Sarah Mackenzie (00:05):
Hey, hey, Sarah McKenzie here, and this is the Read Aloud Revival, the podcast that helps your kids fall in love with books and helps you fall in love with homeschooling. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve been sharing the sessions that I did at the Great Homeschool Conventions in 2023. Episode 230 was all about helping your differently wired kids fall in love with reading, and I was joined by my good friend Colleen Kessler. Episode 231 was about homeschooling with babies and toddlers, and if you’re doing that, you need to listen to that one. So if you haven’t heard it yet, go listen to episode 231. Today I’m sharing the last of my sessions from the GHC conferences 2023. This one is all about answering that question that plagues us all. Am I doing enough? We all ask it and we all ask it all the time. So today we’re going to talk about it. Here we go.
(01:15):
So Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, he says he’s constantly haunted by this feeling that he should be doing different things, more things, more different things or more different things. Do you feel that way in your homeschool at all? Yeah. So you’re working on one thing and in your mind you’re thinking about all the other subjects and things that we should probably get to. And it feels really hard to be present and engaged and enjoy our homeschools when we’re constantly worried about whether or not we’re doing enough. I think this question of, am I doing enough is actually the biggest question that a lot of us are asking. In fact, how many of you in here have homeschooled for two years or less, let’s say? Excellent. Lots of you. Welcome to the dark side.
(02:06):
We’re super normal homeschoolers, so just let’s look at that really clear. Yeah, so here’s the thing. How many of you in this room have been homeschooling for let’s say 10 years or more? Excellent. So here’s the thing that all of these homeschoolers who’ve been homeschooling for 10 years or more can tell you is that this question of am I doing enough? We ask it all the time every day. So even if this is your first year homeschooling and you’re like, okay, I’m going to figure this out. No, you’re not. You come to me for encouragement and I promise I would deliver. No, really, the point is that this question of am I doing enough, it’s a question that we’re constantly asking all the time. So let me tell you a little bit about my family first. My husband Andrew and I had been married for 21 years and we have six kids who’ve been homeschooled all the way through.
(02:59):
When we first started homeschooling, he was not super excited about this idea. I didn’t know any real homeschoolers, I just heard about them on the internet and didn’t really want to send my oldest daughter to school. So he thought we were going to dress weird, start speaking our own language and stuff. So now when the kids are speaking their own language at the dinner table, I’m like not in front of dad. Our oldest is 21. She is a junior at Franciscan University in Steubenville here in Ohio. We live in Washington state, so kind of a long way from home. She’s studying English. Our second bear in the top middle is Allison. She is a freshman at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Drew, go Bees. I hear some SCAD people here. That’s fun. So Drew is our senior. He is the senior in our high school this year and next year he’ll also be heading to Franciscan University of Steubenville with plans to study marketing. And then those three at the bottom, Clara, Emerson and Beckett, Clara’s 11 and the identical twin boys are nine.
(04:03):
Here’s what I will, first of all, before I go any further, I want to remind you this because I’ll forget to mention this later on. I’m going to mention some book recommendations, some podcast recommendations, things like that. If you want all of those notes for you, just text the word, it’s not the word, it’s letters, text the letters, GHC to the number 33777, and I’ll send those to you. So you’re going to get some notes just in case. That way you can just relax tonight. This is the beginning.
(04:28):
How many of you, this is your first homeschool conference you’ve ever been to? Okay, so we need to talk about the exhibit hall before we get any further. So it hasn’t opened yet, so you haven’t gone in there, okay? I want you to remember when you walk into that amazing exhibit hall that they are spreading a feast and it’s not like you go to a restaurant and order everything on the menu. You don’t even need some whole categories on the menu. One of the things that’s so important, I’m so glad we’re doing this talk here at the beginning of the conference, is that out of all the speakers who are here and everybody who’s on stage and everything that you’re going to hear and learn this weekend, which it’s so energizing to me to be around so many other homeschoolers, I just love to be in the same room with all of you and in this busy convention center where you look around and you’re like, oh my gosh, because we’re at home alone doing it every day, and so you’re seeing all these people around you.
