(soft music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I can't believe it and I bet you can't either. It's January again. A whole new year is here again.

I hope that your family was blessed by fellowship and deep conversations over the holiday. But I know that a lot of us are looking 2024 in the face and thinking, oh my goodness, now I have to get started again. I don't know if I have it in me. You do, and we're here to encourage you.

And I brought one of the best encouragers ever. One of my best classical learning compatriots, Jennifer Courtney, is here with me today. And we are gonna encourage you so that we are all ready to get started again. Jennifer, thank you for coming in today. - Oh, thanks for having me, I'm excited.

- I know that you and I have been through a lot of ready, reset, go moments in our long years of homeschooling. How long, I want you to tell the listeners, how long have you been homeschooling? - So I have been homeschooling since 2005. Three of my kids have now graduated from my homeschool and one of them has graduated college and is in the workforce.

- I think, listeners, that you're probably thinking, oh my gosh, she has the wisdom of the ages. And she does, she has lots of wisdom. But I happen to know that just like me, lots of Jennifer's wisdom was hard fought for. And we did a lot of the wrong thing on the way to finding a better way.

Jennifer, would you agree? - Yes, and it seems like every year, you might think, well, I made a couple of mistakes in all the years I was homeschooling. But really the truth is, it's a little bit of an experiment as you go, finding out what works with that particular child in that particular season.

And so usually, I love your title for this podcast because every year I found that I needed, I would make all these great plans in August and then after the Christmas holidays, I needed to definitely reset for the winter. - Yep, it's just there's something different about restarting at the beginning of the second semester than the beginning of the year when everybody's fresh.

And it's like Anne Shirley used to say, every day is fresh with no mistakes. And so I always felt more like that at the end of the summer than I felt in January. So why is hard? Well, I gave it away for me. I was gonna ask you, which is harder for you beginning the year each fall or restarting the academics after the long holiday break?

- For me, it was always restarting. I'm in your camp 'cause it felt like in August, I live in Oklahoma, it's hot. And by August, we had been through a lot of summer and we were tired of swimming and tired of not having a schedule. And we were eager to dive into our new books and use our new school supplies and all those things.

So it was pretty easy to get us started in August or September. But coming back after Christmas can be very brutal. - I like what you said. In the fall, we are maybe not tired of summer, but we're tired of being hot. We've done all the swimming that we can do.

We've been on all the vacations our family's gonna take. We're ready for something new. But you know what? Nobody's really tired of being off. Nobody's tired of having three or four weeks of vacation. And the other thing that you said that's really true is, you're excited about fresh notebooks and sharpened pencils and new textbooks.

Well, none of that is new. When you come back in January, it's just a different page and the pencils need to be sharpened. And you've already looked through that book and you know what's coming and not all of it is what you want to see. And so, yeah, I agree that it's harder to start over.

Why do you think that is? Why is after Christmas so hard? Actually, okay, let's be real. Why is January so long? Why is January so hard? - Yeah, I think partly, so you and I have some mutual friends who live in New England and they always say that this time of year, your brain is addled because you're full of cheese.

- That's right. - So I think the lack of good habits over the break probably have something to do with it. The lack of good sleep schedules and normal food and all those things. But so I think just getting out of our routine makes it hard. And then for some people, it's just the weather.

Kids are cooped up in the house. I can remember when my children were small, making my son run laps around this one part of our floor plan because otherwise I could not live with him. He needed some exercise and it was too cold to go out. So some of it's that just lack of routine and then also just the weather, I think.

- Yeah, yeah, I think that, and we're gonna talk about this 'cause y'all, this is not gonna be a podcast where we're all just bemoaning our fate together. 'Cause while it does make you feel better to think you're not alone in your misery, it's even better if we can think of some positive antidotes, some positive things to do.

So we are gonna encourage you to maybe think outside the box. I mean, like Jennifer, maybe you need to suspend your don't run in the house rule. And maybe you actually need to have your kids running up and down the kitchen floor, picking up peanuts or dust bunnies or whatever you put on the floor just to get the wiggles out, especially if you have little kids.

And it may be that with older kids, you need to switch the chores up. Everybody gets a new chore assignment in January, something they don't already know how to do so that they have to use their brain for something besides schoolwork. So we'll give some of those good ideas too.

I think that a lot of us, parents included, just feel tired when we're starting out again. Why do you think that is, Jennifer? - Yeah, I think some of it is just repetition of things. So the analogy that I've used in the past is that I come from a long line of Oklahoma farmers and several of them farmed cotton right through the Dust Bowl years, which was a very difficult year to be.

