*Today I have a guest post by Amy Dingmann. I recently read Amy’s new book The Homeschool Highway: How to Navigate Your Way Without Getting Carsick. It’s a short read (I finished in two days) that’s overflowing with great advice, practical ideas and lots of encouragement. I asked her to share some of her wisdom with you, and I’m very honored she agreed.
If you visit my house, don’t be surprised if you find a mess. My oldest son wants to be some sort of chef and takes pure delight in taking all the ingredients out of the cabinets, mixing them together and making the next world’s greatest sauce to brush over grilled chicken breasts.
He’s creating. He’s learning what tastes go together and which ones don’t.
He’s also making a huge mess. But it’s just a mess. And messes are easy to clean up.
My youngest son suddenly comes up with an idea for a costume he’d like to sew. And regardless of the fact he has his own giant tote of fabric, somehow my totes of fabric are open and strewn about the entire basement. And even though he’s been told a hundred thousand times to put back what he gets out, he gets lost in the land of creating and forgets what should have been put away.
He’s creating. He’s learning about colors and patterns and how to make this sleeve and that seam.
He’s also making a huge mess. But it’s just a mess. And messes are easy to clean up.
Messes happen in learning. It’s part of the process. Hopefully we can learn to see the mess and know that for our children, learning is happening.
But do you know that their learning is messy for us, too?
Whether a family tiptoes or jumps wholeheartedly into interest-led learning, they step into a bit of a mess. A sticky puddle of goo that jumbles up our head. Because when following interests, learning is no longer neatly organized in our brain. It does not progress in the order we’ve been programmed to believe is right. It’s not fluid. We can’t necessarily predict what’s going to come next…and we sometimes sound brainless when trying to explain the what and how of our path to others.
That’s a mess.
We second guess our kids. We second guess the journey. We start to wonder about ourselves and our place along the path. We can spend nights awake stressing about whether the kids are learning the right thing right now, and if we should really let them spend so much time immersed in that project our public school teaching aunt said was worthless and a complete waste of time.
A mess, if I ever saw one.
Interest-led learning comes in many forms and happens in many different degrees, which might tempt us to beat our heads back and forth over it’s too much and it’s not enough. Or, as is sometimes the case, we get stuck on a train of thought that says interest-led has to be all this way and none of that.
We’re making a huge mess. But you know what?
It’s only a mess.
And messes are easily cleaned up.
You can clean up this mess by taking a step back. Looking at the big picture. Focusing on the long term.
You can clean up this mess by learning to trust in the why and how of the path your family is on. Byremembering why you chose to do this one way and not the other.
This mess can be cleaned up by keeping perspective. By staying open-minded. By realizing that many times wonderful things take place because we’ve helped them along, but just as often, wonderful things come to be because we took our hands off…and let the mess happen.
Messes are part of life and part of learning, both for our kids and for us.
Don’t be afraid to let those messes happen, because we can clean them up.
Amy Dingmann is currently wading through the messes of her sixth year of homeschooling two boys. She is also the author of the recently released book The Homeschool Highway: How to Navigate Your Way Without Getting Carsick, available on both Kindle and in paperback. She frequently blogs at The Hmmmschooling Mom, A Farmish Kind of Life, and her author site. Amy lives on a farm in central MN where she enjoys photography, bluegrass music, and attempting to write in her hayloft without falling asleep.
Photo Credit:mrsdkrebs