(05:24):
But one of the really key important things to remember is that nobody on stage can tell you how to homeschool. So if you came to this conference hoping that we could tell you what to do, the problem is that your children are not our children and God has given you the grace to homeschool your children and you are the expert on your own homeschool. So what we’re going to do today is we’re going to ask this question of, am I doing enough? There’s a way to get to an answer. Your answer is going to be a little different from the person sitting down the row from you and then from everybody else in this room. They may be similar, but they’re not going to necessarily be identical.
(05:57):
So what we’re going to do today in this next 45 minutes is we’re going to get really clear on how, if you’re doing enough so that when you go into that exhibit hall, when you go to any other sessions, and most importantly when you go back home to your kids, you can remember you’ve already decided what’s most important. You’ve already decided what’s enough and that God is giving you the grace to be the expert of your own homeschool. I do this thing, I wonder if any of you do this thing where it happens, especially if you go on social media. So if you go on Instagram, I’m not on Instagram anymore for this very reason. I’ll open up Instagram and I start scrolling, and in the course of about 60 seconds, I see somebody making beautiful themed birthday cakes. Someone else whose kids are doing two math programs because apparently one is not enough. There’s somebody else whose kids are learning Latin, someone else’s RV schooling and taking their kids all over the country to these really cool field trips.
(07:02):
Someone else has their kids stand next to a stack of books that they read. It’s like as tall as they are and someone else is grinding around grain. Everybody has chickens. Yes? Yeah.And I combine all of these different people into one fictional composite woman and I compare myself against her and then in 60 seconds I see all this and I look up at my house and I don’t know what you see at your house, but it does not look like it was on Instagram. And all of a sudden I feel like I couldn’t possibly be doing enough. Look at all these things other people are doing. I forget those are 30 different people and there was something that they were all trading off to do that thing as well. So hard to keep our eyes on our own work, isn’t it? But it’s really, really important.
(07:50):
I think the first thing to ask ourselves is what do we mean when we say, am I doing enough? How would you finish that sentence? Am I doing enough to? What are we most worried about? Is it get your kids into college, read on grade level, finish the math book. Am I doing enough to make sure my kids have everything they need before they get to high school age? Tell me, just call out anything that comes to mind for you. Am I doing enough to what? Get them graduated, yeah. Which is the goal to get rid of them, right? Just kidding kids. I don’t actually mean that. Okay, so yes, to get them graduated. What else? Raise a what? A functional adult. Very good. Yes, we want to raise functional adults, which we really worry about when our kids are like, I don’t know, 17 year old boys about to go to college and theoretically speaking completely. My 17 year old says, nobody bakes anything good around here anymore since Audrey’s gone. Audrey’s my oldest, and this is true actually.
(09:00):
So I was like, you could fix that. You could bake something. And he’s like, yeah, I don’t know how, do they make kits for this? I keep thinking he’s thinking like a Lego kit kind of. I shouldn’t even tell this story. You’re all never going to listen to a thing I say after this. And so Clara, the 11 year old’s like, “Do you mean Like a cookie mix?” He’s like, “Yeah, they make those?” And I’m thinking, oh good. This is the one who’s the most adult next. And then what happens to me, and I don’t know if this has ever happened to you where you’re at church and you realize that your nine-year-old doesn’t know how to tie his shoes or something. Because you’ve always bought Velcro because that’s why God made Velcro. My husband was like, “In order to teach our twins how to tie their shoes, we should buy them shoes with ties.” And I’m like, “Why would we do that to ourselves?”
(09:55):
How about we just buy a couple of strings for them to practice at home? Not when I’m trying to get out the door for church, how about that? But what I do is I tend to go global. They don’t know how to tie their shoes or they say something like, France is one of the United States of America, and I’m like, I am failing you. Surely we are not doing enough. I kind of go global. So one of the things that I think we can think about when we’re asking this question of am I doing enough and we ask, am I doing enough to make sure my kids get into college or am I getting enough to… And when you’re thinking in your mind, how will I know that I’m doing enough? Well, if I was to answer that question, I could say, I’ll know that I’m doing enough when my kids get into college, there’s just a little problem because you’re done at that point. You can’t do anything about it.
