Educating at Home

Other than working in my parents’ craft business and doing odd jobs here and there, my first real job was teaching piano.  At the urging of my mom and piano-teacher sister, I began teaching on my own when I was a little older than sixteen.  The students I taught were mostly people that I knew from church, and many of them were referrals from my sister, whose own piano studio was full.

My piano studio grew to about ten students, and their ages ranged from kindergarten to junior high.  Most were homeschool students, but I had a couple of public school students as well.  My sister was my teaching mentor, and while I was teaching I had several opportunities to attend college classes and music teacher groups with her.

During my piano teaching stint, I learned a lot from my sister about teaching.  Rewards, incentives, deadlines, motivation, creativity, building relationships, letting relationships go, working with parents, enforcing policies…  The lessons I had the opportunity to learn at this time were huge for a high schooler.

Teaching piano was a fabulous opportunity for me, but it wasn’t a passion.  Perhaps the biggest lesson that I learned from teaching piano was this: in order to teach others, you have to have a passion for the subject yourself.  I enjoyed playing the piano, but didn’t have a passion for it.  There were parts about teaching piano that I enjoyed, but I didn’t have a burning desire to teach this particular subject.

After a year and a half, I held our final spring recital and quit teaching.  I had given my students a quality education, but couldn’t continue trying to motivate my students to do something that I wasn’t motivated to do.  I had learned a valuable lesson: in order to transfer passion, you must be passionate.  It’s something I’ve remembered for the rest of my life.

My parents have had their own “part-time” business for as long as I can remember.  In the 90s, handcrafted home decor items were really in, and my parents made everything from wooden display shelves to decor designed with antiques to floral arrangements.

(My parents still have this business and it’s grown dramatically, but it’s transitioned to much more of a “home decor” focused business rather than handcrafts.  My mother still designs amazing floral arrangements, though.)

At that time, the primary way my parents marked their goods was at arts and craft shows.  Late summer and fall were the busy times for these shows, and I often accompanied my parents to these events.  From an early age, I was learning how to run a business: setting up the displays, helping with customer service, creating marketing materials, attending the booth when my Mom needed to step away, and even running the cash drawer.

My mom insisted that I counted back people’s change to them: “Your total was $57.53 and you gave me $60, so here’s 57.54, .55, .65, .75, 58 dollars; 59, and 60 dollars.”  (This was a relatively easy skill to learn when you weren’t allowed to use a calculator for math.)  I was shocked that the cashiers at Walmart didn’t seem to know how to do the same thing.

I made and sold my own products at my parents’ booth, too.  At first it was simple things, like a fabric candy cane pin that my mom designed and I would cut out, sew, and stuff.  I remember making Christmas “wreaths” from old puzzle pieces that we spray painted green, glued together in a circle, and used the top end of a sewing pin to make little dots that looked like holly.

Amazingly, these items sold and I made some money!  People must have bought them because they thought I was cute, or else there were a lot of people that liked junky crafts in the 90s.

Eventually, my dad taught me how to use a band saw, and I would cut out simple shapes for my own crafts, as well as my parents’.  I remember designing a nativity set on my own – the first project that I remember being more than “little kid cute”.  We sold quite a few, at a price of around $10-12 each, I think.

I learned quickly that we priced everything at $x.95 because it appeared to be less to the consumer – so items were $9.95 instead of $10.  This gave me some awareness of this price tactic as I made my own purchases, too.

I used plenty of my mom’s supplies for making these crafts, but also had to purchase some of my own as I actually started making significant items.  That was a fabulous way to learn about using money to make money.

My parents’ willingness to let me (and my siblings) take part in their business was a huge boost to my education.  The opportunities to learn business principles, develop new skills, and be inspired to be creative were priceless, and it’s one of the things I value most about my education.

I loved to read.  If there was anything that would motivate me to get my schoolwork done faster, it was a new book to read.  I remember when one of my sisters finally let me read her Anne of Green Gables books.  I read the first one and she told me there was no way I could have read it that fast – “you didn’t read every word!”

Though I never realized it at the time, reading introduced me to many different types of people and cultures, and made up some for boring history classes.  I read everything from books to newspapers to magazines.  My husband, who is good at history and geography, is sometimes amazed at the different historical figures that I can name, and the only thing I can attribute it to is reading.

My biggest extracurricular activity was music, by far.  My mom was a church pianist, and one of my older sisters was the keyboardist (she started when she was 14!).  My sister, who had also been homeschooled for middle and high school, taught piano at her own private piano studio and I took lessons from her for as long as I can remember.  (My mom tried teaching me at first but that didn’t work out so well.)

Every year, the students in my sister’s piano studio would study and prepare pieces not only for our two annual recitals, but also for Music Progressions, a sort of testing program at a local university.  We would be quizzed on music history, music theory, sight reading, and ear training; and then perform one or two pieces for the adjudicator, who was typically a professor at the university, at least for the more advanced levels.

