If I ran into you in an elevator and asked you to describe your homeschooler(s), could you give me a one-minute answer?

(This by the way, is called an elevator pitch.)

If you don’t have an elevator pitch about your kids, maybe your mission has become fuzzy?

Why are you homeschooling? What are you hoping to create (work for God to create)?

This is a GOOD homework assignment for the summer.

Here are some things to help you get started. Let’s look at what your homeschooler is not:

-His transcript

-Her SAT scores

-His acheivement test percentiles

-Her number of honors courses

-His awesome apprenticeships

These are things your homeschooler DOES, but WHO is a different, more essential question (the rest is icing on the cake).

Try these questions:

-What does God say about your child?

-In whose image was she created?

-What gifts did He place within him and why (as much as you can know)?

-What is her character?

If you know these things, you can be faithful to the mission God has given you as a parent. The effect will be a transcript and activities that meet your child’s needs and the family mission, but it will be formed by God’s ideas.

Why not try composing an elevator pitch about your homeschooler?

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If I speak in the tongues of French or Spanish, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of spelling and can fathom all mysteries of histories and all knowledge of arithmetic,

If I have a faith that can move mountains of laundry and dishes each day, but do not have love, I am nothing. 

If I give all I possess to the purchase of good curriculum and give over my body to hardship of long nights of lesson preparation and research that I may boast of how well my kids are educated, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient with slow learners.

Love is kind when they forget how to multiply again.

It does not envy my friends whose kids were born knowing long division.

It does not boast when my kids can sing well but my friends’ kid does not.

It is not too proud to admit it to my friends when I’m tired and discouraged.

It does not dishonor others’ homeschooling methods.

It is not self-seeking and unwilling to help invest in the homeschool culture around me.

It is not easily angered when my kid declares he doesn’t like science.

It keeps no record of wrongs- in me or in others.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth and teaches my kids the same.

It always protects my family and friends.

It always trusts that God has a plan and cares what is happening.

It always hopes that I will be able to hear God and obey His will for my family.

It always perseveres- even on LONG days.

Love never fails.

Do you have any homeschool adaptations of Scripture verses?

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What is happening is that I hit one of those pivotal life transitions. You know the kind? You are moseying along living life as usual and all of a sudden you realize the little country road was merging onto I-95.

So I’ve been moseying along for 20 years, merrily homeschooling my 5 kids.

I hit major transitions each time one of the first 4 graduated from high school. I would feel loss, lost, sad, happy, relieved, and confused throughout their senior years (and especially at graduation).

After each graduation, I felt like I had to redefine myself and how I homeschool. That’s what transitions are like.

This year’s transition sort of surprised me: I am homeschooling my last high schooler. Seth entered 9^th grade this year. He loves high school. He jumped right into my philosophy that high schoolers should be busy and exhausted. He:

-carries full academic load

-is in Tri-State’s Chorale, Bell Choir, TEK, Rhetoric League

-is in MSA’s Praise Band and is manager for the soccer team (and drama in winter)

-is active in church youth group

-loves hanging out with friends in person and on social media.

So he’s cool. But I am at a transition. It feels weird to me. I am not planning 6 years down the road for the unit studies I want to see covered. I am not squirreling away curriculum to use on the next child. (Instead, btw, I am bringing it to MSA’s library and thinking what courses I want to teach here…)

What is it supposed to feel like when you are high schooling your LAST kid?

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Wings Unfurled

You burst into my life one day
So rushed to make your mark
You never even stopped to breathe
And almost broke my heart

Our fears relieved by your strength
You overcame that shaky start
My child of laughter and delight
Took on the world a boy apart

Though life confused you many times
By your determined heart
Somehow you made your way
Your life God’s work of art

All I knew and tried to teach
From all the love within my heart
You’ve soared beyond, wings unfurled
Flying from a running start

My son, now grown a man
Tested, strong and smart
Seize the future God has planned
Your life, His work of art

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It’s from The Onion, a fake newspaper/news site, full of satire and spoofs of current culture.  And while I can’t recommend the site in general (it ranges from the completely innocuous to the  completely offensive), this article was too good to pass up.

So, please accept my apologies for bringing The Onion into our little discussion about homeschooling, but I hope that once you reach the end of this post, you’ll have decided it was worth it.

____

The article opens with the following:

According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.

