The Day I Stopped Being a Teacher
From rigid schedules to the terrifying beauty of real freedom.
I started homeschooling with a 36-page spreadsheet and a laminated schedule that broke the day into 15-minute increments. I thought my job was to be the Director of Education. I was wrong.
For the first six months, my kitchen was a battleground. I was trying to recreate a public school classroom in a 1,200-square-foot house, and my seven-year-old was miserable. I was miserable. We were spending our days checking boxes that neither of us cared about.
The turning point happened on a Tuesday. I had planned a unit on "The Life Cycle of Plants." I had the worksheets ready. I had the instructional video queued up. But my daughter wouldn't come to the table. She was outside, in the dirt, trying to figure out why the ants were carrying pieces of a dead beetle toward the porch.
I realized that while I was trying to teach her about biology, she was actually doing biology. I had a choice: force her to sit at a desk and read about life, or join her in the dirt and observe it.
I didn't lead that day. I followed. And that was the day I stopped being a "teacher" and started being a facilitator of learning.
Since then, our house hasn't looked like a school. It looks like a workshop. There are no bells. There is just curiosity and the time required to follow it to its conclusion.