This program had varying levels, but was in no way connected to the student’s age; a concept that I think we’d do well to think about applying to other educational opportunities.

In junior high and high school, I also took part in an annual piano performance event.  Each student would prepare one (or two, if they were short) piano piece and perform it in a concert hall before a judge, who would give a grade of one, two, or three and critique the piece on paper.

Once, I went to the state piano teachers’ convention and received an “honorable mention” in a similar type of competition.

Practicing the piano was part of my lesson plan for school, and I practiced for 30 minutes a day when I was younger, and an hour or so during junior high and high school, when I was more active in music and considering it as a college major.  I often accompanied our church’s youth and children’s choirs, and played for congregational music.

I liked music, but it wasn’t my passion.  I often wanted to quit, and my mother always threatened with “if you quit, you will not be allowed to touch the piano again”.  Well, I didn’t love music, but I did like playing, so that threat always kept me from quitting.

Two of the weaker links in my homeschool education were social studies and science.  Hopefully they’ve improved it by now, but Bob Jones science and history were terribly boring in the 90s, and we didn’t do a lot to amplify them.

Once, my mom entered me into the homeschool geography bee.  I did not do well.  (My future husband won that bee twice and went onto the statewide geography bee once.)   Why wasn’t I entered in a spelling bee, or a show-your-work at math bee?  I could have aced those!

I remember taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills a couple of times.  I don’t think it was required by our state, but my parents wanted us to do it to make sure we were learning everything we were supposed to be.  Those were easy, even if I didn’t know my history or geography very well.  Hello, multiple choice math problems?  Who could not get those right?

I vaguely remember taking extra schoolwork to work on in-between the different sections of the ITBS tests.  Goodness, homeschool parents were slave drivers!  I scored well on those tests, and my parents were probably relieved to know that they were giving me a satisfactory education according to state standards.

During my junior year in high school, I took the ACT.  I don’t remember my score (a 28, maybe?) but I know I did amazing in English, good in math, and guessed at everything else.  That was enough to get me a well-above-average score, so evidently everyone else has some holes in their education, too.

Sunday afternoons were the one big exception to my somewhat hands-off education.  My dad was my math teacher, and I wasn’t exactly an amazing student.  I do still feel that part of it can be attributed to the advanced-ness of Saxon math, and my dad’s strict grading scale: the lowest A I could get was a 94, the lowest B was an 88.  I was also never allowed to use a calculator.

On Sundays, my dad would go over the work I’d done in the previous week.  I was assigned one lesson per day, and all thirty or thirty-one problems.  (I always thought the kids whose parents let them skip some of the problems were the luckiest kids on earth.)  Math tests were an amazing treat, as there were only twenty problems!

At about 3 or 4 on Sunday afternoon, my dad would call me to the kitchen table and we’d go over the problems I’d missed.  Oh, I hated this, but looking back, I love that my dad invested that time into me.  Now, I find myself teaching my first grader the same things my dad taught me: Show all your work.  Keep your rows straight.  Don’t rush.  The simplest mistakes will kill you.

I never was an amazing math student, but thankfully, haven’t chosen a career path that requires a lick of algebra (though I suppose if I had be interested in a field that required advanced math, I would probably have enjoyed it a bit more).  Then again, I could probably figure it out now that I’m allowed to use a calculator.

I’ll write more about this later in the series, but during my senior year of high school I took College Algebra with Review at a local community college.  I had started, but not finished Saxon’s Algebra 2, but my parents had agreed that I could consider my high school math complete if I did well in the College Algebra course.

I passed College Algebra with flying colors and received a complement that I was one of the best students in class.  I felt a little gypped that I struggled so much with math in high school only to find out that I didn’t really have to know all that stuff in order to do well in basic college algebra, but I’m grateful for those Sunday afternoons with my dad and all the effort he put into making sure that College Algebra class was one of the easiest things I’d ever do.

I don’t actually remember a lot of school that looked at all like classroom time.  Though I’m sure much of my education in the early grades was more hands-on, I mostly remember working through my textbooks and the lesson plans my parents scheduled on my own, heading upstairs to consult with my mom if I needed help.  It seems like we would meet at the kitchen table around 10 AM every morning and go over the day’s work, and she would check what I’d done and we’d discuss how I did.

In thinking back, this style of education very much shaped what I am today.  When I need or want to learn how to do something, I figure out how to do it on my own.  I’ve taught myself how to start a blog; code CSS, HTML, and PHP; cook gourmet food; and design and sell a digital product.  The fear of learning something new is rarely present in my life; if I just have the desire to learn something, I’ll figure out a way to learn it.

Until I started thinking about my own education, I didn’t realize that this part of me was due to my education – I thought it was just part of my personality.  Now, I’m realizing that although I may lean that way naturally a bit, it is due in great part to the fact that I was taught how to learn things on my own.

Perhaps you would say that’s being “self-taught”, but it’s possible to teach someone how to teach themselves, and I think that’s what my parents did.