What a bumpy start we’ve had to the year - if that’s not the biggest understatement ever...!
I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for your support of Mustud and of this amazing team. It has been a privilege to be able to continue to keep the music going. It hasn’t been without its challenges, so thank you for being patient and giving us encouragement along the way. It has kept us going. As has wine. The Simpsons. Coffee. More wine...
Thankfully, our sense of humour remains intact, so we can still laugh when things happen, like Google deciding that because I have been emailing so much over the last month (I was), it means I must have been hacked (I was not), and they suspend your outbound emails (a problem that requires wine). If you haven't heard from me recently, this is why!
Temptations to throw technology out the window aside, I know we are all feeling the effects of a rapidly changing world right now. It’s challenging, disorientating, confronting. We can’t escape it and we certainly can’t control it, but we can decide how to approach things and choose some positivity amongst all the chaos.
I’ve found it tricky to navigate too but have realised that by keeping my routine, I’m feeling pretty grounded and I have discovered that the feelings seem to come in waves. It’s okay to have a complete and utter meltdown, it’s okay not to have all the answers, it’s okay to get it wrong, it’s okay to let go of ‘perfect’ and go with ‘the best I can do right now’.
While we are continuing to keep the music pouring out of creatives in our community, I’ve also been thinking about what else I have up my sleeve that might be useful during this time. After many conversations with you (I see you parents), I can see there is a lot of overwhelm around the home schooling that has found its way into every home en masse.
Turns out, I do have something up my sleeve (drum roll...). For those of you who don’t know, I was homeschooled for a significant portion of my education (Grade 2-4 and Grade 7-11). Given a lot of us have found ourselves suddenly homeschooling, I wanted to share my tips with you from the perspective of what it was like for me as a kid vs. now, with the clarity and benefit of adulthood and hindsight. I hope this might help you in some small way.
Just so you know I wasn’t lying about the trampoline situation….
Now, before you all try and conjure up images of Nerdy Mell, I have to break it to you…I wasn’t particularly nerdy, other than my piano practice (that’s the part that sounds awful and repetitive and everyone wants to make it stop…not the part when you play the music you already know and it sounds awesome). Truth be told, I didn’t want to be homeschooled, however, being the optimist that I am and being able to make the best of situations, I locked in on the advantages and left the rest at the door…apart from my angsty teenage years. Got to have a bit of ‘tude to keep everyone on their toes right?
Okay, so how does this help you?
My goal in sharing this with you is to get my point across that none of us has to be perfect in this and that readjusting the expectations of yourself and your kids will help with the stress of not meeting your high expectations. Lower them a bit. In fact, lower them a lot.
School is like work. Most of us go to work 9-5. Some of us have a lot of responsibility and some have a little less. But I can guarantee that none of us actually work 8 solid hours a day. There are a gazillion distractions, people to compare ourselves to, better things to do, procrastination, drawing things out, unnecessary meetings, need I go on? I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I’m just making the point that we don’t just clock in, do 8 hours of solid, uninterrupted work and then clock out. It’s the same with school.
Tip One: Your kids don’t need to be ‘doing school work’ for 5-6 hours a day. I promise you, they are learning more in 1-3 hours.
Why?
1. There are less distractions;
2. You can learn in your style, grasping concepts easier and quicker;
3. You learn at your pace;
4. You won't get left behind, because you have the time to really grasp something you're struggling with, without having to hurriedly move on for the kids that have already got it;
5. You learn you can achieve a lot by being efficient.
How do I know this?
I am not a traditional learner. I have a very kinetic/tactile and comprehensive approach - I need to be able to touch things, hear things, draw things, ponder things, talk about things and look at them from every angle, fail at things and reach milestones I’ve set for myself. I eventually learned to harness this (this is where the hindsight part comes in, sadly), and it was a frustrating process for the subjects I found harder to ‘get’, but having the extra space and attention definitely helped and I honed my tool kit over the years.
I have four siblings who were homeschooled with me. They all learn differently too, and they were all able to work through their work at the same time, just in their own way. There is no One-Size-Fits-All approach, and that's fine.
