ADD with methods/ Ella Frances Lynch spinoff

[MomintheMountains]

I just finished reading the excellent Ella Frances Lynch thread. I started reading her bio and her articles. But, whoa! Do I really have time to study yet another educator and her ideas on education?I love reading about education and I love implementing new thoughts, methods and ideas (new to me, but usually from educators from past generations). As home educators, we are blessed that we are not tied to bureaucracies, school boards, textbooks publishers, etc. We can innovate with our own children and individualize their education. But I can't help but wonder if my children would benefit from more consistency. I want to study and grow as an educator, but my study leads me to change things every year. I've been from unschooling to Montessori to Charlotte Mason to neo-classical to screw-it-buy-a-curriculum and back again. Am I the only one? Is it because I have a certain personality/temperament? How can I grow, learn and improve in my teaching without giving my children educational whiplash?

[dauphin]

Following.

 

I am starting to have a sense that I grow each time I binge-study on some theory and then set it aside (e.g., I now have a far better understanding if why CM unsettled me. And figuring out why it wasn't a good fit led to discovery of my own tendencies/needs as a teacher and my DDs as well.). I'm hoping it someday might lead me to a place where I can look more like those posters a who just "do it myself because no curriculum fits right." I'm afraid I need a little more hand-holding, in both the broader overview sense as well as the details (e.g., the person on another thread who says "that's ridiculous to spend that much on a deck of (memory work) cards!"-for the most recent season of hs'ing, I truly needed that support,but now I have a glimmer, after using it, of how it might look if I I did my own? But that also takes a lot of time, which I don't have because of....er....research. Doh!)

[MomintheMountains]

I am very comfortable with homeschooling the early years now and I think the early years are pretty much looking the same with each of my kiddos. (I think I stopped reading the Lynch stuff because, though very interesting, it is focused on the earlier years.) I have been at this for 10 years now. I think where I have ADD is from middle school and older. My views keep changing when I read something new. Maybe it will be the same with my older children... maybe eventually I will discover my groove with them as I have discovered my groove with the primary grades. Actually, I have come to the conclusion that I need to focus on my own education and not read so much on educational philosophy any more. I think my older children will benefit the most from that.

[Farrar]

I've just begun homeschooling and I feel like I've already gone in so many different directions that my head is spinning. I'm always attracted to the new and shiny thing, KWIM? And then I assume that the new and shiny thing is so much better than what is on my shelf so I *must* buy the new and shiny thing. And of course in a few months the new and shiny thing isn't so new and shiny anymore and something else has caught my eye. For me, this is due to a lack of discipline. I have to work hard to counteract that tendency in myself.

 

When I first began reading about homeschooling, I could feel myself sliding into those bad habits. "The great conversation," "truth and beauty," academic rigor? Yes, I want all of those things, thank you. I'll click a button on Amazon or Rainbow Resources and I will *have* those things. Easy peasy.

 

What I really liked about the EFL books, is that she is the antithesis of that kind of a mentality. She's about rolling up your shelves and working with what you have. Reading her books helped steer me back to the middle which is always the safest place for someone like me. And I don't think EFL would want a mother to make huge changes in her homeschool even if those changes were to EFL's methods. ELF writers (paraphrasing here) that the most important thing in the first 10 years of a child's life is teaching the habit of hard work. I think she would say that changing everything mid-stream does not teach the habit of hard work, and in fact, probably teaches the opposite of it. 

 

I always force myself to read this post when I find myself being pulled in all kinds of different directions. http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/489917-be-a-sun/?p=5272324

 

That MMV post is such a good one.

 

I guess I would caution anyone not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of method buzzwords and the commodification of methods. Aspiring to academic rigor is good. Aspiring to join the "great conversation" is good. And so forth. Just because these get popular or there are products that claim they can help you get there doesn't mean that the original intention was a bad one. It's just that you have to be the one implementing it, believing in it, continuing with it with that sense of purpose, and filtering out what's a useful tool to buy to get there and what isn't.

 

I liked the simplicity that EFL suggested in those articles (I only read those three) - in particular the idea of using what you have and not worrying so much and focusing on habit over specific content worries. I think that's a good message. But any message has to be filtered for today and for you and your family individually.

 

If the goal is simplicity or learning hard work or whatever the goal is, then changing your materials is such a small question in the grand scheme of things. So what if you ditch one book for another or one program for another or decide that one program isn't working. To me, the values come through you, not through the specific books or curricula. And, as such, changing those isn't anything to worry overmuch about.

 

I guess for me, the reason to read about education and educational theorists old and new is to keep whittling down my own ideas to get to the core of what I believe. It also helps me see new ideas and influences and sometimes quite practical tips, but mostly it is just helping me get down to the core of myself.