graduate with only a few bright moments of inspiration and insight aside from that rare class and maybe a senior trip. An equally large slice on that chart represents students who languished entirely. There’s a good chance that even our best and brightest could have been even better and brighter in an educational system that allowed for customization. 

12-years of education-in-a-box is not going to inspire anyone, yet the most lucrative educational companies out there are the glitzy programs that sell a full year’s grade level in a complete package, usually with claims that their approach is both super convenient for parents and a delight to all children, regardless of their age or interests.  If you look closely, you’ll see that these programs especially target families with younger kids because families that continue to home school through middle/high school will certainly move to a more à la care approach or give up. 

Why do they target new-to-home-school families? These comprehensive year-in-a-box style curriculum approaches are like gummy multivitamins for kids. They are advertised as a product that has everything a body needs but you will mostly pay for pretty colors and nice packaging to help convince your child to swallow it. They will try to convince parents that such programs are “the only way to be sure” that their child gets everything she needs. Moms are easy prey to this approach. Natural insecurities are targeted by big box curricula vendors who suggest that there’s one right way to educate and one acceptable body of knowledge a child must master if he will be able to move forward and succeed in life. Big box curricula companies prey on our fears that we are not up to the task of educating our own children.

If you wander a vendor hall at any major home school conference, you’ll see more and more products that are marketed to busy parents who don’t have time to prepare. This is a safe marketing approach because I have yet to meet a modern parent who finds enough time in the day to finish all that must be done. I have even seen literature curricula advertised as requiring zero parental knowledge of every reading any literature. Plug-and-play curriculum is becoming more common because, again, there are lots of insecurities among educators worried their child is missing something. 

You are still an excellent candidate for an à la carte approach, even if you aren’t the one who teaches every minute of your child’s education. If your child is set on mastering an entirely foreign-to-you subject, then an approach that requires minimal parent preparation is probably a good idea. I would hate to think what would have happened to my children’s various passions had it been entirely up to me to prepare and teach them rock-climbing, piano, French, blacksmithing, and chemistry. 

Busy or not, all of us must read to our kids, gently teach them essential life skills, manners, basic art skills, writing, music basics, money management, and math, all while conveying our own worthwhile passions (gardening, cooking, golfing, sports, dancing, etc.). Why out-source the next level? Many newbies are led to believe there is some scientifically devised body of knowledge that stands above these basics in the elementary years. They assume that this fictional “scientifically devised body of knowledge” is expertly instructed in a formal institution and that some scientifically approved group of officials have pronounced their blessings on such curriculum and stamped it with accreditation, a word that sounds more substantial and important than it is prior to one’s college years.

À La Carte Education

Most first timers who buy year-in-a-box approaches will start their school year with enthusiasm. They have colorful textbooks, a stack of workbooks, some art supplies plus a few clever math manipulatives. They are ready to go. If I had ever tried big-box-curriculum, my kids would have gotten started with the subjects they like first. By the end of the first week, my math-loving son would have already finished most of his math for the first semester. He’d have tucked anything requiring creative writing under his already tattered pile of workbooks. My oldest would have finished a full year’s collection of creative assignments and would be regarding her math book with fear and loathing hoping it would disappear. My youngest would have abandoned all of it and would be working through his latest piece on the piano. He might have graduated from college with honors, but you couldn’t tell he’d turn out that way as a youth. He was allergic to anything that gave even a whiff of being overly simplified for child-consumption. He only wanted to work with materials of substance and weight. 

Creating a customized approach to all major subjects one at a time, a child at a time, is the à la carte educational approach that I recommend. This might mean that the math approach I’d picked for my son’s 9th grade year might only serve him for the first 2 months and then he’d be ready for the next thing (and I’d have to find an entirely different approach for my two creatives). My oldest would be given time in the day to draw, paint, and be artistic requiring little more than access to good music and art supplies. My youngest needed to blow off steam by playing on the piano whenever he needed to work on subjects he didn’t enjoy (I’m looking at you, math) but he might spend a couple of days “wasting” time reading ancient philosophy or figuring out how to tie knots in survival scenarios.