For the five days a week I was homeschooled, I probably did about 2-3 solid hours of school work a day. Let's be honest here…I learned how to get it done much quicker, and that meant I often ended up with additional school work. On this fast-tracked schedule, it’s probably not surprising to hear that a year of school work was well and truly completed before the year was out. This left a lot of time for me to learn about things and invest my time into the things I was very passionate about (for me that was music, art, reading and writing - although, at times like these, I kind of wish I had taken even a remote interest in cooking as currently, my flatmate is getting surrounded by awesome music, but average baking. Sorry Mike).
When you’re homeschooled, the Education Department has to come and visit you three times a year. At the start to make sure the curriculum is sound and includes at a minimum the public school equivalent. In the middle of the year to make sure everyone is on track. And at the end of the year to assess everything. By department standards, I was always at the minimum of where I needed to be at any point in the year, but most of the time I was well ahead.
Having extra time to spend playing and creating, being outside a lot, having space to think and learn how to create in moments of quietness (boredom), were all perks that have served me well to this day.
High School was a little trickier, since I was going through the normal highs and lows of being a teenager. But because I had already developed a good idea of what I was passionate about during primary education, I was able to spend even more time on these things because I had learnt how to be independent and work through things. I was also quite lucky that I had siblings, so I was also exposed to their interests and we did like to chat. A lot. I used to get my sister to summarise the books she read (complete book work) so I didn’t have to read them unless they sounded like my cup of tea. Genius.
Tip Two: It’s okay to be bored. Let your kids be bored. Boredom creates.
I was the homeschooled kid that also didn’t watch TV. I was the kid that jumped off the roof onto the trampoline. I was the kid that wrote in a journal and had my feelings come out on a page (better out than in when you’re angsty). I was the kid that made art and checked in on the ‘oldies’ in the street, While I don’t advise kids start jumping off roofs all over Melbourne, my point is that I was pretty happy creating games and feeding my sense of adventure, finding connection with people that I most likely wouldn’t have had otherwise…….and I didn’t break any bones until I was 17, so there’s that.
Tip Three: Routine
While routine is important, it helps to build in a little time to relax. At least once a week, I did do my school work in my pj’s. It’s kind of like casual Friday. How good is casual Friday as an adult? That’s how good PJ Friday is for kids. Commit to comfort.
Tip Four: Let them be involved in creating a routine.
You’ll be surprised what kids want to be involved in if you give them the chance to tell you. The concept of ‘Eat the Frog First’ is a good one for any kids that suffer procrastination. Once you get the hardest or most boring or revolting thing done, everything else is much easier and you are learning how to time manage as well as feeling a sense of achievement. You can finish each day with a reward of your favourite activity or subject and so there is always something to look forward to. No point feeling dread all day just to end up putting the task off as long as possible and finishing your day in a bad mood.
Tip Five: Celebrate the Wins
We all need encouragement and recognition. We need to find the good in everything and now more than ever, we need to be grateful for what we have and not focus on what we don’t have.
You’ll get to witness milestones you don’t normally get to see. There’s this thing that happens for teachers. There is this moment when a student clicks and really takes off with momentum. I like to call it the lightbulb moment. You feel so proud of them and get to watch it just click into place as their eyes sparkle, their smile is so wide you think their cheeks must be hurting and they can’t wait to explain to you what they know so you know it too ;) It’s pretty nice. I highly recommend you soak some of that up.
I also liked to contort myself into a bucket. Less dangerous than jumping off the roof and equal amounts of joy and fun.
I hope this has been in some way helpful, if not entertaining or heck, maybe you just learnt something new about me. I was homeschooled, didn’t want to be, I found the silver lining, I learnt about myself, had career opportunities, built a business and turns out, I’ve never stopped learning. So take it from someone who has been through the process when I say…you don’t have to be perfect. No one expects you to be a 6 hour a day teacher. No kid can sit there 6 hours a day and work relentlessly on math. Will your kids fall behind during this time? No. They’re going to learn some new skills that will equip them well for life. They’ll become more efficient. They’ll become more creative. They’ll realise how resilient they are. They’ll be grateful for the small things. They’ll love sharing with you those lightbulb moments.
They’ll drive you crazy, you’ll drive them crazy, but it’s the good kind of crazy.
Lots of love
M xx