Learning along side our children

On three separate occasions this week I have had people tell me that they could never home school because it takes a special kind of person to be able to do it. This of course made me wonder if they were trying to be nice and give me a compliment at being able to do it, or if they were flat out calling me a nut. I chose to go with the compliment. It got me thinking though, what do they mean by that? Who is this special person and what makes them so special? I can assure you I am not special, I am just a Mom, plain and simple. What special powers do people think we home schooling parents possess?

For me, one of the things you need as a homeschooling parent is the ability to admit you do not know everything. This is hard for some, but you have to be able to say, “I have no idea what the smoothest surface in the world is, let’s go look it up”, just as an example. Some think this makes you look weak in front of your kids. I think it makes you look human. Being able to learn along side of your child shows them that you can learn something new at any age, that learning doesn’t stop because you are an adult and that learning isn’t something that is done at a certain time of day or in a certain setting. Learning is constant, it is everywhere and everyone is in the same boat.

This was the case with me recently. Julien is learning to ski this year. Our local homeschooling group meets at the hill by our house every Monday and we decided to try some lessons to see if he liked it. He did. He loved it actually, but seeing as he sometimes needs help going down , and my husband only snowboards and that makes it difficult to take little ones down the hill, I decided to learn to ski as well. Now, despite being a professional ballet dancer for, oh 15 years, I am really not that athletic. Heck, my Mom put me into ballet because I was so clumsy. She thought if I was going to fall down all the time, I might as well do it gracefully.
 

{Photo courtesy of the fabulous Annie Lance, thanks Annie!}

My first lesson didn’t go that well. A combination of not the greatest teacher coupled with the before mentioned clumsiness left me feeling discouraged and a bit off skiing. Then I looked at my five year old watching me. He was seeing my reaction to it all. He was watching, just as I have watched as he learned to swim, learned to skate, learned to ski, he was watching me struggle. Then he smiled and told me I had done well and that I just had to work on my “pizza”, aka snowplow, a bit but not to give up, it would get easier. He watched me struggle and he watched as I learned. I realized that this was perhaps one of the best things I could teach him. Sometimes things are hard, and we all struggle, the thing that matters is what you do with that challenge.

So this week, I hopped on the skis again, and it was easier, and my snowplow did get better and together we went down the mountain, cheering each other along. Learning side by side and growing a little bit closer. I realized that the magical power that everyone thinks we have isn’t magic, it is just curiosity and the desire to keep learning. One of my main reasons for wanting to home school is to instill a lifetime love of learning. What better way to teach that than to learn along side of them?

So next week we are heading to the hill early. We want to get a few runs in before our lesson. Julien thinks we can master our turns before the afternoon. I am not as confident, but it doesn’t really matter. We are having fun and we are learning, together.