For the Love of Learning

There are so many posts I could write about my mom: the spectacular, the heart-warming, the funny, etc. However, if you have a mom like mine and start sporadicly writing only a few days before Mother's Day and you're trying to do life with four small children and you're packing for a weekend camping trip and you spend too much time dawdling around the house instead of cleaning it... well, you somehow run out of time to write all the neat memories of your mom. I'll have to keep writing and save some for next year.
I also wanted to write a "Love you, Dad!" There are many memories I have of lessons learned from my amazing dad. I felt a bit one sided sincerely gushing over my mother and not a mention of my great dad. Love you, Dad!
SO! My parents began homeschooling me in the sixth grade. I enjoyed school a lot. Okay, I enjoyed the first week or two of school every year. After those first couple of weeks I began to tune out teachers' lectures, wonder why they wouldn't just let me talk with my friends and "forget" homework at school. I liked reading quite a bit - as long as the books were from the Archie comic book series. My mom always wished I read more. She would say they were vapid story lines or that they didn't improve my vocabulary. Whatever! One day I marched proudly up to my dad and announced I had learned a new word! Pickpocket. He asked where I had learned that from and I said, "From Archie!" Take that classic literature! Who needs Oliver Twist?
I just found no point in school. I never progressed much in anything. I was stuck in super easy math facts for what seemed like years. I had to reread a boring reading textbook that I had flunked out of the year before.
To make a long story short my parents finally decided to homeschool.
Now depending on your community you might think, "Well, of course they homeschooled." Where we are now about half of us or more homeschool, so we are in good company. But not my parents? When I was growing up we lived overseas in a community where less than ten other families also homeschooled. We lived in a country where their citizens were forbidden to homeschool. I admire that boldness and obedience in my parents, both of them, for that wasn't easy.
I also greatly admire anyone who homeschooled before Al Gore invented the internet! How did you do that?!? How did you read about Johnny Tremain without Wikipedia to tell you if he was fictional or not. How did you look up a YouTube clip of the Johnny Appleseed cartoon? And didn't you feel like you were missing out when you couldn't Google imagines when you wanted to see what a parasite looked like? And printable free lapbooks, etc... Oh, how I appreciate my mother doing her best with the encyclopedia. :)
There were good days. There were bad days. There were fights over school and triumphs over school done well. I'll never hear the Longfellow poem of Paul Revere's midnight ride without remembering not-so-fondly fights over how one was supposed to recite poetry. I seemed to always read it with a robotic tone, which evidently drove my mother insane. It's taken me years to appreciate that poem for good literature instead of a point of contention. Don't worry. My children will have plenty of point-of-contention memories due to my inability to see the bigger picture.
But besides the skeletons in the school cabinet there are precious traditions that are being passed down as I am now blessed enough to pass down. Who would have thought I would be reading the same educational books that my mother read while teaching me? I am now learning about Charlotte Mason for myself. How I love reading about Mason's view of educating children and realizing this is exactly what my mother did for me. I feel like I've been given a gift. It's quite a pleasure of mine.
Another tradition that was passed down heavily from my childhood to now my own child is the love of reading out loud. It took me years to enjoy reading for pleasure. Even now it takes quite a bit of concentration for me to read to myself. It also takes me quite a long time to finish a book. It is what it is and I've learned to accept it. However, I love reading out loud to the kids. I've already decided when they have grown up and move out I'll have to "adopt" children in the neighborhood to read out loud to. And where did I get that from? My mother dearest.
I was once sick when I was younger teen. The fever was high. My mother had called a doctor who said to dress me in a thin nightgown and leave the window open all night to drop the fever. I remember being cold that night! But I remember something far more lasting and precious. My mother was visibly worried. She seemed to have much energy and intention with no where to put it. She paced. She wrung her hands. Then she left me for a few minutes and returned with "Little House on the Prairie". She sat by my side as I fell in and out of sleep and read out loud to me. That is one of my sweetest memories.
Our homeschooling days were full of homemade burritos, arguments, walks through the neighboring fields and villages, learning together, and later sharing the lessons with my dad. We just lived life together. What a beautiful, real life it was too.
Anyway, a belated Happy Mother's Day to you, Mom. Thank you for all your sacrifices. Thank you for putting up with me.