Homeschooling Myself
I say I homeschool Hannah, but actually I suspect a lot of the schooling is for myself.
We baked a cake that day. It was, as usual, a lesson for Hannah in measurements, quantity, and in how things come together. It was a nice, cold, wet, rainy morning and I was determined to enforce a wholesome way of spending time as a family. But we progressed as we normally do on baking days. She wondering at how everything works (fiddling at the gauges on the weighing scale, how flour comes out through the sieve etc), her Type A mom breathing down her neck, barking orders and vainly trying to contain the inevitable mess, and the husband smiling in amusement at the battle scene. But Hannah as usual took it all in her stride: serenely unperturbed by all that huffing, interested in finding out all about this strange and wonderful world, smiling and joking with whoever was listening, that I began to realise it wasn't she who needed a lesson but me. And it's the same and only lesson that my Parent has been trying to teach me for so long - patience. Letting go. Enjoying the moment with my child that will never come around again.
That's the thing about homeschool. It's got so many pluses. But the one minus is that you are the child's main (sometimes only) teacher and the child is subject to the foibles, mental models and prejudices you carry. That's a bit of a bummer because the child begins to think of the world from the narrow perspective of her parent and doesn't get to see any other perspective. So I try (when I remember) to tell Hannah when I'm wrong and apologise to her. That way, she sees that I'm not infallible and hopefully she can begin to form a more well-rounded philosophy of life.
"There's an evil king that lives in this mountain (of flour)", she says. "He turned me into a statue once." "Oh dear", said I, "what did you do?" "A prince rescued me. So you should never go onto this mountain." She connects the dots oddly and that's good. Sometimes gross. Like when she had a bit of plum fibre hanging between her front teeth and using her tongue she pushed it back and forth, singing "Jingle Bells". Ok, so she won't be a rocket scientist. Maybe one day she'll sit at the computer writing strange and pointless blogs that no one cares to read. But hopefully I'll slow down enough to appreciate the uniqueness that is my daughter. And hopefully she'll realise that not everyone is a retentive control maniac and there's other ways to live.
Comments