How we modify our “My Father’s World” curriculum.

I’m going to tell you a revolutionary little secret:  you know how the “My Father’s World” teacher’s guide comes all pre-packaged into 34 neatly organized weeks?  I ignore those.  Entirely.

Basically–I pullllll it apart.  Like cotton candy.  We buy that fluffy-enticing-stick, all covered in amazing yummy learning potential… and we stretch off pieces.  We savor.  We save bits for later.  We ditch some.  We add in extras.

I am sharing this because sister– we sometimes make fluffy delights into nightmares.  We somehow feel the need to measure up by following someone else’s timeline.  If you eat cotton candy piece by pullllllled piece?  ENJOYable.  If you try to quick smash it up into a little neat ball between your palms and shove it down your gullet just because you’ve scheduled the Super Rope for next and you don’t want to fall behind on potential delights…you’ve missed the POINT.  You might actually miss out on the MOMENT.  You’ve just taken a potentially scrumptious experience and turned it into a nauseating memory.

See–that’s sometimes what we do with our curriculum.  We shove.

Our curriculum comes labeled neatly into 34 perfectly packaged weeks.  Bless its little heart.  It says: Do these things on Monday, these on Tuesday, and so forth.  And sometimes this “helpfulness” has the unintended consequence of making us act like we are following a sacred recipe, or living under a deadline.  A contrived deadline, merely suggested by a stranger:  a stranger who would probably be the first to tell us that they penned the schedule but never followed it perfectly themselves.  Teacher manuals are birthed in idealism.  Yes?  Isn’t that a lovely thought?  Is it possible that since the beginning of the earth no teacher’s manual has ever been perfectly followed, EVER, by any human…including its author?  And to try is to become an unintended slave to beautifully planned ideals in exchange for joy, peace, and true education.  Yes?  It takes concentrated practice to see the blessings in the manual, while feeling free enough to ignore those weekly headings and run at our own pace.  ((Oh, I know.)) 

Do you know why curricula is sold with such neat, pre-planned weeks?  Because we pay big bucks for it.  There’s a sense, deep down, that we need a guide to tell us the exact formula for getting our kid from babbling baby to sufficient, educated adult.  We ASK companies to please lay it out for us.  We know our kid needs to know “history” but then we panic because:  how much?  when?  what if I miss something?  Then we have the SCHOOL SYSTEM, like a sleeping giant who lives next door with one eye open and watching…we are always semi aware of its gaze and presence.  It has formulas of what kids need to know by when.  Only, if you’ve ever actually met a human kid–you know that learning can speed up and slow down on any given day…and that those imposed formulas are simply a way for institutions to keep thousands of kids heading in the same direction while being handed off from teacher to teacher ~ upwards of 40 different staff members taking turns with each child from K-12th grade.  Formulas are NECESSARY in that environment, agreed?  They aren’t there to insure a perfectly functioning adult human…they are there as safety rails.  Think of a teacher blowing a whistle and having children line up to walk to the lunch room.  This is necessary~ THERE.  We don’t do this at home.  We don’t NEED to.  We know our kids are going to make it safely to the dinner table without getting lost.  

Now, I want you to pour yourself a hot bath ~ relax ~ and bring along a clipboard with a sheet of scrap paper.  You’ll only need one side.  Pretty sure.  Maybe just grab a junk mail envelope.  Go ahead and write down everything you remember learning about history as a kid.  I did this exact experiment one night.  I ended up laughing and laughing because I was valedictorian of my high school class–the very top of the crop–and my clipboard?  Was almost blank.  It certainly wasn’t 12 years worth of formulated history lessons.  In school I learned how the system worked:  read it, answer questions, cram for exam…and repeat.  None of it went into long term memory.  Because none of it interested me enough.  I graduated from college with honors and landed a dream job ~ I have a great life.  It worked out.  Does this make you feel better yet?

Hear me–I am not saying that plans are bad, or that if you follow a laid-out, prepackaged system your kids are going to end up in a bathtub with a clipboard laughing at their formulated education.  What I *am* saying is that if your teacher’s manual is your boss, and your kids are miserable, and you passed up that field trip last week because the checkboxes held you hostage, and you regularly feel “behind” ~ then step off that dizzy ride.  Come with me to the cotton candy cart!  Let’s learn to slow down and make memories with our kiddos ~ let’s savor learning.  I am going to do a series of posts examining exactly how I take the beautifully pre-packaged My Father’s World Curriculum (MFW) and serve it up in a way that makes the most sense for my crew.  How you serve it will probably look different.  And that’s DELICIOUS!

Click below to read more about how we do this in our home:
Part 1: MFW BOOKMARK METHOD
Part 2: MFW REWRITTEN