And my grandmother would tell me these stories. So I really became curious after I was assigned to read "The Grapes of Wrath" when I was in high school. But she would tell me these stories about how she and her sisters and her mom would dust the house. And then an hour later, there'd be an inch of dust on everything again, 'cause there was dust blowing across the prairies and the houses weren't well insulated.

And so they had to tie handkerchiefs around their faces to keep from breathing it, and they just had to dust once an hour. I can't even imagine. - Me either. - But I think sometimes that's what we feel like. We're just dusting and then we look over and there's more dust.

So I think it's a good analogy sometimes for our homeschool. One thing I always remember is when my kids were little and I was teaching the third and fourth one to read, that when they get to the word "the" and they say things like "to her," you're like, "No, still 'the.'" - Nope, still "the." - It was "the" yesterday, it will be "the" tomorrow.

- Yes, yes. - It's just some of that, I think, repetition, that constant dusting and knowing you have to do it again. So you can use that analogy for their struggles in math or their struggles in reading, fill in the blank. But one of the things that I think was true for my ancestors is that they kept on going because they loved their home.

They loved the farm and the land and so they kept laboring. And I think that's true for us too. We love our kids, we love our homes, and so we keep dusting. - Right, we keep doing what we believed in in September and October and November. We keep doing what we believed in.

And if you've had one child already, you know that the repetition, while it seems relentless and on some days fruitless, it's not, because you do see the fruit, that repetition, duration, intensity over time is what brings mastery of math problems and reading words and everything. And so I think that we have to give ourselves permission to be tired, but we have to remind ourselves that there is a rainbow on the other side of the gray clouds.

- And it happens suddenly. I think your analogy is a good one, Lisa, because I can remember with my firstborn, just practicing, practicing, cultivating the habits, checking the work, inspecting, having the conversations, working out the frustrations. And then it really felt like all of a sudden, there he was in a suit and tie presenting a senior thesis.

- Oh my gosh, that is so true. That is so true. - It was over and he was grown and a beautiful human being standing before me. - Yes, yes, it's become such a trite statement that we've heard and we've all said it. The days are long, but the years are short.

But I discovered that even trite statements have a lot of truth in them. When my girls got, they grew up and it did seem sudden. Now there were lots of days that I thought would never end and lots of ditches that we seemed to take a long time to climb out of, but all of this sudden, it was done.

And they were beautiful young women that the Lord had allowed me a hand in nurturing. And it was all worth it in that shining moment. It is all, all worth it. - And then they get to be adults. And I don't know about your experience, but my oldest two particularly now will come and tell me thank you for things that we worked through.

And they'll tell me they're so grateful that we homeschooled. And they didn't always say that when they were 14, just to be clear. - Yes, yes. - You work for CC and you're so committed, your kids just must love it. And as far as I know, they're kids just like everyone else.

- My kids also beg not to do the one AC. - Oh, yes. - Yes, I mean, I had kids who said, "Please, can I stop with the Latin "or do I really have to do advanced math?" And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. We are the same. - Yes, and I had one that really was very fearful of public speaking and just for years, begged to get out of speeches and debates.

And then her last year in Classical Conversations, she just gave, she won her team policy debate. - Oh my goodness. - And she gave a beautiful advocacy speech. And it was just really fun to see that we made, that we made the right decision to keep pushing into something that she didn't feel comfortable with, yet she conquered it.

- Right, the Lord honored her effort and honored her obedience to you. - And that was beautiful for you to see, I know. Okay, so let me ask you this, in your experience, 'cause Jennifer, you haven't just been a homeschool mama, although that's never a just, okay? But you've also been a curriculum developer and a state manager and a practicum speaker and all these other things.

So I know that you have talked to people, well, all over the country, but all over the world as well. What is it that you have heard, what is hard and why is it so hard for mamas, for us weary mamas in January? What is it that's hard for mamas?

- Well, one thing I can say is that the children may be resting and having fun over the holidays, but moms are usually working triple time to make the holidays happen. The cooking and the entertaining and all of those things that made it hard even just to get the laundry done.

And so moms come into January tired because they've spent at least three weeks on overdrive. And so I think one thing is just to take a minute to rest yourself and sit still and think about what you wanna do for the second semester. And then also as my kids got older, I sat down with them and said, let's assess our first semester.

What went well, what do we need to do better? Do you have any suggestions for something new you would like to learn and do you have suggestions for how we can tackle the thing that you just said needed to go better? And I've had kids in my home tell me all kinds of things.

One of them said, I really think we need to start this science book over. I did not understand it, I would like to start over. And so that's what we did. I thought that was a reasonable suggestion for a 14 year old to make. - Good, all right, so those things are hard.

