Teaching from Rest…Mostly

It’s that time again—the beginning of a new year of homeschool—and I’ve already been through the full spectrum of emotions. I’ve cycled through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance within a 10-minute math lesson, and we’re only adding 2+3. I’ll tell you what—teaching little people isn’t for the faint of heart.

I taught high school for 11 years, and the challenges of expressing big ideas were totally different from those of communicating fundamental information. It seems much harder to input information from scratch on a nearly-blank slate. And because I’m his mom and he’s my kid, there’s more familiarity and frustration than in a normal teacher/student relationship. When he confuses the sounds of G and J for the 27^th time in a row, it’s hard for me to keep a note of incredulity and impatience out of my voice, and I know he’s ready to tell me to “jo gump off a bridge” too.

But there is a better way…or so I’ve heard.

Teaching from Rest

Last year as I embarked on homeschooling for the first time, a sweet friend gave me a book called Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakeable Peace by Sarah Mackenzie. She said it was transforming her approach to teaching her own four children. As she’s doing a lovely job, I figured I’d better read the book in hopes of a similar transformation.

I did, and it has—or at least it has the potential to change my approach, if only I can remember and apply all the truths inside. Today I wanted to share just a couple of quotes from the book in order to encourage you and remind myself. If you’re not homeschooling at the moment, don’t worry. Some of these ideas apply just as well to whatever vocation or task you’re tackling. If you are homeschooling, I hope these encourage you like they do for me.

Hope for the Type-A Teacher

When I’m tempted to lose my cool when we’re not making progress as quickly as I’d planned, this reminder comes in handy.

When I focus on being diligent rather than rigorous, my measure for success is not, “Did I check off lesson 97 today?” I am going to want to check off lesson 97 at some point. But if I can’t do it today because my child is not achieving understanding, I don’t need to fret and worry and wring my hands.…When [the child] doesn’t understand the day’s lesson, it isn’t a setback; it’s just God showing us our marching orders for the day. My child doesn’t need me to fret and fear; she needs me to love and guide her with grace.

The List Gets Done…Eventually

Ouch. Needing to check off lesson 97 is my factory setting. I’m a list maker, a list checker, and perhaps a list worshipper. When my son’s frustration or confusion or straight-up hyper inattention prevents me from checking off lesson 97 today, it really messes with me. I feel that tightness in my chest, the narrowing of blood vessels in my temples. We. Must. Accomplish. This. Now sit down, five-year-old, and display an adult’s level of focus so we can do all your lessons in one go!

You can imagine how wildly successful this approach is.

But while it’s important to finish lesson 97 at some point, there’s no point in forcing him to finish it today if he’s already burned out. Do I want him to learn diligence? Of course. Does he need to master the information in lesson 97 so he’s not confused when we get to lesson 98? Definitely. But it won’t help if I yell at him to focus when a short break and a fresh approach would most likely solve the problem. God gave me grace to try that yesterday, and my son later finished the whole lesson in the sunshine on the back swing. See? Miracles can happen.

A Love of Learning

And even when we finish lesson 97, is that really the be-all and end-all of school? Is a completed textbook really the sum total of our labors?

The true aim of education is to order a child’s affections—to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought. Our greatest task, then, is to put living ideas in front of our children like a feast. We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish them in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence. It is to these ends that we labor.

Flaws in the System

I was talking with another friend and homeschool mom yesterday about our own school experiences. While we graduated from different places, we had similar experiences: our enjoyment of learning wasn’t because of our time in school; it was in spite of it. I’m sure we both had good teachers for many classes, but I know I fell between the cracks of the teachers’ interests.

I was too ordinary for advanced classes, too smart for extra help, too good for discipline, and too odd for teacher friendships. They plodded along through lessons while I doodled, wrote notes, or read my own books during class. As long as I wasn’t a disruption, that was good enough for them. And what can you expect from an underpaid, overworked teacher in a class of 35? I hate to admit it, but I’m sure I did the same thing when I was a teacher.

Filling a Bucket or Lighting a Fire?

But it’s pretty hard to fall between the cracks in homeschool. At the moment, all my efforts are split between two humans, only one of whom is my pupil. The other is a tiny, tea-spilling, paper-ripping tornado. I can see my son’s strengths and weaknesses (unfortunately, the feeling’s mutual), and I have a decent idea of what he needs to focus on. But is my job simply to ensure he has a good fact base stored in his cranium by graduation? Surely not.

Poet William Butler Yeats says, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Much more than instilling information in my children’s minds, I want to instill a love of learning in their hearts. When my approach is one of stress, frustration, and sheer grit, I may be filling their pails with water, but it’s dousing the fire underneath. This Smoky-the-Bear approach wins the battle but loses the war. That’s why I’m thankful for books like Teaching from Rest that remind me of truth.

Gandalf, the Life Coach

If, however, I can model the joys of learning in general—not just of specific subjects or facts but of learning as a natural, daily activity—then my kids will be well on their way to a successful education. At the end of the day, the outcome of their educations isn’t up to me. In the words of a wise wizard, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” And that, my friends, is quite enough.