Success in Imperfection - Part 2 of 6

This is Part 2 of 6.  Find the other parts here.

Imperfection feels like failure, doesn’t it?  We want to know that we’re doing what’s best for our children, that we’re competent at this job of homeschooling that we’ve embraced, that we measure up, and the clearest way to know that is to judge ourselves and our children against the standard.  But what if our standard isn’t the right one?  And what if we aren’t competent to judge how we measure up because the results aren’t necessarily visible?  What if our expectations fail to account for the true challenges we face?  What if the “right thing to do” isn’t actually best for our specific situation?

My oldest and my youngest both learned to read painlessly and early.  My youngest taught herself by helping me do DuoLingo Spanish on my phone at bedtime every night!  (That’s not an officially approved method of reading instruction.)  When my oldest started Year 1, for her reading instruction time we used the Declaration of Independence because I had a lovely picture book copy of it and it had enough words she didn’t already know that we could do some word building and other CM-style reading work with it.  Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?  My second child had a vision issue that went undiagnosed until she was about 8, and because of that and some other factors she spent about 2 years working painfully through the McGuffey Primer. 

Was that a reading lesson failure?  No!  Actually, in some ways my lessons with my oldest were failures because I neglected to do the spelling portion of the lessons most of the time and so my oldest had to really hit spelling hard through copywork and dictation when she was older to make up for that.  My second child’s lessons didn’t produce the same results, even though we did them even more intentionally and incorporated many of the optional elements that help to remediate reading difficulties.  But she had extra challenges, and we didn’t see much progress until her vision issues were addressed.  And even then her results continued to be different because she’s a different child.

If I measured my success by the standard of “reading fluently by first grade” or some other commonly accepted standard, my time with my second child would be considered a failure.  But it wasn’t a failure!  We did what was possible and healthy based on where we were at the time.  We mostly kept school as a positive experience in the midst of the challenges.  We kept evaluating what we were doing to see if it was the best course right then.  And we kept in mind Charlotte Mason’s principles and her guidance, which saved us from falling into many mistakes that would have been considered the “right thing to do” but in my daughter’s case would have been the wrong thing to do.

Keeping the principles in mind can save us from those sorts of popular mistakes, where something that works for many is confused with something that’s a foundational expectation.  But we can fall into another trap, trying to do everything that’s ever been associated with Charlotte Mason, as if leaving something out or giving something short shrift means failure.  Charlotte Mason never expected any of us to be able to perfectly implement every technique, every notebook, every activity that she recommended, every opportunity for habit formation.  Even her own teachers, in her own schools, with lovely timetables and days structured to help them keep the timetables, couldn’t fit in everything. 

My lists for weekly work for each of my students are pretty long, especially in the upper years, but they still don’t include everything I think we should be doing and certainly not everything Charlotte Mason ever recommended.  And we don’t even accomplish those lists completely every week!  (Don’t tell anyone, but occasionally some thing on the list doesn’t get accomplished at all during an entire term!) And many of the items on my long lists aren’t done “correctly” but are done quickly and simply in order to fit into our crazy life.  They get done, but they probably don’t look anything like what most of you envision if you see that item on a schedule.  And I’m happy with that, because even our simple and quick version of those items is good.  Sometimes we can get bogged down in trying to figure out how *exactly* we’re supposed to do each piece.  We just can’t research everything!  And it isn’t necessary to research everything. 

Sometimes we find we need improvement in an area, and then more digging into the details is needed, but usually a general understanding is good enough, certainly enough to start with.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s moving us in the right direction.  Charlotte Mason success is not measured by how many things we accomplish and how correctly they’re completed. 

Not only did Charlotte Mason not measure success in that way, she warned us not to try to take her recommendations and turn them into lists and rules.  She saw the danger in making her method into a system, like taking a detailed road map showing all the possible routes and turning it into a list of specific steps to get from point A to point B in one particular way, the kind of list you get in a map app.  She didn’t want us to judge ourselves by such a list.  That’s not a proper measure of success.

 In the first place, we have no system of education. We hold that great things, such as nature, life, education, are 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' in proportion as they are systematised. We have a method of education, it is true, but method is no more than a way to an end, and is free, yielding, adaptive as Nature herself. Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one's behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. Method in education follows Nature humbly; stands aside and gives her fair play.

Charlotte Mason Volume 2 p. 168

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