(10:45):
And I think even when we ask the question, we all get a little bit uncomfortable because we know that our kids are not recipes. So it’s not like we can say, how do I know I’m doing enough to have my kids hold onto their faith? Well, we all know very good faithful parents who have kids who’ve walked away from their faith. Our kids are not recipes. It’s not like we read aloud enough and we do use the right curriculum and we keep our patience and don’t lose our temper in our homeschool. We make sure that we teach them history on a three or four year cycle, then we can put all of these ingredients in and out pops a well-educated child is just not how it works and we know that. Actually, that’s not really how recipes work for me personally going back to the cookie thing.
(11:33):
Actually, I’ll tell you a little bit about that because my friend Catherine makes these beautiful, delicious raspberry chocolate ganache cakes and when Alice our second was turning 16, I asked her, “What kind of cake do you want? Froyo?” That’s my speed, Baskin Robbins, you want to go to Baskin Robbins? And she was like, “Oh, do you think you could make one Olivia’s mom?” I’m like, oh, okay. So I call Olivia’s mom and I’m like, “Hey, can you send me the recipe you use to make that gluten-free chocolate ganache cake you make for Olivia’s birthday?” And she’s like, “Oh, it’s so easy. You cannot mess this up.” That one didn’t make it to Instagram funnily enough. This is kind of a lot of times what parenting feels like as well. We’re like, but I did all the right things and I’m not getting the results that I was hoping for.
(12:30):
So here’s the bad news. The bad news is that there is no guarantee that when you’re homeschooling you’re going to get the results that you want. The good news is that’s not what God has asked you to do anyway. And we’re going to talk today about knowing exactly what God is asking us to do and how do we figure out that we’re doing it even when we don’t get to see the results yet. That’s what faith is for. We wouldn’t need faith if we knew it was all going to work out. The whole act of homeschooling is one big enormous act of faith and that’s why it feels scary, and that’s why we ask this question of, am I doing enough? I mean, look around you. Every person in this room is here because we’re asking this question. You are not alone when you’re asking this question, am I doing enough? I can’t possibly be doing enough.
(13:21):
So let’s get really clear on one thing. Am I doing enough is not a complete question, which I think is really the root of why it feels so overwhelming to us. Am I doing enough to, let’s just play this out for a second. Am I doing enough to help my kids hold onto their faith? What kinds of things might you do if you were like, I want to make sure I’m doing enough to help my kids hold onto your faith. Just call some stuff out. Go to church, Bible study, pray, scripture memorization, devotionals. Yes, okay, but if you were asking yourself this question, am I doing enough, when you were looking at your kid’s handwriting, you’ve had this moment, right? And you sit down and you’re like, I don’t know how I’ve missed this for so long. That is atrocious. Either you’re going to be a doctor or nothing at this rate.
(14:13):
If I was to say, are you doing enough to help your kids get a good math education, any of those things would be a no. Scripture, memory verses, reading the Bible, going to church, those aren’t really helping them. Okay, so now if we were going to say, am I doing enough to help my kids get a solid math education? What kinds of things would you do? Practice math again and again and again and again. Anybody done long division? That is the litmus test. If you do not want to quit homeschooling, when you are teaching long division, you are of another species. That’s amazing. I’m like, I didn’t like this the first time I learned it, let alone. But if we were asking ourselves, how do I know if I’m doing enough to give my kids a solid math education and we answer the questions of practice math, we do a little bit of math every day, we get a math curriculum. Would that answer our question of helping our kids hold onto their faith?
(15:08):
Does that make sense? When we say, am I doing enough? That’s not a complete question. Am I doing enough to what? Because once we get really clear, once we have to answer that question, am I doing enough to and we fill in the blank, then solutions start to bubble to the surface. What it forces us to do is it forces us to get extremely clear on our goals. So we could even take this with an example. One of the things that I really like to do with my kids and I just teach it to them because I enjoy it and I don’t enjoy a lot of things I have to teach them. So I sometimes pick things I do enjoy Shakespeare, I really like to do Shakespeare with my kids. Now, if I was to say, am I doing enough to… How could I finish that? Well, if for me, if I was to say I want my kids to have read every Shakespeare play, that is not my goal, by the way.
