The mornings are chilly and bright, giving way to afternoons of short sleeved, shoeless, mossy grass toe-wiggling.
The air is full of many things. The sound of buzzing bees and zipping hummingbirds. The scent of dandelions. Soon, too soon, the pines will begin producing more pollen than my allergies deal well with historically and I will have to spend a good deal of time indoors until they calm down.
This morning, however, it's raining and Jellybean, age 13, realized she was down to one last school subject. I informed her, as I had the others (in front of her so this wasn't exactly coming out of left field) when they got down to their last subject, that it would be wise to start doubling up since she had a bit longer to go on English than the rest of the family.
Believing I was trying to heavy her load rather than free up her time, she began to cry. She thought I didn't want her to ever get a spring break so I kept loading her down with more and more! She had trouble understanding abstract concepts and she doesn't do well when unexpected things happen, especially if she sees them as adding to her workload. I relate to the last part so much, but I've never had trouble with the abstract, making it difficult for me sometimes to figure out how to explain things to a teenager who does struggle with it.
The Lord gave me the inspiration to get the quarter jar to show her what I meant. I said she has 19 lessons of English left, but we are supposed to start break after 9 school days. I had her get out 19 quarters to represent the 19 lessons remaining and line them up on her desk. I drew 9 big circles on a scrap paper to represent the days, including today, until the end of the school year for us, and asked her to put 1 quarter in each day. I explained that the quarterpillar off to the side was the number of days she would have to do school after her siblings were finished for the year.
Then I asked her, "What happens if you double up?" She put a second quarter in each circle and I saw understanding dawn on her face as she exclaimed she would only have one extra lesson this way. Without prompting, she immediately assigned the extra quarter to today by putting it into the first circle.
Having absorbed the concept, she continued to apply it as I silently watched. She rearranged the quarters to 3 per day and glowed with happiness at the sight of the days early she might be done instead of late! We discussed how many she would like me to put on her assignment list per day from here on out and she concluded she would do as many lessons as she can today and then decide based on how hard it was, how much time it took, and how many she ultimately wound up finishing in a day.
Someone's sitting there reading this and judging. How stupid to not have explained this to the child before! She's a teenager now and it ought have been explained sooner! I assure you've I've explained it many times over many years with many kinds of props. Why it stuck so easily this time was because the Lord readied her to hear it and me to teach it today.
Or You do know that curriculum wasn't designed to be 100% finished, right? Why can't you just give the poor child a break? Why do you try to hold to some arbitrary schedule or lesson planning? Homeschooling is about flexibility! You're not a public school! True, and I apply these concepts when and where it is best for my children to do so. However I am their mother and I also know that for some children it's better to be predictable and strict about finishing certain things. For this child, this is something she needs to do all the way to the end. There are multiple reasons but the fact that she fights against this subject the hardest should be enough to tell you that she needs the neural connection of a self-motived planning, executing, and subsequent psychological satisfaction of completing of it. I won't raise my children based on the public school's methods that were designed for crowd-control, nor will I raise them based on "because you're not a public school..." (implied: "you can't do anything that looks even remotely like the public schools"). I will take each situation as it comes and, by the grace of God, I will raise them the best I can even if those methods do or don't please others.