There was, of course, no such report by the DoE, since this is The Onion — where everything is made up.  But the article proceeds to detail “school-homing” parents’ concerns with the quality of their children’s home environments and guardians.

School-homing parents, the article says, worry about the ability of their children’s parents to provide proper care, education, and values to their children.  It’s best just to let the experts at school take care of raising the children, the school-homing parents say, rather than relying on their children’s incompetent parents raise them.

____

In the end, the article takes all the usual arguments for removing children from schools in order to homeschool them, and reframes those arguments as arguments for removing children from their homes in order to have the schools raise them.

The result, I think, is hilarious.   But all joking aside, what does the article actually tell us?

____

First, the article presents the act of turning your child’s education and formation over to a school as being an admission of your own incompetence, selfishness, and laziness.

We’ve come a long way since the days when it was the homeschoolers who were the one’s being made fun of!

____

Second, it shows us that homeschoolers are having an impact.  The article wouldn’t be funny unless people were familiar enough with homeschoolers to know why homeschoolers choose to homeschool their children.

After all, all the reasons the “school-homing” parents give are exactly the reasons that homeschooling parents give, just with the words “school” and “home” (or “school teacher” and “parent”) reversed.

Unless people could recognize these arguments as, “typical arguments for homeschooling, just turned around backwards,” no one would find the article funny.

The fact that The Onion expects people to find the article funny means that The Onion expects people to be familiar with homeschooling and homeschoolers.

We’re no longer some bizarre fringe group.  We’re now an acknowledged part of the culture, with which people are expected to be familiar.

____

Third, it means that people are expected to agree with us.  The article wouldn’t be funny unless the arguments made by the “school-homing” parents didn’t seem ludicrous to people.

But the arguments made by the “school-homing” parents are exactly the opposite of the arguments made by homeschooling parents.

So, if The Onion expects people to find the “school-homing” parents’ arguments ludicrously hilarious, that can only mean that The Onion expects people to find the arguments of homeschooling parents to be sane and sensible.

____

Even though this is just a satire/spoof article on a fake news site, in other words, I think it shows us that we homeschoolers are better positioned than ever to be culture changers!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "graduate fellow"), which he loves.]}

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The O’Shaughnessy family are culture changers for sure. Angela’s story:

You’ve probably heard this old story, but it bears repeating because it sort of sums up the O’Shaughnessy approach to culture-changing:

A man is walking along a beach when up ahead in the distance, he notices another man picking up starfish, stranded on the shore by the retreating tide, and throwing them back into the water.

Curious, the first man asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m saving these starfish,” comes the reply. “They won’t survive in the sun until the tide returns.”

Taken aback, the first man says, “Don’t you realize there are hundreds of starfish lying here, and that throwing a few back will make very little difference?”

The second man says nothing but remains unfazed. He picks up yet another starfish and throws it out into the waves. He hesitated for a moment, then looks back at the first man and says, “I just made a difference for that one.”

When Mrs. Tillman asked me to write about our family’s venture into culture-changing, I back-pedaled, because my husband and I don’t think of ourselves as culture changers.

We like to keep things low-key.  We aren’t demonstrators, protestors, or activists.  We’ve never built a school, a hospital or an orphanage, nor have we donated enough money to have our names on one.  When we die, it won’t be a high-security event.

We think of ourselves more as people who just get up in the morning and say, “OK, what needs doing today.”   Well, apparently five years ago, we got a Holy Spirit nudge that adoption needed doing.  It was just one of those, “we-can-make-a-difference-for-this-one” procedures.

After a family vote, we started out looking for one small girl to add to our family.  Turns out, we flew to Brazil in 2006, spent six weeks there and came home with two sisters, then 12 and seven.

It sounds all warm and fuzzy and noble.

It wasn’t.  Read Luke 17:10.

We know that our choices have made a difference for the girls.  They now have more opportunities than they ever would have had if they had stayed in Brazil.  They have a family and stability.

They’ve also lost their family of origin, their culture and much of their language.  They’re stuck with a family who looks different than they do.  They were disappointed to have to share our attention with our birth kids, and to learn that we aren’t rich and won’t buy them everything they want. They are sometimes confused by the language and culture.