“But how do you know they are learning everything they need to know?” you might ask.

Rest assured that any reasonably conscientious home school educator is doing an equal or (usually) superior job compared to any standard curriculum approach in an institution (yes, even the really expensive ones). But if you are doing it right, you are not educating alone in a vacuum on a desert island. Others should be brought alongside the educational process to help flesh out a completely customized experience for your totally unique learner. The most important person to come alongside you in educating your child will be your child himself.

Many colleges prefer home educated students today because they have read real literature, learned to write in both creative and academic contexts, and they tend to be autodidacts because they learn how to learn. As a full-time educator of a variety of different types of students (public, private, home-schooled, unschooled), we find that students who have been conventionally schooled (either public or private) seriously struggle in scenarios that require them to take ownership over academic material. We have to walk them through managing even basic elements of maintaining their own learning experience. Even conventionally schooled gifted students struggle in this area because in most conventional programs (small or large, prestigious, or mundane), education is something that is done to you rather than something that you own and do for yourself and do on your own behalf.

Students who take ownership in their own education learn they can speed or slow their pace on subjects based on the intensity and quality of their efforts. They discover they can seek out and successfully take on more difficult subjects in areas that they enjoy because they’ll do what they must to move forward and achieve their own goals. They learn that it is better to go back and re-learn the basics in areas that are important to their own academic plans rather than check a box that a subject is done. If their goals are less academic and more hands-on, owning their own education means they’ll start real work in areas they love sooner, not later. Metalworking, music, drama, woodworking, cooking, working with animals? All of this can start much earlier in a child’s life when mom or dad have allowed --and even designed—all of that to be part of their child’s education.  
   

Rigid Flexibility?

Why One Hour a Week is Plenty

by Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Modern conventional middle or high school programs have trained many of us to think that students must meet five full days a week to obtain a “good” education. Few evaluate how ridiculous this assertion is so let’s count the cost. Students spend on average from 120 to 180 hours—per subject, per year—sitting at a desk as the standard normal way to acquire any single body of knowledge such as basic chemistry, history, Spanish, or geometry. Home educators are told by most states that their child needs 120 to 150 hours of "seat time" to count a course as a credit (that’s for an academic year of one subject). Many states require a minimum of 180 days of attendance in school. On the traditional schedule, courses meet for five days a week for fifty minutes. To make things more dismal, these hours are now rarely garnished by things like woodworking, auto repair, art, music, home-economics, or even good literature as books have been condensed to short stories. Such topics have been phased out in most places.

Cubicle Life?

Is there something scientific about these numbers and calculations about “seat time”? Have education scientists determined that the average student truly benefits from 120+ hours of sitting to master a topic? Not at all. Worse still, most classes demand additional hours at home to finish assigned work so let’s add another 80 hours over the course of a year. What can an average person learn and accomplish in 200 hours per year?
Those that believe there’s some logic behind requiring 120-200 hours per subject per year often demand even more. Disappointing results on standardized academic tests in public schools urge pleas for more funding, longer school days, more special programs, more special aids, plus lots more homework. Most districts comply and try to convince taxpayers that adding more to the school day is the only solution. Not only do modern students sit far longer in classes than at any time in history but conventionally schooled students rarely have time for part time jobs, serious hobbies, volunteer work, family life, or much else, for that matter. Long days parked in physical classrooms and long to-do lists notwithstanding, disappointing exam results persist and worsen while a generation of young people languish dangerously.

