Wednesday: meaningful work

This old photo popped up when I typed “work” into my blog’s media search bar. Original caption: what I look like while writing, according to Rilla

Early on in my parenting and homeschooling journeys (same journey: they were simultaneous), I recognized as a core value the importance of giving kids opportunities for real work that contributes to the household. As my babies became toddlers and then preschoolers, and I immersed myself in education theory and methods of homeschooling, I understood that this was an area where my thinking diverged from radical unschooling. It’s why I landed upon a style of homeschooling that was unschoolish but not, by the definition developed by the radical unschoolers of the late ’90s and early 2000s, unschooling.

Book idea: what it was like to watch homeschooling theory develop and spread in different directions. The Home Ed Mag discussion boards on AOL in 1995: moms speaking with authority, laying down definitions that over the next ten years became a kind of dogma. Amusing now to think back and realize how very young their children were at the time. As the years passed, I watched with interest as their ideas were tested, challenged, vehemently defended, splintered, refined—all the while testing, challenging, defending, splintering, and refining my own. Remembering moments like the time a famous unschooling/non-coercive parenting speaker wanted me to stay for an evening event at a conference, and I explained that one of my kids was ready to head home, and she said, “Can we bribe her to stay?” —How startled I was, having seen her blister hapless moms on her discussion forum for parenting with bribery. How crystal clear it was in that moment: the gulf between theory and practice. How that canyon snakes through nearly everything we attempt in adult life, and much of the work of adulthood is building bridges.
/end tangent

Anyway! While I’ve experimented with different methods and materials over the years (the decades now!) of homeschooling, I held fast to certain core principles, and provide opportunities for meaningful work has been one of them. (My older children, however, will note that I applied that principle more consistently when they were small than with my two youngest. “When I was your age, I’d been ______ [fill in the blank with a household chore] for years already” is an occasional—and totally accurate—remark in my home. When you have competent teens handling the bathroom- and kitchen-cleaning, it’s easy to ride the status quo. I generally appreciate the reminders to make time for teaching important life skills to the younger set.)

The meaningful work concept has shaped our home education experience, too. If I assign something, I want it to matter, not be mere busywork. On a practical level, this means: if I can see after three or four math problems that you understand the concept, there’s no need to finish the page. You can do a few more problems on that page a couple of days later. Still remember the steps toward the solution? Cool, we can move on. If I observe a gap later, we’ll circle back and fill it in.

I know that my dogged adherence to this principle stems from the hours of boredom and frustration that filled my own school days—hours spent doing 40 problems, the first five of which were interesting puzzles and the rest, puzzle-key mastered, were excruciatingly bored and robbed me of sleep or precious reading time.

Eek, the timer’s about to go off. I was going to chronicle the past week’s meaningful work! My own, I mean.

Well, quickly:

• All tasks that make our home pleasanter are meaningful work, even the tedious kind. Of note this past week: I sorted through two boxes of paperwork from the filing cabinet, culling a whole boxful for shredding or recycling, and sorting the remaining files into grouped layers in the other box. Did I find the one piece of paper I was looking for—the document that prompted this activity? I did not.

• Homeschooling: I taught some math things, read lots of When You Reach Me (see yesterday’s post), discovered how fearfully dusty our globe is but spent a lot of time poking at sites on it anyway, and learned about the Haida Nation who lived off the coast of British Columbia thousands of years ago.

• I wrote a Brave Writer Arrow for Pam Muñoz Ryan’s lovely novel Mañanaland. Sent it off to my wonderful editor, Dawn Smith, with a few gaps that I’ll fill this afternoon. This is the May book for Arrow subscribers and will be my fifth Arrow from this academic year’s batch of ten titles. I wrote nine of the ten Darts, too! Writing these comprehensive guides is challenging and rewarding work—the reward being the delight I see on kids’ faces in the photos parents share on Instagram and elsewhere. We’re helping families make magic.

• I kept up with work for my social media clients, my coaching clients, my nonprofit client.

• I wrote posts for Patreon and for this blog.

• I worked on some extremely loose and fuzzy exploratory notes toward my next novel. Didn’t spend as much time in that notebook as I would have liked, due to the bullet points above. 😉

• I did some garden cleanup (the bees are awake at last, so it was safe to remove dead stems)—but that’s such a pleasure that I can hardly count it as work. Or: it’s meaningful work on the writing project, because gardening is when I do some of my best writing. I wrote the first draft of Fox and Crow Are Not Friends in my head while weeding the side yard, one San Diego day. Same with all three Inch and Roly stories, come to think of it.

• I got exactly nowhere on my secret stitching project. No wait, that’s not true. I made some notes about next steps.

• During the course of writing this post, I learned how to successfully extract a stripped screw. Huck is pleased. (The secret: put a rubber band over the top of the screw to create traction for your screwdriver.

It’s cardinal o’clock. Time to go!

What is this about?

• encounters with beauty
• encounters with living books
• meaningful work;
• imaginative play;
• big ideas to ponder and discuss;
• white space;
• connection.

If this post ends abruptly, here’s why