I have spent the past week making the “End of Year Subject Record” documents for my kids as part of wrapping up this past school year and this morning I had a “clouds parting to let the Light shine down on me” moment of glory.
For the last five years of homeschooling, this task was arduous to undertake and yet rewarding to admire once it was complete. My husband would get a chance to look over all that the kids had learned in the past year and be amazed at the volume of material we covered, but for me it was not a great time of year.
Each year I have learned from past mistakes and honed the efficiency of this process, simply because I was not born to be a secretary and the drudgery of creating these types of overview documents is only outweighed by the horrendous prospect of making a master version from the boxes and boxes of work samples and class notes if and when my children decide to apply for college. But even in an optimized state, writing up every thing that my kids learned is absolutely not my favorite activity.
OK, here comes the glory moment…. ready?
I compared the amount of learning we did in each subject area (this only happened because I had the document zoomed out to two-on-a-page format so I could do a final formatting review and the amount of writing on each page just popped out at me). Wow!
This is the order that popped out for my kids (most studied to least)
- History
- English
- Math
- Music
- Science
- Logic
- Foreign Language
- Art
It is not that my kids don’t like Art – they love doing it. So much so that sometimes I have to go tell one of them to turn the light off and stop drawing so that they will go to sleep at night. But as a whole their interests and curiosities are focused on THE STORY (History and English). For me there are significant similarities between math, music, science, and logic so it makes sense that they all group as one block, I shall call THE PROCESS.
I realize now that it is obvious that once you loosen the reigns of homeschooling and let your teen begin to direct their own learning to accomodate interests and curiosities, you will see those interests reflected in the amount of learning in each subject. But to me, as a former scientist who could not write a lick, who grew up wishing to be an artist, and who speaks four languages and can understand a few more, it is absolutely amazing how different my children are from me. They have expanded me. They have shown me the beauty of THE PROCESS and that all of our lives: past, present, and future, are inexorably tied to THE STORY.
Without THE STORY we have no humanity and without THE PROCESS we have no civilization – but civilization is only achievable if our humanity is intact. Art and Foreign Language are really nothing more than means to communicate and not as important.
All that out of mindless secretary work I discovered my children were showing me something deep and good and true about us all. And it is well worth the effort of all they typing and collating to see the glory.