Old School

A century ago, around 11% of high school aged students attended any form of continuing education and they only did so for about half to a third of the year. A school day consisted of a few focused hours in the morning and a few more in the afternoon. Educators would normally set students to their tasks and then go elsewhere to work with younger students who needed more feedback on basic skills mastery. High school students enjoyed enough autonomy that they could work through material at a pace that they influenced while time demands allowed them to remain essential to their family (and local) economy with full or part-time work.
Most adults today couldn’t get close to passing the 8th grade exams of a century ago. 14-year-olds demonstrated better mastery of subjects and better intellectual engagement in a wide variety of topics compared to today’s PhD students. Great grandpa who “just” had an 8th grade education was likely far better read and better prepared in math, history, and science than most youth today. Great-grandpa and great-grandma would be stunned by how long 15–18-year-olds are expected to sit at a desk while they accrue no clear benefits nor make any contributions elsewhere when, for all human history before now, this same age group would have already been undertaking adult responsibilities at near adult skill levels.  
Veteran home educators know there’s no logical reason why anyone needs to sit in school for 8 hours daily and still have more classwork to do at night. If you don’t educate your students at home, put yourself in that classroom seat. Imagine how much better you might function if, after getting your assigned tasks done for your day, you could move to the next project to free up your Friday, read a book, play an instrument, paint, play a sport, make some cookies, work on a 4H project, or simply be done with responsibilities the minute you have finished your own work. Sure, you might be a procrastinator by nature, but it wouldn’t take you long to improve your time management and ambition level, all to your benefit, because your reward for doing so was relative freedom each day to finish up and move on.
Cubicle workers know it is difficult to find motivation to do much out of the ordinary when stuck at a desk no matter how productive they’ve been. At least they have a paycheck for their efforts but why apply a cubicle mentality to education and expect better results? Our 16-year-olds are being asked to imagine their hypothetical “paycheck” which won’t arrive until age 18 or 22 or even later.

Why We Picked ONE Hour Classes

We began offering semester courses at The Lukeion Project in 2006 starting with Latin. Our goal from the start was to teach the way we wish we had been taught. Because we weren’t government funded nor sanctioned (whatever that means), people asked us why we wouldn’t just make all classes fun and easy! Why should we have high expectations and assign things like papers or the National Greek Exam?
At The Lukeion Project we wanted to be as effective as possible at our jobs because our business model was built on students successfully moving up to the next level of difficulty over a stretch of years rather than taking just one fun class. Why even offer Latin 4 if we were going to do a poor job at Latin 1? The answer was not going to be found in duplicating methods that were failing in schools.
Our long-time teaching experiences at the university level and as home educators had already demonstrated to us how a certain rigid flexibility was the best model. The bulk of new material and a bit of review can easily be covered in a single one-hour meeting weekly. Doing more than 60 minutes in a session is difficult for even adults. All new material for the week is covered in 60 minutes. Students who need more time to master a subject are provided abundant resources to help demonstrate and review key concepts. Meanwhile students who are quick to grasp material can finish the work and move on. All work is turned in during windows of time with a set-in-stone schedule.
Rather than cutting corners (as those who are accustomed to the 150-hours-in-a-desk might think), we have found a highly effective approach that demonstrably brings students to their desired levels of mastery with sufficient autonomy as reward. This develops executive function, time management, and maturation.
If subject matter seems easy to a student during a certain week, she can finish quickly with free time as an incentive. If the material is more challenging, she can take all four days in the assignment window to complete the task while reviewing the recording, working a few self-tutorials, using flashcards, and playing the review games. Both types of students move along at the same pace, but resources are available to support extra coverage as needed. Staying on a schedule keeps a student motivated to keep focus and momentum. One’s “seat hours” might be 30 for the academic year (one-hour live online each week) but actual involvement in subject mastery –review, quizzes, writing projects, discussion boards, translations, etc.)—might be anywhere from 90 to 200 hours over an academic year, as the student needs. Since our first full semester course in 2006, this system has worked beautifully.    
Repetitive review tasks after a concept is fully mastered is drudgery and feels like trying to remain focused while staring at products on an assembly line. Students who need more time to learn a subject will not have all the same needs as everyone else. One concept might make sense quickly, but other skills need extra attention and time to sink in. This is why, for many people, conventional school can feel like running in the wrong foot race all the time. Students at all levels and approaches benefit when they are given more autonomy.
In a single one-hour live session at The Lukeion Project, we move ahead into new material and usually have students engage in that material or review in a lively way. The online classroom allows all students to participate, not just the fastest and smartest, because everyone has a chance to type in answers. Technology makes it possible to record each session so students can review whatever flew by too quickly. The one-hour meeting pushes the limit slightly on the extent of standard human focus, but we keep sessions lively and illustrated to help cover the material while engaging brains.
One student needs a couple of hours. Another one needs five or six. At the end of the week, everyone has had the chance to engage the material with the enticement of having control of one’s own time. Home educated students do very well in this system. Conventionally schooled students will struggle more at first because they are not accustomed to enjoying any benefit from finishing their work after achieving competence. Given the chance, they always prefer autonomy and liberty. They catch on quickly.
How do we know our methods are successful? We have both our Latin and Greek students take national exams, not for our sake but to demonstrate to others that they are making excellent progress in ways that are recognized by “the powers that be.” 95% to 97% of Lukeion language students earn honors. In AP Latin and AP Lit., students enjoy a 100% pass rate and 50% earn a score of 5. Many of our classes are taught on par with college level courses yet our students usually excel while still having time to accomplish the other tasks that make life worth living.

