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Have you ever played with a magnet and a paperclip? Once you get the paperclip within the magnet’s field, it pulls that paperclip into place. I always liked to remove the paperclip and slide it away from the magnet, then start pushing it back toward the magnet little by little and see at what point the magnet pulls the paperclip back in.
In some ways, we are like the paperclip and our habits of thinking and behaving are like the magnet. We might pull ourselves away and decide we’re going to do something different, but over time we can find ourselves inching back toward those old habits until we get pulled in again. That’s a helpful analogy to keep in mind when you decide to change from a classroom school setting to a Charlotte Mason home school. Let me explain.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about tendencies and tips for those who are making the transition to using a Charlotte Mason approach in their home schools.
We all come from different backgrounds and those backgrounds can act like magnets. It seems like they constantly try to pull our thoughts back in that direction. Today, let me offer three tendencies to be aware of and also give three helpful tips for those of you who are pulling your children out of a classroom setting and beginning to homeschool with the Charlotte Mason method. Or perhaps you are coming out of a classroom setting yourself, as a teacher, and beginning to homeschool. Both scenarios are going to hold some challenges, some magnetic pulls, to be aware of.
Let’s talk first about three tendencies to watch for.
tendency #1: replicating the classroom at home
Be careful of trying to replicate the classroom in your home setting. Sometimes we get locked into a certain mental picture, “School looks like this,” and we try to make our home school look like school at home. You don’t need to be locked into that. The wonderful thing about homeschooling is that you have flexibility. But it might be a challenge coming out of a classroom setting, depending on how long you or your student have been in that situation.
You or your children might be used to a predictable schedule, sometimes to the minute, with bells ringing to tell you when to do what. That schedule tells you that you will be done with this class at exactly 11:57 and you will have lunch until 12:25. Such a system may be helpful with a large crowd of students, but it is seldom helpful in a family setting.
Try not to get locked into replicating that strict time schedule at home. Some kind of timetable can help you to keep moving forward and get things done in a timely manner. But you can decide what that timetable looks like. You might want a schedule with set times, but another possibility is to create a schedule with “time boxes.” A time box is much more flexible. With a time box you can decide, “We’re going to do these things before lunch, and we’re going to do these certain things after lunch.” It doesn’t matter whether you start math at 10:05. This type of schedule doesn’t depend on the clock but on a list of subjects that you plan to do during each box of time. For example, you might know that you will do math during the morning time box and it will happen between history and poetry. You can decide what type of timetable will fit for your family during this season of life. Enjoy the freedom to do what works best for you.
tendency #2: feeling like you’re not doing enough
The second tendency also involves the clock. Often in homeschooling, it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough because you’re done so much more quickly than in a classroom setting. You may be used to spending 7 or 8 hours in a classroom every day, but rarely is that amount of time necessary in a home school. In a one-on-one situation, in which you’re tutoring one student with one teacher, things go much faster than when you’re trying to corral a whole classroom full of children. You will most likely have shorter hours in your home school.
But even if you’re okay with the shorter school days, when you switch to a Charlotte Mason approach, you might feel like you’re not accomplishing enough—or your student might feel like she’s not accomplishing enough—because you don’t have a paper trail of worksheets and busywork. It’s easy to depend on a paper trail: “See, I learned something. This is what I learned.” But the Charlotte Mason Method is much more organic than that. Your students are learning, but you don’t have to fill out a stack of worksheets or create a paper trail to prove it.
You know, that mention of worksheets reminds me of another difference that might take some getting used to: you’re not going to be teaching to the test. What I mean by teaching to the test is, often in a classroom, the teacher knows what’s going to be on the test, and the scores on that test are going to show whether that teacher did a good job or not. So it is not uncommon for the teacher to say, “Here are the things that are going to be on the test. These are the things that you need to learn.” Charlotte Mason did not do it that way. She spread a wide feast and let the children take what they were ready for. When it came time for exam week, there was no reviewing. There was no going over “this is what will be on the test.” Charlotte thought that either the children knew it or they didn’t. So just be aware that your students might have some transitioning to make in their thinking (and so might you if you were a classroom teacher). It’s not, “This is what I need to know for the test”; it is, “This is what I’m learning as a person, and that’s all good.”
Tendency #3: using grades as motivation
Try to re-ignite your children’s natural desire for learning that all of us are born with.
Be cautious of using grades as motivation. Charlotte wanted her schools to teach the joy of knowledge for knowledge’s own sake. That was a foundational principle. So try to make learning a natural part of life. Encourage your students to learn about things they’re interested in during non-school hours too. Try to re-ignite their natural curiosity, their natural desire for learning that all of us are born with. Sadly, that curiosity often gets schooled out of us and out of our children. Let your students see you learning new things just because you want to, not because there’s a grade or a prize involved. Be cautious of using prizes and grades as motivation. When you hold that grade up as the goal, it takes away the value of knowledge. It sends the message, “I’m getting the knowledge, not so I can have knowledge, but so I can reach this other goal,” meaning the prize or the grade. Do you see the difference? We don’t want our children to think about knowledge in that inferior way. The focus should be the knowledge, not the grade or the prize.
So those are three tendencies you might want to watch out for. Let me also give you three helpful tips.
Tip #1: allow time to “de-school”
If you are coming from a classroom setting, it might be helpful to allow some time to “de-school,” to decompress. Your students have been programmed to do things a certain way, for several years perhaps. They have formed habits of thinking and behaving; and the longer they have been doing things a certain way in a classroom setting, the longer it’s going to take for their minds to let go of those things. So take some time off at the beginning just to get to know each other again, to make sure that your hearts are turned toward each other, and to allow you to start fresh when you’re beginning to homeschool.
Speaking of starting fresh…
tip #2: have a family discussion
Before you start in your home school, sit down with the kids and discuss how things are going to look different than it did in the classroom setting that they’re used to. Let your students know what to expect. And then give each other grace, especially for those first few weeks, because it might feel uncomfortable. It might almost feel like you’re playing school at home.
tip #3: consider your students’ individual needs
Let me just mention that some of these tendencies and tips might apply differently, depending on whether your student was doing well in the classroom setting or was struggling when you decided to take her out and homeschool.
If your child was the social butterfly, and being with those other kids all day filled up her friendship cup, then you’ll want to intentionally schedule time with friends outside of school. You might also want to emphasize the benefits of leisure time that your student will have. As I mentioned earlier, you’re going to get through school work much faster. You’re not going to be schooling from 8:00 to 4:00 every day. And your student might not be sure what to do with that leisure time. So encourage her to explore her own interests. Point out how there’s much less stress in your family, because you’re not going to have homework either. You might volunteer as a whole family in your community or in your church. You could discover some old traditions that take some time—those old traditions that can nourish your spirit—like gardening together or cooking from scratch or building and making things to use in your home, even those wonderful traditions of reading aloud as a family or singing together. All of those things are going to enrich your home and help your children discover the joy of leisure that they will have, now that they are homeschooling.
I hope these thoughts help you make a smoother transition as you get started homeschooling with the Charlotte Mason Method. Next time, I will offer three tendencies and three tips for those who have been using mainly textbooks and workbooks in their home school and are stepping away from that method to a Charlotte Mason approach.
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