Thinking “Outside the Box”

By Penina Taylor

Well, it is that time of year again.  The hottest part of the summer and the busiest, August is both an end and a beginning.  The summer is over, children are home from summer camp and those that go to school in other places are finishing up their summer visit and preparing to go back to school. Most parents have already made their school plans for the coming year and many of us are firming up those plans.  For those with children in school this may involve carpool arrangements or trying to figure out how to cover this year’s increase in tuition.  For those of us who homeschool these preparations include confirming classes to be taken, registering with the City or County, finalizing arrangements with a Rebbe and ordering curriculum.  It is too hot to go outside, but that’s ok, we spend most of the day on the phone or shopping for supplies.  Yup, it’s almost time for school to start again......for some of us.  Why do I say for some of us?  Well, let me explain.

Within the Jewish Homeschooling Community, there are two basic philosophies (no, that can’t be right - 40 families and only two philosophies?) Ok, humor me a little.  There are those who homeschool because they have chosen homeschooling as a lifestyle choice.  They believe that it is an integral part of raising children with the idea that the home is the center of their life.  Such families are usually very concerned about giving their children a high quality and well rounded education, but they are not so concerned about making sure that their children’s educational program conforms to the abstract yet rigid standards set by the institutional school establishment.  As I put it, they are willing to “think outside the box” when it comes to how they educate their children.

The other philosophy of homeschoolers in our community is the result of the schools themselves.  These are parents who have sent their children to Hebrew Day School just as we have always been told we should, but for whatever reason have had a bad experience.  Sometimes this bad experience comes from having difficulty communicating with school administrators.  Other times, this difficulty resides with the fact that their children have learning differences and need to learn a different “way” than the way that their teachers teach.  Sometimes these difficulties may come from other children being cruel and causing fear and a tremendous amount of stress in their child.  This is often where the tummy ache syndrome appears.  The children find going to school so stressful that they get sick over the idea of having to return to the torture chamber called school. 

Any of these reasons are valid reasons for homeschooling.  Just as any method of homeschooling a family chooses to use is valid for them.  However, the problem arises when families who fit into this second category enter the homeschooling experience wanting to “leave an out”.  I liken this to a prenuptial agreement.  When a couple decides to get married, they can go into marriage with one of two attitudes.  They can go into marriage with the idea that Hashem has matched their soul to that of their Bashert and that marriage is a lifelong commitment to be broken only under extreme circumstances, or they can go into the marriage prepared for it to fail.  The problem is that statistics show that marriages begun on the premise that they are likely to fail usually do.  In the same way, homeschoolers who go into homeschooling leaving themselves “an out” by working very hard at keeping up with the schools “just in case” they need to send their children back to school are missing out on the beauty of the homeschooling experience.  Besides, why did they pull their children out of school in the first place?  Do they think that in one or two year’s time the school is going to somehow be different?  The child may be a little older, a little more capable of handling the school setting, but nothing will have changed about the school itself, except that perhaps it has gotten bigger.

To fully enjoy the homeschool experience, each family must learn to “think outside the box”.  It is an essential element to a successful homeschool experience.  I am not saying that we all need to think outside the box in the same way, that would be thinking inside a new box. Every homeschool choice a family makes is valid because they know best what will likely work for their family.

This leads me back to my original point.  In my family, summer vacation goes from approximately mid-August to mid October instead of June, July and August.  Why?  Because I cannot see the point of starting school the beginning of September only to start and stop during Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Succot.  I figure that since I am going to lose nearly a month of school because of the holidays, why not just shift our vacation?  In September the weather cools and the kids are more likely to want to go outside anyway.  Now, I am not trying to persuade you to change when you take vacation, I am just giving you one example of how I practice thinking outside the box to benefit my family’s lifestyle choices.  Other ways of thinking outside the box may be to eliminate the whole concept of summer vacation from your family routine and spread the time off out throughout the entire year. Whatever you chose to do in your family, remember that you write the rules.  So be well, think outside the box and kasiva v’chasima tova!