History Was not Boring

Your Teacher Was

Regan Barr with The Lukeion Project

Recently I was speaking to a friend who admitted she is still trying to overcome a lifelong hatred of history. She related a story that I have heard dozens of times: all her "formal" history education was nothing more than memorizing faceless lists of names and dates. She is still bitter. I had some awful history class experiences, as well.
For example, I remember taking state history in junior high...I do not remember any state history, I just remember TAKING state history. And I remember the room clearly. The powers-that-be called these things “portable classrooms,” but the students called them “trailers.” They were rectangular boxes made of corrugated metal that had been strategically placed at the farthest corner of a black-topped parking lot. The Oklahoma summer sun blazed down on that parking lot in late August heating it up to at least four hundred degrees. Crossing from the main building to the trailer for history was dangerous business. The furnace blast would hit you and you could feel your skin melting. Your only hope was to make it to the trailer before your blood began to boil. When we finally stumbled up the rickety wooden steps and into the air-conditioned coolness of that trailer, we collapsed into a dehydrated heap and gasped for air. As we paused to admire our own survival skills, it would hit us. “Oh, man!! They have done it to us again. They tricked us into coming to history.”
The state history teacher was young, just out of college, and he had flaming red hair. He was a wrestling coach who had been forced to teach state history. He must have done something awful in college because he was being punished in this assignment. History was as torturous for him as it was for us. He was easily flustered and when he became angry or frustrated, he turned bright red in the face. Some classmates decided that evoking this reaction from our uninspired and unmotivated instructor was a lot more interesting than any old boring state history. Those students smelled fear, and when their pack instincts kicked in, the poor man had no chance. He was like a wildebeest separated from the herd and the lions were intent on bringing him down. He would get louder, redder, and more animated the angrier they made him. To his credit, he never acted upon those thoughts of violence that surely filled his head. That class took years off his life.
Now some might be under the naïve impression that teachers should spend time learning the subject matter they will be teaching, but I think in teachers’ colleges today you get right to the crowd control training. It is a rare junior high that has an excited and knowledgeable state history teacher, so any poor fool who gets stuck in that classroom better have some crowd control training – some riot gear might help, too. No experienced teachers ever made that blistering journey across the blacktop to see how things were going out in the “state history trailer.” He was on his own!
That is the sum of my memories of history prior to college. I cannot even recall what gender my high school history teacher was, though I am certain I took some history in high school. Is it any surprise that I hated history? I remember my civics teacher because he had some funny mannerisms that were more interesting than civics. I remember my kindergarten teacher because she mispronounced my name for half the school year. I remember…or rather feared…my fourth-grade teacher because she was a large, gray-haired gal who thought her students’ idea of a fun time was skipping the lunchroom pizza crowd to eat vegetable soup (!) with her in the classroom. The image of her brandishing a yardstick as she attempted to chase down some miscreant on the playground is emblazoned in my memory.
I remember those teachers, but not the history I was supposed to learn. Why? Because of the interesting details. My teachers, classmates, and classrooms were swirling vortexes of interesting details, but history itself was not. Today I understand that it is the details that make history fascinating – the sort of details I remember about angry teachers or the walk through the inferno to the “state history trailer” – not the sorts of details you find on a timeline.
By the time it got to me, history had been scoured clean of all the interesting details and only drudgery was left. History does not occur in expansive decades, centuries, and millennia. It does not even happen in timeline tick marks. It happens the same way that life does: one moment at a time, one blistering step at a time. History is not the story of enormous hordes of faceless automatons. It is the story of unique people like you and me. They sometimes cooperate, sometimes get into fights, and sometimes act with dignity and reason, but quite often act in silly, dangerous, or unpredictable ways. It was not until I got to college that I had instructors who loved what they were teaching and filled their history lessons with little-known facts and engaging anecdotes. Guess what?? History is about real people! History cannot be boring unless life itself is boring. But sometimes we stand so far away that we cannot see any of the interesting bits.

