On time... and the lack thereof

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
- Pogo (Walt Kelly)

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Time seems to be my enemy these days. There is so much I want to accomplish before the end of our school year, but I am clearly not going to reach my goal. Every day we seem to run out of time and end up leaving one or more items “undone” on our list of subjects or activities.

Make our own cuneiform clay tablet? Not today. Create a 3D mobile of the solar system? Uh-uh, no time this afternoon. Build a scale model of Noah’s Ark? Not happening.

(OK, I made up that last one. I never intended to do that. Granted, it crossed my mind... but only for a moment, I swear!)

Actually, I don’t really plan all that many activities. I did plan for the cuneiform tablet project, because it was actually do-able (a little bit of air-drying clay, a chopstick, and a rolling pin to flatten the clay into a tablet shape, and you’re ready to go). But it’s more than just the fun activities that go by the wayside.

In part, I believe this is because I set some pretty ambitious goals for each day, perhaps bordering on unrealistic. Can you cover math, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, Bible, science, and social studies (history, culture, geography) every day? What about fine arts? Handwriting? Typing? Phys Ed?

At the same time, I don’t know how much time to allot for certain activities or for teaching a new concept. Should math take an hour? Should it take more? Less? If I plan on math only taking an hour, but we really spend 90 minutes on it, is that because I overestimated the amount of work that could be accomplished in an hour? Did I spend too much time on introducing the concept? Did I assign too much seat work? Or is my son simply wasting time daydreaming, dawdling, and generally procrastinating? (This last possibility is most definitely a contributor factor to our time problem, but not the sole cause.)

Veteran homeschoolers keep reassuring me, “Don’t worry! You’ll figure it out!” In the meantime, the perfectionist in me feels like a complete failure because we aren’t even coming close to completing our daily “to-do” list. I hate looking at my weekly lesson plans and seeing all these unchecked boxes and circled items with a big fat ? beside them – as in, when we will ever get back to this?!

If I were going to be perfectly honest, I’d have to confess that time, itself, is not the enemy… rather, it is my inability to wisely manage the time I do have. For now, I’ll chalk some of that up to being a novice at this homeschooling thing. Y’all are buying that… right?

On the start of a new adventure

Bless me, what *do* they teach them at these schools?
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe

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No doubt it was bad form to write a lengthy article about perfectionism, and then not write again for two months, thus implying that I have, indeed, been paralyzed by my perfectionist tendencies.

While that is undoubtedly true (and certainly a contributing factor)… I have other, truly legitimate reasons for the lengthy delay between posts. I have recently entered into a new dimension, one replete with its own language: homeschooling.

Eight weeks ago, if you had mentioned Charlotte Mason to me, I would have replied, “Who?” Or, if you had asked me to explain the trivium model of a classical education – the grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric stages of learning – I would have stared blankly and said, “Huh?” If a homeschooling mom had told me they used an eclectic approach to their curriculum, I would have asked, “What does that mean?” If she’d then told me she measured her child’s knowledge through notebooking and lapbooks, rather than worksheets, quizzes and tests, I might have skeptically responded, “Um, o-kaaay.”

Now, these are the terms by which I am defining my days. And nights. And weekends. It’s been a crash course in elementary education. Everything else going on in my life came to a screeching halt as I dove head-first into this wild and crazy adventure. We hit the ground running, as they say – there was no time to prepare; it was learn-as-you-go.

My home office is now a school room; the artwork on the wall has been placed by world maps, the cursive alphabet, and posters of Ancient Mesopotamia. Books on public relations and graphic design have been temporarily boxed up to make room for encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, thesauruses, and tomes on ancient civilizations, astronomy, dinosaurs, oceans, and the human body, all in preparation for our next year of school.

I’ve owned it for only a couple months, but the most dog-eared book on my shelf right now is Cathy Duffy’s 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum, after having spent hours and hours pouring over her recommendations for math, grammar, reading, and writing. In less than 60 days, I’ve already formed opinions on the benefits of unit studies, spiral math curriculum, and the merits of teaching vocabulary by first studying Greek and Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes. That I not only understand but could also explain these concepts provides proof that my immersion in this new culture is complete.

Frankly, I’ve learned more in the past six weeks than I have in years, and I’m not just referring to the theories of education that I’m absorbing in my quest for the perfect curriculum. I made a somewhat hasty decision to purchase a year-long unit study that starts with Ancient Egypt, and takes us through the Age of Exploration; ultimately, it was not a decision I regret one bit. It ties in appropriate areas scientific study (e.g., a study of the human body while we study Ancient Greece; an oceanography unit while we study the World Explorers), as well as literature (we’ll read The Golden Goblet while we study Ancient Egpyt, and The Bronze Bow while we study Ancient Rome), spelling, grammar, writing… pretty much everything except math. It’s really an amazing curriculum, which we will begin in the fall.

In the meantime, for the remainder of this school year, I decided that we needed to cover world history up to and coinciding with the time of the ancient Egyptians; i.e., the other early civilizations: the Sumerians, Minoans, Myceneans, megalithic Europe, and the peoples of the Indus Valley – basically, civilization up to 1200 B.C. For science, we have studied the creation of the world (from a biblical worldview!), the solar system, and the layers of the earth, and will spend the last few weeks on dinosaurs (which, my 10-year-old son claims, he has never gotten to study in school).

Just preparing the lesson plans for this last quarter of school (which is when we began our homeschooling journey), has been an education. I’ve learned more about the origins of our universe and the life of early man than I ever knew before. I’ve learned facts about the layers of the sun that I never knew. In fact, I didn’t even know the sun had layers! I didn’t know that cuneiform was one of the earliest writing systems, I didn’t know that farmers used constellations to tell them the times to plant and to harvest, and I didn’t know that Stonehenge was being built around the same time as the ziggurats in the Middle East.

I didn’t know a lot. I still don’t.

But after this next year, I’ll know a little bit more.

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For those who might be interested in a unit study approach, I heartily recommend A World of Adventure! It is one of Cathy Duffy's Top Picks – considering the vast number of unit studies to choose from, and that only a handful (six, to be exact) "made the cut," that's high praise, indeed. I really wanted to start this study right away, but decided to truly go with a chronological approach to our son's studies, by starting with the creation of the world and the ancient civilizations that preceded/coincided with the Ancient Egyptians.


Find out more: A World of Adventure