Yeah, I think you're right, that's actually very profound. Moms come into January and we're just tired. December was not a vacation. It was different, but it wasn't a vacation. But then I also love what you said. Sometimes January is hard because we have been pulling an 800 pound load uphill by ourselves and it wasn't the right load.

We need to redistribute the load or get some fresh horses or something, you're right, that we sometimes, January is hard because contemplating doing more of what we did in the fall, we know is not the right thing. And we just need to do something else. That's really good. Anything else that you think is just hard for moms and why?

- I think when we're tired, so generally speaking, after years of working with homeschool families, I think that there can, one of our besetting sins is that there's a lot of fear that we're gonna do something that will ruin our kids or that we are gonna make a decision causes them to miss out on something amazing.

And so when we're tired, those doubts and fears, we're even more likely to listen to them because we're tired. And so, resetting our time in the word and getting some friends to encourage you becomes super important in those moments when you're tired. So I always counsel people to get, to have their classical conversations directors pray for them.

They are standing by wanting to do that thing. They want to pray for all the members in their communities. And so being transparent with each other is important at this time of year when we're tired and those fears creep in. - That's really good. That is good. And you know, I think it's wise that we recognize that when we get still again after being so busy through the holidays, we can hear those niggling fears.

We can hear those, but what if this is not working and what if I'm not doing the right thing and I haven't seen the results I thought I would, is it my fault? When we get still in January, that's when we hear those fears. Really, really good, Jennifer. All right, so why is January hard for students and how can we help them?

- Well, I think they've had a complete lack of routine for three weeks. They've had no sleep and tons of sugar. It's a bad combination. And so I always used that first week in January when our community wasn't meeting to try to reset what we were eating and how we were sleeping and to try to ease back into the school schedule of getting up and at least doing some math and reading and just getting us gently back into the routine.

- I like that. Y'all, you heard it here. You have permission to ease back in to January. I think that that is a kinder, gentler approach to second semester and it will bode well 'cause the truth is we are all off our schedule. Most of us did bend the rules of everyday life a lot for the holidays.

We stayed up later, we did more, we ate more poorly. We let the kids go, go, go and watch, watch, watch and do, do, do. So now we have to get back to the reality. And if we make it a comforting routine and a privilege to start slow, then I think our children will appreciate it.

- Yeah, and I know you and I both are strong believers in reading aloud to our kids. So I always tried to find something really charming to read in January and February so that we could turn on our gas fireplace and have something warm to drink and read and start our day reading scripture and then reading something either cozy or funny or something that just helped us be excited to get back in our rhythms.

- That's really good. I think that's good. It entices our children to thinking and deep conversations again and that's a good. All right, so let's be super practical. What can moms and dads who are listening to this, who are heavily involved in homeschooling, what can we do to encourage ourselves?

How do we encourage ourselves in this dark winter season? - Yeah, one thing besides the prayer and the getting back into reading scripture that I've mentioned is that I was always encouraged by finding a mentor whose kids were older than my kids. It's one thing to sit around and air your frustrations with your friends who are in the same trenches with you and that's not a bad thing to do but it can be more helpful to do it with someone who's just a little farther down the road so you can get their wisdom.

And so I was doing that one day with one of my, and I've had several great mentors who I'm so grateful to. But I was grumbling a little about some complaining and some other teen habits and this wise older mama, even though she didn't know about my dusting analogy, she said, "You need to wait and pray and keep working "just the way you're doing and they will come around.

"They are not quite who God intends them to be yet." And she was right, they did come around. And so I think having a mentor is extremely important. - I like that and I like what your mentor told you. Give yourself some grace. Give yourself permission to wait on a result.

I think that our world today is the instant gratification and we're gonna try this plan because it promises instant results or fast results and when we don't get fast results, we feel like we're failures or that that plan was not for us or that we were definitely not for that plan.

And so that is real wisdom, to wait and persevere and give yourself grace that just because everything has not righted itself in the first week does not mean that it's not coming around. - Yes, and we also, besides the instant gratification, we also can't think that it is a straight upward line that marks the progress of our home education.

You're tempted to think it's a graph that just goes right up at a constant and steady pace. You do your work and the development comes in kind and it's not like that, it's more like a scatter plot. - Oh my goodness. - Ups and downs and going gangbusters for a while and then hitting a wall and falling flat.

- Oh, that is so good. Okay, so listeners, you might think that's not encouraging, that's not encouraging, but it is, okay? We're not, we want you to know that it's natural that things don't always get better, you know? It really may, there may be a season or a subject of three steps forward, two steps back with you or with one of your students, one of your children.

