In our homeschool, we usually do “school” only 4 days a week. We sometimes double up on days in our 180-day curriculum and also school pretty much year-round, so we are afforded this little luxury. Since we don’t do traditional school on Friday, we spend a bit of time doing free writing, a concept I learned about after listening to a podcast by my favorite homeschooler, Julie Bogart, about bringing more joy to your homeschool. Last year, when I started homeschooling, writing assignments often felt forced and stilted for my kids. Julie’s suggestion of weekly freewrite sessions frees me from the mental burden of worrying that my kids aren’t writing enough, and frees them from having to worry that it’s being graded.
This past Friday’s topic was: What has been the best part and the worst part of this lockdown situation for you?
My kids came up with some pretty interesting answers. My youngest desperately misses Slurpees at 7-11, while my oldest misses seeing his friends. One of my sons wrote about how scared he is for his grandparents health, which was definitely eye-opening for me. We are always talking about it around the kids, and we often forget the impact our words have on them. He also wrote how we have more time for swimming and playtime at home now that we’re not going to basketball practice, ice skating, or gymnastics.
It got me thinking about how I’m feeling the same way.
As a new homeschooler last year, I felt tremendous pressure to do all the things. I signed up for every free library program and clicked “Attending” to every homeschool event I could find on Facebook. I dragged my kids to each and every homeschool program. Some were awesome. Some not so much, but I felt like I had to try everything out to see what we liked.
By this school year, my kids had had enough of the extra programming and practically groaned when I told them we were going on yet another nature walk. I felt guilty, but I often gave in to them, cutting down our weekly attendance at a certain program to just twice a month instead.
But the coronavirus lockdown has taken our already pared-down list of extracurriculars and whittled it down to zero. At first, I was disappointed that my kids were missing out on half their basketball season or their weekly ice skating lessons. But faced with the ongoing reality that there is nowhere to go and nowhere to be – I find it extremely freeing.
Suddenly, I’m realizing, finally, what this homeschool thing is all about. You know how you can’t really turn off your mind if the TV is still on, or your phone is dinging next to you? Well it’s the same with homeschooling. You can’t appreciate the time at home if you’re still running around everywhere. Even with cutting down on extracurriculars, we were still leaving the house almost every day of the week.
This new normal forces us to be at home all the time. There are no guilty feelings about not attending a homeschool program – there are none. I don’t even feel pressured to schedule weekly playdates for my children – there are none of those going on either.
What is happening in our lives right now calls to mind a book I read years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, a book about mindfulness written before it was en vogue. “Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are,” Kabat-Zinn writes. Don’t try to over-schedule. Just be.
For some, this new reality is extremely difficult, and I’ll admit, at times it feels suffocating if I think about it too much. But there is a huge upside for us right now – and that is slowing down, almost to a complete standstill, and enjoying each afternoon with each other without the pressure of feeling like we need to be somewhere else. Where we are is exactly where we are supposed to be.