When our fourth child was born, it seemed like everything broke at once: hot-water heater, dishwasher, air conditioning. It seemed like it was all destined to give up the ghost at what felt like the busiest (and worst) possible timing for us. But over more than a decade of homeownership, now, I’ve realized that solving problems involves a willingness to keep learning. I have to get curious about hot-water heaters long enough to make an informed decision.
One of the mental-models that helps me work through a problem I need solved is to think of the problem as solveable in one of three ways:
- I can do it myself (time-consuming)
- I can have someone do it with me (saves me time, but costs me money)
- I can have someone do it for me (most money, least time)
So, too, every summer, I look for the pain-points, the friction, and the difficulties in our homeschool and I ask how we can go about solving that.
Do It Yourself?
Is it something we can do ourselves?
Here, it’s best to play to our strengths. We like to sing as a family, so music is an easy one for us not to have to outsource. That said, we handle singing but outsource some piano. I have an easy time with Latin and Greek, so I can teach those to my kids while focusing—especially at first—at keeping it interesting and fun. As the kids reach Shakespearean age (which we start in 4th-grade with the CMEC), we read the play with the older kids after the littlest ones are in bed, often with a treat.
When we choose to do it ourselves, we notice that we generally relish the research involved or look forward to reading more books on the subject.
Can Someone Do This With Me?
What help can we get from someone doing it with us?
That’s the joy of the CMEC, in many ways, because a guide comes alongside us during our pre-reading and helps us get a sense of the lay of the land so that we’re a better informed guide during the term. It’s an online homeschool-coop where experienced mothers and less-experienced mothers all share their strengths to shore up each other’s weaknesses and give us the confidence to educate across the subject.
Much of this is just documentation from mothers who’ve been there before. The etymology of document has at its root the verb doceō – to teach. It was originally an instru-ment (same suffix -ment) for showing or proving something and thus could mean a lesson, instruction, or warning. Now, we just mean almost any text united around the same theme.
The CMEC shores up many of our weaknesses and recommends resources that give us confidence to take on nature study, greater guidance as we brush-draw, or even just make . YouTube is at least as helpful for education as it is for home repair.
Can’t Someone Just Do This For Me?!
And then, what’s a high priority for us that would be worth spending the money for someone to do for us?
These will also be different for everyone. For us, it tends to be math, piano, swimming, drawing, and, perhaps this year, outdoor-leadership-skills. It will change as our kids grow and their interests or abilities change. Here we need to select well, trusting our children to the care of another teacher or coach, either in-person or online.
As one of my former bosses likes to say, it’s easy to convince someone to give you their money; just make a good product. But it’s much harder, he added, to convince them to trust you with their children. Sure, the person must be an expert in their discipline, but we must also take into account the life and atmosphere of these places. What is the tone the coach or teacher sets? What kind of children will my children be regularly spending time with? It’s on us as parents always to choose wisely in this regard.
The Options for Latin and Plutarch
And so, at grammaticus, I offer support for homeschool-families in all three ways.
If you’d like to check out Latin or Plutarch for yourself, I have plenty of free resources on YouTube, as podcasts, or my resources pages (Plutarch, Latin, or Greek) on my website. The Gospel of Mark this summer is a great free resource for someone wanting to practice their Latin and read the Gospel of Mark through a different lens than they have before. The Plutarch Podcast will enter its last season this fall, and then we’ll have a free overview of every. single. life. 👍️
If you’d like to do it with me, you have a couple options as well. All the Plutarch classes have an asynchronous option that’s available for $20/month if you just want to watch the videos after the fact and see me walk through a life in ten lessons. This year, we’re following the Ambleside sequence again and doing Cato, Philopoemen, and Titus Flamininus. For Latin, Office Hours is open as a separate class for anyone wanting to practice their Latin or ask questions.
If you’d like Latin done for you, I have the Reading Road to Latin. At your own pace, and in a couple of different ways (more on that in a future email), you can let me lead any of your kids through the basics of Latin grammar all the way up to a high level of reading the Classics! There is no shortcut, or as Euclid said “no Royal Road to geometry,” but I’ve crafted a journey that is gradual enough to reward consistent effort. How do you know you’re improving? When you read Latin you understand more and more of it instead of seeing (or hearing) it as gobbledygook!
So, I hope this framework helps you think about what you do in your homeschool and how you reflect on ways to improve next term in your own homeschool. Like Latin, that road, too, is a long one, but we’ve seen enough families do it well that we know the outcomes are worth our time and attention today and every day.