I like that, things are sometimes a scatter plot. Yes, that is so true and you just realize, but in your own life, mamas and daddies, think about the things that you have been pursuing that you have wanted to get better at. Is it always a steady clear upward climb?

Do you just keep getting better and better or do you stay at this level where you're not very good at something for a long time and then you have a breakthrough and then it unravels a little bit and then you go forward? I think that's really wise, that's really good.

All right, tell me some creative things that your family has done to fight the doldrums, Jennifer. I have shared before, one of my daughters, we hit a wall and it may have had something to do with the weather. It was cold and gray, but one of the walls we hit was in challenge A when there was so much to memorize geography-wise and spelling was not her forte and having to memorize the names of all of these world capitals and spell them correctly, it just took a toll on her soul.

And so we had some days where things just seemed very bleak to her and it wasn't just the geography, it made everything else seem covered in gray too. And so one thing that we did, and you'll laugh, Jennifer, I still have the candle of happiness. We called it the candle of happiness and we went and we picked a scent that she really liked.

It was a really warm vanilla scent and when we were having a bad day, we would go, we would light the candle of happiness and we would sit really close to it and we would ease into the day and ease into our subject. And so that sounds like a silly thing, but I will tell you it made a huge difference in her outlook and I'll be honest, I'm not sure if it was the candle of happiness scent that made the difference or if it was just the relationship that we built, I honestly think it was that she saw her type A, make a list, go, go, go mama be willing to say, wow, we need to take a step back and a deep breath and you know what, it's okay if we just sit together and work on this as we're able.

I think what made the candle of happiness a success was that she felt heard and important and she had a partner and it was her mama. - Yeah, I think that's so good and for us in our house it was running the gas fireplace all winter. We moved school mostly into that room and it just made cozy happy feelings and my husband got over the gas bill.

- Yes, yes. - Wasn't sure we needed to run it as often as we thought we did but it made us feel, it made winter special. We have good memory of having the fireplace on and lighting some candles and eating something warm in there. So and then I think you're right, breaking the routine sometimes is super important.

So one of my, I'll never forget, one of mine was doing a math lesson on fractions and I am a type A list making kind of a person and let's get through things and move on. And so she brought me the math book and said, "Look, at the introduction of this lesson there is "this recipe for molasses cookies, can we make it?" And I thought, I technically know that fractions in a recipe are math but it feels wrong.

- Right, it feels like it will not help us get to the end of this lesson. - Exactly, and we made the molasses cookies. I think she was in fourth grade, she's now a freshman in college and we still make those molasses cookies in our family because it was such a special yes that I was able to say, yes, we can stop in the middle of our school morning and make a cookie.

And so that, just sometimes stopping and doing something that they want to do is really important. - Yeah, yes. And I think, and it doesn't happen just in January, I think our children from time to time need to be reminded that the homeschooling for us is because we're choosing to invest our lives in them knowing the Lord and learning about his word and his world.

And we're not invested in them getting a college scholarship or finishing the textbook or becoming the valedictorian. I think that they need from time to time to be reminded that we chose homeschooling so that we could be with them and we are glad to be with them. We are glad to be learning together and they just need that reminder instead of we're all slogging through, be reminded that we're all learning together.

- Yeah, absolutely. And one of the ways that we do that without throwing out the lesson plans altogether is when a subject is hard, like let's take the challenging cartography that was for that child. And sometimes I would just set a timer and say, you know what, I know this is hard right now, but it's important for us to have good habits.

And so instead of me saying, you're going to draw and label this entire map today, I'm going to set a timer. And you have to judge on your child and where they are. So, or I would do this with Latin a lot of times when things are hard and I'm just gonna set a timer.

And as long as you work diligently while the timer's on, then when it's off, we are through with that subject for today. No matter where we are, which was really hard for me to do, I feel like we need to-- - Yes, oh my gosh. - But if I was just willing to make that deal with them, that if you will form these habits with me of working a little bit every day, even if we're struggling with something, we can't finish where we thought we should be for the day, we have cultivated the habit of doing a hard thing for a little bit of time every day.

So. - Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That's really good. Cultivating habits are important. So there are things, listeners, we all know the right things to do. Okay, let's not pretend. We all know that we need to get enough sleep. We all know that we need to make good nutrition choices. There are things that, you know, if my kids ate too much sugar or too much carbs, they were not alert, shall we say.

