The 2021 Homeschool Year is Over, and I Learned This

 

Oh, to be a young mom planning her curriculum for the year… (despite the fact that I didn’t buy a planner)

 

It’s summer of 2020 in Colorado.

 

But in a nerdy second-generation homeschooler corner of my brain, it’s almost fall.

 

Montessori cups and Waldorf toys jump in and out of my online shopping cart. My thrift store hunts become school-themed. I’ve even replaced the celebrity gossip pages on my broswer with hopeful Pinterest pins.

I say “hopeful” because we all know where this is going.

 

If there was one cutesy chalkboard sign that I need to paint and hang in my schoolroom, it’s this:

 

The school year I planned

will not be school year I experience.

 

I don’t even have to elaborate on that one.

 

At the start of the homeschool year, I wouldn’t have believed that to be so. But if you asked me half-way through the school year, I would have admitted it was most likely true.  As winter set in, and Colorado blizzards delayed our nature romps, it was becoming obvious that our daily our plans were shifting away from my “projections” and into our reality.

 

Let’s be real. If you know me, it’s not shocking. And if you homeschool yourself, you’re not even remotely shocked.

 

There are quite a few reasons why I homeschool, but flexibility is one of the pillars that keeps me tethered to homeschooling. As anyone who’s tried it knows, there is nothing more flexible than homeschooling. As an Army family that uproots itself every couple years (or months– greetings, summer 2021), flexibility allows us to have uninterrupted education. It enables us to learn to read while living out of boxes. It offers us the opportunity to have big life changes and not fall behind.

 

If I could keep this flexibility in mind, homeschooling life would be dandy.

 

Newsflash: not all is dandy.

 

The problem is the little perfectionist voice in my head that reminds me about the workbook pages we didn’t finish. It’s the same voice that questions why we did an entire unit on mammals instead of just two weeks of it. And it’s the voice that considers a trip to the closest paleontology center “a waste” if there isn’t some kind of field trip report produced afterwards.

 

Well, I’m deciding to leave that perfectionist voice behind with this school year.

 

Because after a full school year of overthinking, I’ve reached the realization that the perfectionist voice isn’t going like any deviation from “the plan.” No matter if the deviation is a good thing. Even if the deviation is a better thing. And how silly is it to be beholden to a plan simply because it was made?

 

More importantly, who came up with the plan? A fallible, non-psychic human (hey there, hello) who can’t predict the future of the entire year. Sure, I can roadmap the skills we need to master and the books or tools that can get us there. But if the year I planned is nothing like the year I experience, why will homeschooling be any different? 

 

 

 

Not surprisingly, the Army definitely swept into my personal calendar with a red pen this year. That alone was going to through my “plans” for a loop. But beyond that, it was my first year homeschooling with three kids.  It was our first time balancing Kindergarten and Nursery school.  We blended the Montessori method into our fairly traditional homeschooling curriculum for the first time. We moved houses. Life happened, and it happened in between the margins, not on the dotted line.

 

The end of the 2021 homeschool year tumbled to a close somewhere in the middle of it all.

 

Is it me, or does wisdom always seem to descend retrospectively? (and always while on a walk)

 

As this school year comes to a close, I’ve come full circle to a much bigger, and much more important realization.  It’s not just “the facts” that flexibility will be taken advantage of and plans will change. It’s not that the perfectionist voice needs to be squashed (though it does). Simply put, it’s this:

 

I don’t need the school year that I experience

to be the school year that I planned.

 

And maybe at the start I thought it had to be. But luckily, I’ve learned my lesson. My imaginary, projected “plans” got ripped out of my hands by the winds of life and swirled away dramatically. They didn’t need to stay, because it turns out I didn’t need them. What I needed was exactly what we studied this year: amid the boxes, amid the move, and blessedly amidst the three littles.

 

The 2021 homeschool year is over, and I’m glad that (on top of learning I need a planner), I learned that.

 

If you enjoyed:

“The 2021 Homeschool Year is Over, and I Learned This”

then check out my previous post:

“10 Things I’m Doing Differently Next Homeschool Year”