Check out Lukeion Classical History for high school level and above

Sing, Dance, Grow, Talk

A Note to Home Educating Parents

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

As my youngest child prepares for his college graduation in a couple of weeks, I look back at the sum of our family activities, chores, achievements, and low points over the last 28 years since my first child was born. We celebrate that all three of my home-educated children finished their college degrees even as my middle child completes his graduate medical degree for yet another year. (That’s not a humble brag but a full-on boast, for those keeping score). All three of my adult children are hardworking, successful, lovely people that we enjoy being around every chance we can find.

I present here some things I’ve learned. Take the ones you like. Discard the rest. Find what resonates. What would I have done differently and how I could have improved matters under my control as a home educator and mom? What would I recommend to families who are still in the educational trenches?

As a professional educator, some of you might assume I will suggest families up their academic game for their offspring. Maybe more AP courses and more CLEP exams? Maybe harder classes and higher grades? Perhaps some academic summer camps mixed with year-round academics? On the contrary!

Approaches that worked for my family:

1. Provide a rich buffet of opportunities and tools in topics that interest your student (Let your musicians have instruments. Let your artists have art supplies. Let your problem solvers play games.)
2. Settle for a checkmark of completion in topics that don’t.
3. Make travel a big part of your family’s experience to expand the assortment of things that interest your student.
4. Let your child’s personal enthusiasm guide your budget of academic energies. Get requirements quickly finished and then lavish energy on topics that bring excitement.
5. If you conscientiously educate at home, be assured your child will exceed expectations at college.
6. If you foster time management skills, personal responsibility, plus the confidence to both endure and overcome challenges, your student will greatly surpass his peers at college.
7. Don’t overdue AP classes, CLEP, and dual enrollment opportunities. There’s no replacement for the friends and connections your child will make at college if they do so from the start. Too many frugal moves to skip the first few years of college will result in a failure to make social connections and then a failure to form essential professional ties with peers and professors. These connections are as important (if not more important) than the expensive diploma at the end.
8. Thinking, writing, reading, and understanding are topics taught best at the dinner table, garden, library, and barn rather than through a formal curriculum or workbook. Just talk to each other as adults, even if your adult is only 10 or 13… then see point number 4 when it comes to spending time or energy on classes.
9. Let each of your children become an expert in areas she loves and then trust her advice or let him guide the rest of the family in that topic. Respect and trust will enhance development but also it is nice to have somebody become a computer specialist, or chess master, or the best at making gnocchi or making a nice avocado toast, or maybe the go-to guide for Medieval weaponry.
10. Be firm with boundaries regarding work time for everyone. Adults and children alike need to trust that dinners will be together, Saturdays will offer some family time, Sundays are set aside for rest and ritual, etc. At the same time this becomes more difficult, it becomes more essential.

Things I wish I’d done more of:

1. Forgive each other more directly and more immediately. Shouting, “stop bickering!” might bring a short but artificial peace. Issues can fester rather than gaining resolution just because conflicts were misinterpreted as being “merely” temporary or childish and then brushed aside as bothersome noise. Talk through resolutions while issues are manageable so that calloused resentments are never formed.
2. Music (all kinds at all opportunities)
3. Dance (all kinds at all opportunities).
4. Turn off the TV
5. Grow to celebrate wins more often. Don’t let Etsy or your overly festive relative make you think you need to buy special decorations or put on massive party events before you can celebrate. Start at dinner. Focus as much as possible on thankfulness and then take joy in even small victories daily.