Who Are These Kids?

Who Are These Kids?

Maybe this happens to all homeschooling parents.

This week abounded with opportunities for me to face humility as a homeschooling mom.

We can’t always be right about things. We try, as homeschooling moms to work lessons ahead of time, understand the material before teaching it, and find resources to help us in areas we are weak.

But… sometimes the best laid plans fail and our weaknesses are exposed.

And that is where my fail for this week begins…

Poetry Rears Its Ugly Head…

My children have been asking for ages and ages for me to start reading Dante’s Inferno to them. I have hesitated, partly because I wanted them to be a bit older, but mostly I just wasn’t ready. Being a science and math person means working really hard at understanding complex literature and poetry. I started trying to catch up in those areas when I first realized that my kids were advanced. And so I worked through high school literature lessons from the good folks at Roman Roads Media and from Susan Wise Bauer.

I read the Aeneid three times through (out loud, thank you Wesley Callihan!) before I thought I understood it well enough to teach my kids. And now that we are halfway through the epic, I can say things are going pretty well.

And so a few weeks ago, I relented and we started Dante’s wonderful poetry in a translation by Dorothy Sayers. It is marvelous stuff, but…

Here is the Fail!

This week we were reading along through Canto II and it happened. I stopped to summarize what had just happened and both of my kids protested:

Mommy, what are you thinking?

Weren’t you paying attention to what you were reading?

It was Virgil just now talking, not Dante!

Aack!

It happened!

It definitely isn’t the first time I have been wrong, but it was one of those times when I have to admit my weakness to my kids and let them explain a lesson to me.

In a sense this is a fail, but I suppose in another sense it is just part of the reality of homeschooling teens. Some days I will be right, others I will be wrong. If I am learning along side them then the biggest lesson they will take from homeschooling is how to learn and that even their mom can do it.

There is a Funny Embedded In This Story…

In total honesty, I wasn’t completely paying attention to what I was reading.

I have done so much reading aloud to my kids over the last nearly decade and a half it isn’t funny. Somehow I have developed the ability to read aloud and compose dinner menus or shopping lists or think about the last time I washed the dog.

I start my mouth going and it can read a book completely through while I ponder the wonders of the universe or work through outlines of blog posts. Not sure how it works. I did not think it possible to have your mind working on two tracks at once, but there it is.

And so when my son asked me if I was even paying attention to what I was reading, the answer was, “Well, no. I was trying to decide between hamburgers and roast chicken for dinner,” but I never got the chance to come clean. The twins were too busy acting the blow-by-blows of the entire Canto out to me, in hopes that I would understand this time…

Have you been wrong in something you were teaching your kids and had them catch you at it? What happened next?

That was my week.

Now What about You?

How about a downright fail or a funny?

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