(16:00):
Then the natural things that would bubble up solutions to that would be well then you need to read them all. And you probably need to go to some plays and you need to make sure you make a list of them. That’s not actually my goal. I don’t really care if my kids know all the Shakespeare plays. What I do want them to know is know who he is. I’ll tell you this, a couple of weeks ago, one of my twins, because I interview authors and read a lot of revival like Sam Smith, that’s why I was doing this. I was pretending like he was right here. Like Sam Smith and other authors and they’re used to that by now. So now we’ll be reading and they’ll be like, have you met this author? So we’re reading Romeo and Juliet and my nine year olds are like, so when are you going to interview Shakespeare? I was like, history. And France is not a state. Just to be clear.
(16:48):
My goal is actually that I want my kids to know who he is. When they hear Shakespeare, to know that he’s not down the street right in the green number. And also that I want them to enjoy at least one of his plays and so that when they hear or see him in the future, they don’t go, not for me. That’s all. That’s my goal. Because I know that I only have my kids for 18 years-ish. They always bounce back fry here. That means most of their reading and most of their learning should come after they leave our homes, not while they’re here. That takes so much pressure off. When you discover that your kids should do most of their reading after they leave your home, that makes it very easy for your goal to shift from reading all the right books to loving reading so that they will keep wanting to read books after they leave your home.
(17:39):
So same thing with Shakespeare. Now if I ask the question, am I doing enough to help my kids fall in love with Shakespeare? That’s a whole different answer because for me I’m like, well, what do I need for that? I think I just need to read one play and make sure that they know it’s funny. They watch it, we can listen to it. Maybe we go to it, a local performance of it or something depending on the Shakespeare play preview, just that’s my public service announcement. When you get clear, the solutions start to naturally bubble up and they shrink down to size because am I doing enough is this big nebulous question that does not have an answer. So the reason it feels overwhelming is because it’s not a real question. You will never be able to say yes to it. So we have to get really clear.
(18:23):
All right, here’s what we’re going to do. Everybody in this room probably has something that they are worried about right now with at least one of their kids. Let’s just stay academically. Let’s just stay with academics tonight. There is a series of few questions that you can run through and answer for yourself because you are the expert on your child. Nobody else knows your kids as well as you do, and nobody else cares about your kids as much as you do. So there’s a series of questions that we can ask that can help us figure out how to answer this question for whatever it is that you’re most worried about tonight. It requires that we know the heart of education, which is really about knowledge, skill, and virtue, which we can also think of what do our kids know? What can they do and what do they love? And if we think about this, this is education. You learn things, information, so you learn knowledge and then you grow in skills so that you can do that long division someday, maybe. Learning how to read, learning how to do different things, learning skills.
(19:30):
And then what do your kids love? Which is really wisdom. It’s virtue. It’s that heart stuff that we have a hard time putting our finger on and the schools can’t even touch, but that we definitely can cultivate in our homeschools and we very much want to. So we can ask our question. Let’s go back to that Shakespeare example actually. Am I doing enough to help my kids love Shakespeare? I just want them to leave my homeschool having loved Shakespeare. Now I can ask the question, what does my child need to know in order to love Shakespeare? Okay, well, they need to know who Shakespeare is and maybe one of his plays. Maybe just know that if they hear the word Hamlet, they’re like, oh, Shakespeare wrote that. I never read it. I have no idea what the story is, but I know.
(20:13):
Okay, what does my child need to do? Well, I want my child to be able to either read or watch Shakespeare and kind of know what’s happening. I mean, no one really knows what’s happening at the first time they’re reading Shakespeare, so it’s fine, but not be so intimidated that they think they can’t figure it out. And what do I want them to love? Well, I want them to love Shakespeare. I want them to love the written word. We can do this with anything. We can do it with math. Am I doing enough to… Someone call out something they’re worried about with another academic so we can just run with it. Writing. Okay, good. So am I doing enough to make sure my child can write an essay? Okay, awesome. So what do our kids need to know for them to write an essay? Okay, composition, structure, same thing. Grammar ish, we can talk about that too. We can list things. You could actually go down into that exhibit hall and you’ll see a whole bunch of things that they can know to learn how to write an essay.
(21:13):
What do they need know how to do? Well, actually, let’s go back to the structure thing. Know how to structure their thoughts. They need to know how to connect ideas. And what do they need to love? Well, this is the word that trips us up a little bit because some of our kids will not love writing and that’s fine. Instead if you get tripped up here, just say, how can my child grow in virtue here? And that’s another way around to think about it. So what do I need to know for my child to know what they need to know, do what they need to do and love in order for them to write an essay. Not that much actually. You could teach a child to know and do and love how to write an essay with one essay. You don’t need to teach them to write 12 essays, 14 essays in a year.
