A New Tune

My home is a bit of an anomaly these days.  As a public school teacher I, too, have found myself thrown into homeschooling, but, unlike most folks, my kids have always been homeschooled.  This is business as usual for them and I am the odd man out.  Our decision to homeschool our kids started when our eldest was just approaching school age.  We had lots of reasons, ranging from the state of our local public school to the newly implemented standardized testing that came out of Common Core to our own son’s unique learning style.  Fast forward 10 years and it has been a success.  My academically inclined husband (valedictorian in high school, historian through college and extensive post-graduate work) has led this charge and the results have consistently exceeded my expectations.  

Now I find myself trying to fit into their rhythm, which doesn’t match up with the structured compartmentalization of my years of traditional school conditioning, and it is a bit jarring.  Normally, our transitions to “mama’s home” during school breaks and especially summer vacation are simplified by the fact that I leave my school responsibilities behind and their rhythm changes to accomodate long days and late nights.  But this is not normal.  This is far from normal.

One place where our worlds came together was this morning, during “Books and Coffee” followed by “Sacred Writing Time”, with the first being a well-established routine for my husband and the kids, and the latter being my addition to our new reality, a practice that has for years grounded my 7th graders at the start of almost every ELA class.   This mash-up was even better than Billie Eilish meets The Beatles.

We are all adjusting, just like the rest of humanity, to new rhythms.  The music that is being created may not sound like anything that has come before, but if you listen close enough, you’ll hear the melodies that defined an earlier time.