We gave up a lot of privacy and money.  We opened up our family to scrutiny, not only through the formal process of home studies and such, but also because so many people wish to impart their opinions about adoption.  We learned that our belief that “love and limits” are enough, isn’t.  We learned that we can do the best we can, and sometimes it still doesn’t appear to change things.  We learned that spreading our money thin and doing without is by no means the hardest part. As much as we tried to educate ourselves, there were still things that about the girls and adoption that astonish us, stump us and amaze us.

We also experience the joy of hearing a little girl tell people she has the best family.  We get to chuckle at her not wanting people to know she is adopted, as if they can’t tell that her brown Latina face did not come from our pale Irish genes.  We learned that there is so much that is alike about people, no matter where they come from.  We get the fun of kids experiencing things that they never would have had the opportunity to experience.

We get the pleasure of knowing that we’ve done one thing to fulfill the scripture: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).  Most of all, we’ve learned a great deal about the love of God, who “while we were yet sinners, … died for us.”

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I have been asked to share some advice on cooking for large family gatherings.  Although I am certainly no expert, I have had a fair amount of experience with this over the last 25 years as I have hosted family and church dinners in my home and participated in a “dinner co-op” which entailed my making dinner for five families at a time once a week.  I’ve made my share of mistakes and earned more than a few gray hairs from the panic that accompanied them, but in the process I have learned some ways of making this task more manageable.  I hope this will be a help to some of you who may not have tried your hand at a large meal yet.

1.  Make a Menu – Do this well ahead of time and put everything on it, even dishes that others are bringing.  Keep a list where you will not lose it to make sure you don’t forget anything.

2.  Smart Shopping – Use your menu to make a comprehensive list of items you will need.  Don’t forget to list any staple items you are low on.  You don’t want to be in the middle of making pumpkin pie when you find you are out of sugar.  Staple a copy of your menu to your grocery list when you go shopping just to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything you need.

2.  Food with Forethought – Choose as many dishes as possible which can be prepared ahead of time.  You may be surprised at how many dishes not only work when made ahead, but are even better that way.
Examples:  Cook turkey the day before, slice when cold, lay in pan with gravy, cover with foil, and
reheat the next day.  Ham works well this way too.
Make mashed potato or sweet potato casserole the day before.  All of the labor intensive, messy
work will be done and cleaned up and you will only have to heat the casserole in the oven.
If possible, choose baked vegetable dishes (i.e. broccoli casserole, green bean casserole) that do
not require you to cook vegetables on the stove at the last minute.
Make gravy ahead of time and reheat just before serving.  Gravy is too risky to be making at the
last minute.  You can even use canned gravy and skip the prep altogether.
Prepare any cold dishes the day before, place in serving dishes covered with plastic wrap in the
refrigerator.  They will be ready for the table without any more work.
Desert is one part of the meal that should be easy to do ahead or farm out to someone else.
I struggle with this one, because I like pies the day they are made, but no one else seems
to care.

3.  Designate your Dishes – Make sure you have enough pans and casserole dishes for everything you are cooking.  Whenever possible cook items in dishes which look nice enough to place on the table.  This saves you a lot of cleanup and keeps the food hotter for longer.  If a casserole dish is too hot to pass at the table, try setting it in a basket.  Also, make sure you have leftover containers readily available to make the clean-up go smoothly.

4.  Corral Your Crock Pot – Use your crock pot to free up oven space.  Many dishes work well in the crock pot and fit with the “make ahead” rule.  You can do baked potatoes or baked sweet potatoes, mashed potato casserole, and even stuffing in a crock pot.  Most any casserole-style vegetable dish will also work well in a crock pot.  Ham works if you have a large crock pot.

5.  Coordinate Chores – Look over your recipes and separate the steps to make the job as efficient as possible.  For instance, if you have to chop vegetables for several different dishes do that all at the same time before beginning any of the specific recipes.

6.  Terrific Timing – Work backwards to plan when various dishes need to go into the oven or begin cooking on the stove.  You may have to adjust cooking times if you are putting a number of different things in the oven at the same time.  Usually, a general temperature of 350 to 375 will work for anything, you just may need to keep a dish in longer than the recipe calls for.  Remember, if you have made casseroles ahead and they have been in the fridge you will need longer to get them heated through, usually 1/2 again as long as the recipes states.  It is also wise to set them out of the fridge 1/2 to 1 hour before you put them into the oven to bring to room temperature.

