Ep 00 | Welcome to Season Two
And we’re back!
Have you ever noticed how much of the homeschooling content points to what you should buy for your homeschool: supplies, resources, planners, wall art, and the like? This makes sense; we moms love to share a good tip. But when we spend our time focused on this part of homeschooling, all of that clicking, liking, saving, and buying can start to feel like we’re preparing to educate our children.
But are we?
Will the perfect materials a homeschool mom make? Or are we missing something?
In this second season of the podcast, we’re going to set aside the shopping lists, roll up our sleeves, and ready our minds to become home educators.
Join us?
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FOOTNOTES
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Imagine with me for a minute.
It’s the first day of homeschooling. The nature backpacks hang ready by the door. The table is set for morning lessons. The supplies for afternoon occupations are stacked neatly on the piano. You stand by the stove waiting for the tea to finish steeping and double-check that the letterboard is ready for the first day-of-school photo moment.
This. Is. It.
I mean, it’s really happening. You’ve spent months—maybe even years—scouring the internet from bloggers and Instagram moms to Etsy and Amazon, and you. are. prepared. There are binoculars and magnifying glasses galore! The watercolor pads are in mint condition. There are crayons, notebooks, wall prints, floor mats, weather stations, flashcards, chalkboards, a pile of books, and 25 alphabet manipulatives...because, yes, one has already disappeared, but it’s no matter—
The day is here, you’ve done your research, and now, well now you just have to...wait a second.
Are we missing something?
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When I look around the mom portion of the classical Charlotte Mason homeschooling world, advice is in no short supply. We moms love to share a good tip or trick, so this makes perfect sense to me. Peruse the internet and you’ll find link after affiliate link of everything you could buy for your homeschool. It’s just what we moms do. And it’s pretty helpful.
But I think of the buying side of homeschooling like the logistical side of mothering: it’s important, but it isn’t the thing. Mothering includes logistics, but logistics do not include mothering. So while homeschooling includes choosing, buying, and organizing materials, buying is not homeschooling.
And yet this is where much of the homeschooling content points and where many of us spend our time. We read blogs, save Instagram posts of table flat lays, watch videos about ‘What Goes in Our Nature Packs,’ and double back to check all of our open tabs for items ranging from curricula to paper clips.
All of this clicking, liking, saving, and buying begins to feel like we’re really preparing for homeschooling, that we’re doing the pre-school legwork, that we’re going to be ready to do it.
But if we spend the majority of our time focused on all the materials of homeschooling, on that first morning, the one I mentioned at the top, when we look out over the perfectly set and stocked table, will we actually know how to educate those image bearers tumbling down the stairs? Will we understand our own pedagogy? Our method and principles of teaching? Or will we just know about the newest resource and maybe a few Charlotte Mason sound bytes we caught online?
In this second season of the Commonplace, we’re going to spend the better part of this year preparing to educate. We’re taking a dive into Charlotte Mason’s principles of education—all twenty of them.
You see, principles, don’t change; they’re truths that offer a steadfast light to guide you as you homeschool your children. Just like we have spiritual principles, we have natural principles (like fire burns and water flows) and we also have educational principles. And knowing and understanding these—the how and why behind your method—is the most important thing we do as homeschool moms.
Our natural inclination, though, is to look for a system. Put in A and B, get C. We like that. There’s a certain comfort in the control a system provides. Whether it’s the idea that children’s minds are empty buckets in which you deposit facts and get, in the end, a competent worker for society...or the idea that if you buy this book list and this supply list, you’ll get, in the end, this type of homeschool--systems are sirens that call to the heart of an anxious, overwhelmed mom.
And beginning to homeschool can make anyone feel a little anxious and overwhelmed.
But having an anchoring philosophy holds a mom in place. It doesn’t matter what new thing pops up on the internet, or that your children have five distinct personalities, or that your friend is doing something differently, or that you’re in an odd season—a philosophy gives a clear end goal and a framework of truths that gently guide those with young.
I want us all to be philosophers, to be lovers of wisdom who act out God’s grace in the practices of our homeschools.
So, I can’t wait to learn along with you this season, to grow as home educators, as women. This is the time for us to roll up our sleeves and ready our minds. I won’t help you fill your art cart and I certainly won’t dance and point at things in reels, but I hope to fill your mind with the ways to awaken the soul at the touch of knowledge and to point you towards a philosophy of education that aims to bring harmony and order, wisdom and virtue, through the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty for everyone at the homeschooling table.
This type of formation in Christ’s image is, after all, why we educate this way.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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