(21:55):
So a lot of times when we ask this question, we get really clear, we realize it’s less than we think. It only feels overwhelming when it’s that big nebulous question that’s not clear, not specific, and we haven’t taken the time to think about what we really want for them. So let’s do another thing. How about am I doing enough to make sure my kids have enough math to do the SATs? Does that sound reasonable? Okay, so if I want to make sure my kids have a good enough math education to take an SAT test, what do they need to know? Probably things that are in math books. Can you tell my husband teaches math at my house. My kids get to about fourth grade and I’m like, “Tap, I’m out. It’s either online classes or you’re up.”
(22:45):
What do our kids need to know? Things that are in math books up till about algebra two. And what do they need to know how to do? Basic math computation. And what do I want them to love? That’s a stretch. We’re going to go with virtue on this one. The ability to stick with something they don’t know how to do because nobody knows how to do geometry until they sit and do geometry. No baby is born knowing how to do algebra so they can grow in virtue by learning to tackle something and sit down with something and realize, I don’t know how to do this, and then I do. Learning how to close that gap. Well, if you have a fourth grader and you’re worried about, am I doing enough to make sure my kid can get SATs score in math, you’re going to laugh at yourself when you do this exercise because then you realize, oh, they’re not taking the SAT this year.
(23:39):
I don’t need to make sure they’ve gotten through all of that. What do I need them to know, do and love right now? Well, it turns out in math, it’s just the next thing. I’ll tell you, a few years ago I came to a conference, it was several years ago now actually. I came to a conference just like this one. I was really struggling with my now 17 year old son in math. Man, we were having such a hard time and so I came to the conference and I found Steve Deme at Matthew C. We weren’t using Matthew C. I didn’t tell him that at the time. I just was like, I don’t know what to do with my kid. He’s not getting it. He’s like, okay, tell me what he knows. So I list he can do this and this and this and tell me what he doesn’t know. I list a long list of things. This is where we’re getting stuck. He’s like, okay, here’s what you’re going to do. And he just gives me a few next steps. He walks away.
(24:28):
And it doesn’t dawn on me until he’s walking away that he never asked how old my son was. He could be six, he could be 16. Why didn’t he ask? Well, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how old he is. The only thing that matters is what does he know so that we know how to get him to the next step. Same thing is true with writing an essay. Same thing is true with reading. It doesn’t matter what you think your child should know. The only thing you can do is say, what do you know so we can help you take the next step? So then we can ask these questions of am I doing enough to help you take the next step in math? And the answer’s probably a lot smaller than you think. Am I doing enough to make sure my kid can read? Anybody got struggling readers in here today? All six of my kids were late readers. We’re talking about it on Saturday at, I don’t remember what time, 2:30 I think. So come to that session if you can.
(25:21):
Am I doing enough to make sure my kid can read? Okay, well, what do kids need to know how to do to read? Well, it kind of depends on the kid, but they probably need to know how to decode words and sound out letters for a really long time for some of them. And they need to be able to do that slowly over time and they need to love stories because if they don’t love stories, then they’re not going to want to read for themselves. So now I can ask myself that question. I’ve got a kid that’s not reading, how do I know if I’m doing enough? Well, a little bit of phonics like 10 minutes a day and a lot of read-alouds and time is enough. The tricky thing is, and I’m going to talk about this Saturday too, that third piece is the hardest one because we’re not in control of it. The good news once again is that we’re not supposed to be. You were never asked to be in control of that third variable.
(26:18):
When we start to feel panicky and you start to feel like, I don’t know if I’m doing enough and you’re going to feel it when you go to that exhibit hall, you’re going to walk and sit there and you’re going to see a whole booth that’s like, I didn’t even know this subject existed and now I’m pretty sure all my children need it. And I’m going to rearrange my whole schedule in order to make it fit. So you can ask yourself what do we need in order to get to where we… I mean, God has given you a unique vision for your homeschool. He’s given you unique kids and unique circumstances and I do not believe that you need any big curriculum overhaul or just the right books or just the right lesson plans to fall more in love with your homeschool because God has given you the kids in your life today, your family today. This is the day the Lord has made. Not the one where you have everything figured out, not the one where you’re like, we did the best homeschool year ever.