It made them want to just nap and watch movies or curl up with a book that was of their own choosing and not necessarily something that was gonna help them with a group conversation later. And so there are things that we know. What are the things? What are some simple things, Jennifer, that you know that we all know, but things we need to remember that will help us get back on track in this new year?

- Yeah, well, I know that like most of our listeners, I listen to a lot of podcasts and it's so interesting. So when you and I were first raising our kids, I think we didn't have that. We had books and friends. - Yep, yep. - These are sources of information.

We can go to the Christian bookstore and get a good book on parenting, or we could listen to some other mommas at church. But I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and not surprisingly, they echo a lot of the practical things we've said today, which is that they see a national epidemic of kids not getting enough rest, not getting enough exercise, not getting enough time to play freely without being directed by others, and not enough responsibility and too much screen time.

So I think when you said we all know what to do, you're right, and so I had to really concentrate after the holidays on those simple things of an hour before bedtime is we don't, we can't concentrate on bedtime at bedtime, no matter how old we are. We need to do the things that signal to our bodies that the day is winding down.

And so whether you've got teens or babies, that is still true, is just getting that sleep to me was the number one thing in January. Let's get back on our sleep schedule and then eating and exercising. So it is much harder to exercise in the winter. And so either my kids learned to bundle up well and go on outside when I, or we figure out something to do in the house to move our bike.

- Right, and those are good things. And parents, your kids are not naturally, they're not necessarily going to naturally embrace all of these things. And so you are going to have to force the issue and set the example. 'Cause it's not just our kids that have most likely gotten out of good routines, it's us too.

And so we need to be getting enough rest. We need to cut back on our screen time. We need to eat better. We need to exercise. We need to go back to our good habits of folding the clothes as soon as they come out of the dryer. We need to get back to the good habits.

We need to give ourselves rewards. We need some unscripted free time as well. What do you think, Jennifer? These are all great ways. You have helped us all to have good ideas for creating a reset plan for our January, for our homeschool and for our homes. What does a plan like that teach our kids?

- Well, hopefully, just like we're teaching them academic content, let's say, for lack of a better word, we're also teaching them how to live well. Every time we give them responsibilities around the house or every time we demonstrate simple things like, you know what, we got off track here and we need to reset.

Then when they are older and out of our homes, they are equipped to know when they have gotten off track and to be able to reset. And they know how to make a plan to do it because we are modeling that for them while they live at home with us.

And I think that is super important. I mean, I know when my kids would call stress from college, that's exactly what we would do is talk back through just what you and I have talked about today, what you need to do to get back on track and make this manageable.

- Yeah, and really and truly, parents, isn't that why you're raising your children? You're raising them to be, not lifetime homeschoolers, you're raising them to be successful adults. You're raising them to be people who know how to manage their own lives well. And so, I think you're exactly right, Jennifer, that learning to put together for our families and ourselves a reset plan teaches our children that starting over is a good thing and that there are simple ways that we can get ourselves back on track.

That's really good. Thank you so much. - Can I say one last thing? It'll be quick. - Of course. - As you're assessing how your first semester went and getting ready for the reset, it is super important not just to look at the things you feel like you're doing wrong, but to take a moment to put your feet up and sit still and think about all the great fruit that you have already seen in the first semester because if you will allow yourself time to dwell on that, you will think of many successes that you had and that will give you a great boost to count your blessings before you try to make a new plan.

- Oh, that's so good and this is the funny thing. The next podcast is going to be about assessing as we begin a new semester. So that is a perfect add in to that. I also, I want to thank you, Jennifer, for being such an encourager to homeschool moms and dads everywhere.

The weary homeschool parents who are turning the corner into January have been blessed by your encouragement. But I also want to ask you about a program that you are part of every week because I think that this might be a shot in the arm that some of our parents might like to receive in January.

Tell us a little bit about the Words Aptly Spoken Book Club. - Yeah, so Lee Bortons and Tim Knotts and I and sometimes members of our team, including Lisa, will gather for an hour a week to go through and just discuss the books that are in the Classical Conversations curriculum and also the parent resources.

And we have a blast and we laugh and we cry and we have great conversations together about books. So if you just need a break and you want to grab something hot to drink and put your feet up and listen in as we have these book discussions, it is a bundle of fun.

And they can be found on leebortons.com under the Words Aptly Spoken tab or you can also find them on her YouTube channel @leeebortons. - That is wonderful. And you guys would love it. It would be a good way to reset your brain and your thinking for the new year.

So hopefully you guys will take advantage of the Words Aptly Spoken Book Club. Thank you, Jennifer, for telling us about that and for being here with me today. - Thanks for having me, Lisa. - All right, see you guys next week. (gentle music) you