I have been working over the past week to extend my crocheting prowess to include socks. Fine wool socks for the Hub, who really appreciates wool and warm feet. My eye-hand coordination has been growing as I have progressed from dishcloths and washcloths to a 14-foot long Dr. Who scarf and a tunic cardigan. At the start of each project, I can barely manage to master the stitch and yarn, but by the time I am approaching the end things are coming together with fine, even stitches. This is the perseverance part of learning. It may be frustrating at the start, but perseverance will carry you through. The professor who oversaw my master’s degree work told me that the way to complete things and the way to succeed in life is not to be smart, but persistent. And he was oh so right, and not surprisingly he is the smartest man I have yet to meet. It has worked for me in all things. From my own education to homeschooling and crocheting.
But back to those socks. In concert with my advancing years, my eyesight is changing. I am lcky enough to have been near-sighted most of my life and so rather than needing reading glasses, I have spent a few blissful years setting aside my glasses while reading or doing tasks that require close focus, like crochet. And then those socks entered my life. I spent several frustrating days trying to deal with (1) wool, a material whose strands like to come apart more than cotton or polyester, and (2) superfine wool that requires a very fine hook and sight rather than feel as a feedback mechanism. Now, the Hub really doesn’t care for brightly colored, easy to see, wool socks so there I sat with dark brown wool. I realized after a while that I really cannot see clearly at that distance anymore. Not well enough to crochet, anyway. And so I tried bright light instead. Anything but the reading glasses! I will happily let myself ‘go grey’ and sport wrinkles as they emerge. I am not afraid of aging and look forward to the day that I will eventually become a ‘Gma’. But not the reading glasses! I found myself becoming more and more frustrated and irritable until this morning I finally dug through the Hub’s desk and found a pair of his older reading glasses. Putting them on, I realized that I could see the stitches! It was no longer hard, the new work was coming out evenly and quickly and that wonderfully happy feeling that I normally get while crocheting returned. The missing piece was focus.
How can anyone, young or old, learn without perseverance and focus? As homeschooling parents, we can help our children along with the perseverance. Coaxing and cajoling them. Providing incentives and leading by example. But focus? We can demonstrate focus to our children, but they will only ‘get it’ if they have the focus to watch us for a while. The best we can do is to recognize those times and situations and activities that lead our children to a focused state and then build upon those, extending their focus to new areas. The feedback anyone gets as they learn a new bit of information is such a positive force by itself in the natural state of homeschooling, that really all we need to do is help our children to recognize focus and to show them perseverance… and learning will come.