(27:16):
We all do that right at the beginning of the year. We’re like, this year, this is going to be the best year yet I am taking the shrink wrap off the science curriculum this year, but this is the day the Lord has made. Even if you’re overwhelmed, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s the most amazing school day you’ve ever had, what do we need to do to make sure we’re doing enough? Here’s what we’re going to do. Think in your mind of the one thing that you, there’s probably more than one, but just pick one for now. The one thing that you’re worried about that you’re hoping to figure out, maybe you’re hoping to figure it out this weekend. That you find yourself when you’re in your homeschool, you find yourself going, I just don’t think I’m doing enough to, what is it? What subject? Is it math? Is it writing? Is it reading? Is it history? Is it science? Are you getting kids ready to take tests or to get into universities? Are you getting ready to graduate kids?
(28:07):
Do you have small kids and you’re like, I just want to know if I’m doing enough to survive my day. You can really think about whatever you’re struggling with right now, ask yourself, get yourself really clear. Don’t say, am I doing enough. Require yourself to say, am I doing enough to and fill in the blank and then ask yourself, what do your kids need to know, do and love for you to know that you’re doing enough to do that thing? Just like we’ve been doing. So how do I know if I’m doing enough to teach my kids to write an essay? You just run down that know, do and love.
(28:39):
I’m going to give you a second. If you have a paper and pen, get out, paper and pen. If you don’t grab your phone because I know you have that. And open up the notes up and I’m going to give you about three minutes. And think through, you can pick one thing per kid, you can just think of one thing. The one thing that came to mind first when I said, what are you most worried about in your homeschool right now and run through this right now.
(29:02):
Anybody get some clarity? Here’s the thing, this is going to come up for you again and again this weekend. It’s going to come up for you at home. It’s going to come up for you as you’re finishing your school year. It’s going to come up for you in the fall and you can constantly ask yourself these questions. You can do it on the fly. You can go just a minute. When you’re sitting next to your child and they’re struggling with their spelling words again and you have a moment of panic, I’m not doing enough, my kid will never learn how to spell ever. You can go, hold on a second, I’ll be right back. I’m going to go use the bathroom, which is where you keep the Hershey kisses. That should be the most important homeschooling advice you learned today. This weekend. Keep your chocolate in the bathroom, top shelf in the back, right corner, and then you tell your kids, “I need to go. I’ll be right back.”
(30:57):
And then you go to the bathroom and you pop one of those in your mouth and you think, okay, am I doing enough to, what is it? It’ll shrink it right down to size. So often I think our stress in homeschooling comes from an unspoken assumption that we’re launching our kids into the world. This is why we panic when they can’t tie their shoes or something. Just like a month ago.
(31:23):
I live in Spokane, which is where the Zags lived, I have basketball fans in here? So we are not a big sports family. It’s like the understatement of the year. So my twins though wanted to be signed up for basketball because everybody does basketball in Spokane. So I’m like, okay. So then I’m like, I guess we should teach them the rules of basketball. My husband’s like, “Yeah, you might want to YouTube them that.” So we did. I YouTubed it, rules of basketball because I didn’t want to drop them off at basketball practice being like, what do you do with this thing?. So we watch this YouTube video and then the very next night at dinner, my husband’s saying something to our older son about baseball and one of the twins is like, which sport is baseball again? My husband’s like, these children can recite long passages of Shakespeare in perfect British accents, but they do not know what’s basic sports. You do realize we’re raising American children, right?
(32:18):
In that case, it was just like, oh, funny. It’s fine with me. Their wives will thank me one day that they can recite Shakespeare and I don’t know what baseball is, but it’s not so funny when they say something academic that you’re like, oh, we should have done that. I’ve got one more. I’m telling all my most embarrassing stories tonight, but my son is 17. He’d love it that I was telling this story, I’m sure. When he was like 14, I don’t know, he was old enough that we should have been beyond this. My husband took all of our kids to the bank to get their own savings accounts, and when they did that, the teller, they did the paperwork, whatever, and then she’s like, okay, you just need to sign here. And she was like, “Okay, so just write my name.” She’s like, “Yeah, your signature.” I wasn’t there, but apparently he gives her this blank face. My husband’s telling me this and I’m like, I mean, we read about John Hancock, so I don’t know.
