Image Courtesy of: http://goalsandachievements.com/career/leadership-creativity-the-golden-rules-of-effective-brainstorming/ WARNING: This post contains swearing. Yes. I swear sometimes. If you offend easily or you're a child, please do not read on. I've felt the inner pull to plan my 'curriculum' out for the homeschool year of 2017... It's been tugging at my guts and boggling my brain (no irony there if you know anything about the gut/brain connection!).
The struggle has begun... I sit down to plan a school year based on my pasionate beliefs and powerful values around how children must be allowed to learn and experience life and learning with guidance not guilt, freedom not fear. Yes... sounds good. But when I get to the 'planning' phase, about to start writing my lists and plans and structures, my head and heart start to argue. You see, my mind is deeply indoctrinated in the old eduational paradigm. Afterall, thats how I was raised, that's the generation I belong to. ... you go to school, you study, you follow all the rules to the best of your ability and you don't rock the boat wherever possible... above all, do not be a free thinker, open feeler, intuitive learner. BAM! The pressure builds inside me and the inner clash reaches it's climax... I know in my heart this is BULLSHIT but my brain keeps saying YES this is the way forward. ...and I'm stuck. Paralysed. Planning grinds to a highly discombobulating halt. I know my old ways cannot be the way forward for the next generation of learners. I know it in the hard and fast fabric of my bones. And yet, those old neural pathways of how I know learning was for me - the shoulds and shouldn'ts of an authoritarian system - have a super strong hold on my senses. So... I sit down to plan in my usual (now apparently outdated) fashion... blank paper strewn over the dining table, coloured pens for brainstorming, lined pages for converting the results into lists and quantifyable measures of my children's progress, computer at the ready to research and decide on the online resources and text books I'll use to structure our learning. That's when the real stumbling blocks appear and crash headlong into my value systems. I don't want to teach this way. My kids don't want to learn this way. SHIT!
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6/12/2016 0 Comments When to quit HOMESCHOOLLet's get this straight. I'm not a quitter, but I do know when enough is enough....well eventually. But before that, I frequently worry that I'm not doing enough, not being organised, not 'teaching' properly, not providing enough proper opportunities for the kids, that they'll not get into University, that I'm letting them down for future jobs, that I can't sustain this, that they're not getting a good enough cross section of life.
Sometimes those thoughts make me want to quit... |
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