After I wrote up my schedule on Tuesday, hated it by Wednesday, and rewrote the entire thing on Thursday, I spent a little time thinking. It seemed to me that the reason I was having trouble scheduling was because I was basing my schedule off the schedule the kids were using at school before.

Not knowing exactly how long everything would take, how much teacher help each subject would take per child, and how much of an issue the younger ones were likely to make was a problem; but it seemed that the real difficulty was one of prioritization. Which things were the most important to me to spend how much time on? Which things can I alternate back and forth between days or terms? Which extra stuff can I cut out entirely and what do I want added in?

To sort through these issues, I sat down on Friday morning and wrote out a big list of what I think the end goals of each subject should be and general philosophical ideas about education. I am expecting this to be an evolving list since I wrote it in an hour and in general tend to append things willy nilly once I think about them further. Plus, I’m sure as soon as anyone else reads it, they’ll have all kinds of great ideas that will no doubt need incorporating.

After I wrote this I sat down to do the schedule again and had the whole thing finished to my liking in about an hour (I’ve updated the one on the last post so it is current). Yay! Much better. Hopefully posting all this here will help me find it more easily than keeping it in the spiral notebook I originally wrote it in, which will no doubt get tossed as soon as it’s full unless the kids abscond with it for their inscrutable purposes.

So, here is Rachel’s Educational Philosophy, also known as “Rachel’s cure for insomnia.”

Happy Reading!

Rachel


Rachel and her Husband, George, have been married since 1996 and are happily raising six charming children in West Linn, Oregon. In her off school time Rachel likes to read, play softball, crochet, play Dutch Blitz, and build websites that she doesn't have time to manage.