(33:18):
Anyway, so he has a blank face and she’s like, your name Incursive. Blank face. So she looks at my husband, she’s like, “What are they teaching kids in school these days?” He was like, “I know, right?” The younger kids are learning cursive, don’t worry. But anytime this comes up, anytime you kind of get like, I’m not doing enough, you might not be. And actually I feel a little bit compelled to tell you that in many, many cases you probably aren’t. But once again, we have to stop and ask ourselves what we’re being asked to do here. If I was to put a tomato seed in any of your hands and say, turn this into a tomato, could you do it? You can’t do it. I mean, you could do something. You could take it home, you could prepare some soil, you could water it and pull the rocks out and you could plant that seed and you could feed it and water it and make sure it has enough sun, but you can’t turn a tomato seed into a tomato, which is not a problem because we’ve never been asked to do that.
(34:28):
And that’s exactly like in your homeschool. You are not responsible for the miracle. Our job is to get up every day and to this day that the Lord has made, help our kids take one more step, which sometimes is not forward. Anyone who’s taught a kid how to read, anyone who’s potty trained a toddler knows that it’s not a straight path. That’s not how it works. But it’s kind of like if we were to plant that seed and then we were to dig it up to make sure that the roots were there, you don’t get to do that. That’s what faith is for. We can imagine Jesus on a hillside with crowd of 5,000 people who are hungry. I love to imagine this. I don’t know if you do this, we’ll be on a family trip and I can tell especially when our kids were younger, it’s getting close to lunchtime and we need to get food now. And my husband’s like, “We’ve got time. Lunch isn’t for another hour or two,” and you’re like, I don’t think you understand. Once everybody melts down, there’s no getting them back.
(35:38):
So I can imagine the disciples being like, “No, for real, Jesus, you need to send them away. They’re hungry. They’re going to be hungry.” Which is how I feel every Tuesday morning. My children are hungry and there’s more of them than I can handle, and I’m like, send them away. Put them on that bus. But what strikes me is that Jesus could have instantly fed everybody in that crowd, but he didn’t. That would’ve been more impressive, probably would’ve been more of the talk of the town, more jaw dropping. He didn’t. What he did is he said, “Bring me what you have,” which wasn’t very much. Was a couple of loaves of bread and a few fish. He said, bring me what you have, and then he made it enough. So you run through these questions to find out what are you supposed to do? How do you till the soil, how do you plant the seed? How do you bring your basket? Your job is not to work the miracle. Your job is to bring the basket and he’s responsible for the miracle.
(36:46):
For several years, we haven’t done it in a while, some friends and I went to this cabin. It wasn’t a cabin, she called it her summer. You have any friends like this? They’re like, come see my cabin. You’re like, pretty sure this is bigger than my house. But yeah, a few of us who are homeschooling together, we’d go and we’d say we were planning for our homeschool. We were a little bit, we’d spend one or two nights out there. We would plan for our homeschool co-up. And this is my first year out there. We just moved to Spokane. So I live in the northwest, so there’s all these evergreen trees and glittering lakes. It’s beautiful. So it’s really early the first morning. I’ve never spent the night away from my kids before and I’m like up because my body’s like, where are the babies? And they’re not here. So anyway, I’m going to go on a walk like this would be great. I’m going to go for a walk. Everybody else is asleep.
(37:38):
So I put my earbuds in and I start to go on this walk and nobody knows where I am, but that’s fine because I’m just going on a morning walk. And I hear some snap, crackle, snap crackle. I’m like, oh, there’s deer out this morning and I keep walking. There’s a lot of deer. It was not until I hear this really, really loud crack that I take my earbuds out and step to the side for this moose, this massive female moose to step out in front of me in the trail. I don’t know. I was going to say from me to this black podium thing, but this might get a little shorter every time I tell this story. I don’t know. I don’t know. You have moose in Ohio? Yes, no? No. Okay. So whatever you’re imagining much bigger than that. They’re huge and they’re really dangerous. I’m really glad I did not know this at the time, but especially at nesting time or it’s not called nesting, it’s called something else because moose don’t live in nest. I also don’t teach science.