7.  Question Quantities – use quantity guides to determine how much meat you need for the number of people you have.  Other recipes usually tell you how many they serve.  Remember, though, if you are having a big meal with a lot of different dishes people will not eat as much of each one.  Take into account what you know about your family or guests.  When making large quantities of casserole-type dishes, remember that they will take longer in the oven.  The denser the food, the longer it will take to heat or cook all the way through.  Consider doing two regular sized dishes instead of one giant one.  They will heat better and you can leave one in the oven on low until the other dish has been emptied.

8.  Share the Suffering – If you have others who are willing to take care of some of the dishes, let them, but choose what will actually be a help.  Dessert is an easy thing to leave to someone else as it can be transported in its finished state.  If you farm out the side dishes, make sure that they are being brought ready to eat.  If someone shows up 10 minutes before the meal with cold green bean casserole which needs to be cooked and your oven is full, you are likely to panic.  If your guests are unreliable consider asking them to bring bread and butter, tossed salad, drinks, whipped cream for the dessert, etc.

Most importantly, remember that the real point of the meal is sharing it with those around you.  Don’t let the stress of making the dishes perfect keep you from enjoying your time with others.  God will bless your efforts.

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I always like to feel I am contributing something useful to other folks’ lives. So that is what my sister-in-law gleaned a few years back, when she and her family stayed with us for a couple of weeks while they waited for their new house to be ready. (I notice, however, that she does not apply it- I have NEVER seen a dust bunny at her house despite all the education and activity that she does.)

But you see, the dust bunnies live on books. We have books- gently-aged classics, spankin-new paperbacks, text books, collections, kid’s books- shelves and shelves of them. In fact, one time the furnace repairman looked around our sunroom and said, “You gotta get rid of some of those books!” (I didn’t believe him, actually.)

And in my eccentric opinion, books don’t look completely authentic unless they have been kissed with a little dust. I think it gives the atmosphere of erudite thinking.

Our “erudition” illuminates Seth’s education these days.

This year school looks like:

Monday and Thursday classes: essays, Latin, Spanish, art, ancient history and literature, study skills

At home: Teaching Textbooks Math, Classical Roots Vocabulary, J. Weston Walch Grammar, A Case of Red Herrings (critical thinking), Earth Science (Globe Fearon), A Beka Health, personal reading list, guitar, Wii Fit

With Tri-State: Choir, MEK

Youth groups: at New Beginnings and Christ Community Churches.

If you dropped in at the Tillman house, you might climb over some projects and trail past my pile of bills and weave between some bookshelves. Or you might just decide to stay outside and admire the sheep gamboling around the field behind us. But if you come in, we can enjoy a cup of coffee and appreciate a dust bunny or two together.

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The runner is in place.

Her shoes are double-knotted, her muscles stretched and warm, her body hydrated. She is wearing her favorite color of spandex, and her ponytail feels secure. Every muscle tensed, she waits for the sound of the starter pistol.

But just as that pistol fires, some troublemaking knucklehead tosses a banana peel in front of her feet. If she slips on her way out of the gate, the race is lost. Even if she gets back on her feet and finishes, there’s no chance she will win.

As we get ready to start a new school year, we are mentally running the whole race ahead of time, thinking through the turns in the track and preparing for the spots we know will tax our reserves of energy and diligence.

But don’t forget to notice that some knucklehead is, indeed, tossing a banana peel right in front of the starting line! If the enemy can take us down right at the start of the race, he figures he owns the track.

Whenever I begin a new endeavor, I find that I am hit hard with something yucky right at the starting line. It throws my focus out the window if I let it. If the enemy can distract or discourage me right at the start, he’s wrecked me.

So I’m not letting him. I’ve got my handy-dandy Banana Peel Blower in hand (it’s kind of like a leaf blower, only much more powerful. It’s also purple, but yours can be whatever color you want it to be.). It’s powered by the Word of God and the testimony of my own mouth. When I shout out, “You are God and I am not, and that’s a fabulous thing!” those banana peels blow out of my path, and I am ready to run.

What banana peel has some troublemaking knucklehead thrown into your path at the starting line? Is it insecurity, fear, frustration, illness, financial stress? Don’t allow it to stay in your path. God is in charge; read the proof of that in His Word, and speak it with confidence to yourself and everyone around you. He has called you to run this race, to homeschool another year, and He goes ahead of you to make the crooked places straight and the rough places plane.

On your mark, get set, GO!

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