(38:47):
When they have their babies, female moose are very dangerous. They’re the number one cause of death at Yellowstone National Park. Glad I didn’t know that at the time. I did know I was looking at this massive creature and I’m like, so I turn around and I start to run and the moose runs after me. I freeze and the moose freezes. I’m seeing headlines. Mother of six mauled by moose while she was planning for her homeschool. It turns out, this is your PSA in case you weren’t into any moose in downtown Cincinnati, that moose don’t have peripheral vision. So what you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to be completely silent and get out of their line of sight and then they’ll think you’re gone and you just wait for them to leave and then you can go away. But that was not my natural instinct.
(39:35):
My natural instinct was to scream a prayer at the top of my lungs and I don’t know if the moose was just overwhelmed by my holiness or what, but I am screaming this prayer and slowly just backing up until I got enough distance that I was pretty sure I could outrun it at that point. And I’ve never run so fast in my life. There is a point, I promise. The point is that if you were to talk to a park ranger and say, “Okay, what do you do if you see a moose?” They would be like, “Number one, don’t yell. Number two, don’t run.” And you’re going to do this in your homeschool. I promise you’re going to buy something this weekend you don’t need. I promise the next week you’re going to go home and you’re going to yell at your kids or you’re going to lose your patients or say something unkind. We all do it. And the good news is you’re not expected to do this perfectly. You’re not expected to know how it turns out you are not responsible for the miracle. That’s what grace is for.
(40:37):
And you are the expert on your own homeschool and the expert of your own kids, and nobody on this earth loves them more than you do. So when you’re looking at different resources and tools and you’re listening to different sessions, keep reminding yourself, I’m the expert of my homeschool, what is the vision God is giving us for our homeschool? How can I make this fit in or where does this fit in? Or what small piece of this fits in? Without feeling like you’re constantly judging yourself by that Instagram scroll or by whether or not you finish, fill in the blank curriculum. It’s been a rare, rare, I don’t even know if it’s ever happened where I’ve finished a whole anything, any curriculum. How many of you went to public school growing up? Same. So how many times did you finish the math book? Never. I guarantee you never did it because the teachers picked and chose. They picked the units, the chapters you were going to do, where you got through to chapter 12 or however it was organized. Same thing with your social studies books, I bet. And pretty much across the curriculum.
(41:49):
And yet we think we’re not done until we have finished every single lesson and crossed every t and dotted every i. We’re holding ourselves to a standard that is virtually impossible. So if we can remember that our job is to till that soil and to water that seed, but his job is the miracle, we’re in much, much, much better shape. Are you doing enough? You probably need to do less than you think and you can never actually be enough, which is what faith is for. God bless you, and thank you so much for coming. I hope there is some takeaway from this session for you, something you don’t want to forget, something little even that can serve you in your homeschool today. Now let’s hear from the kids about the books they’ve been loving lately.
Teddy (42:45):
Hi, my name is Teddy and I live in the United States, and my favorite book is Secret of the Hidden Scrolls because it’s so epic.
Paul (42:57):
Hi, my name is Paul. I live in Iowa, and the book I recommend is Robinhood because it has the perfect amount of adventure to not be scary and the perfect amount of peace to be not just boring or something. It’s the most amazing book I’ve ever read and I would highly recommend it.
Eve (43:24):
Hello, my name is Eve and I live in Iowa and love seeing Black dots because I like counting.
Levi (43:35):
My name is Levi. I live in Kentucky. I recommend the Fire Cat. It has a good moral.
Olivia (43:43):
Hi, my name’s Olivia and I live in Kentucky. I recommend Little House on the Prairie because it tells our story.
Sarah Mackenzie (43:54):
Thank you kids. If your kids would like to tell us about a book they love, head to readaloudrevival.com/message to leave a voicemail and we will air it on an upcoming episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ll be back in two weeks. You might remember from episode 209, my oldest daughter Audrey came on the show and answered questions about homeschooling and we just did a sort of look back on what worked and what didn’t. Well by popular demand, she’s coming back. She’s coming back to the show, she’s going to answer more questions. That’s coming up two weeks from now. In the meantime though, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
