This post is about math, but it’s also about how I haven’t quite lost what I’ve left behind.

The Life I Left, and Why I Left It

My former life felt full of competition and comparison, and was one where I felt like I was playing a game that just didn’t make any sense to me. I left because I didn’t want that life for me, and I didn’t want that for my children. But that mindset has proven difficult to shed, even now.

“Our children are our teachers. The greatest gifts they give us are opportunities for growth and self-awareness.”

– Rebecca Eanes

While I count it fortunate that my children so far have only had limited exposure to the idea of competition in the learning experience, I have not been as successful in escaping its grasp.

When should a child be able to read? When should they be able to count to 10, 100, 1000, add and subtract, and tell time? Schools tie these milestones to age, regardless of a child’s individual development and ability. Many parents understandably use these as markers for how their child is doing in relation to the expectations of the system.

For math, I also use the metrics of grade-level for a number of reasons:

• It’s how the curriculum I use is designed and portioned out: by grade level
• It gives my children a sense of the question, “what grade are you in?”
• It helps me ensure they’re not “behind”
• It helps me defend my actions by proving that I am doing right by them

It’s hard when you feel the fear and judgement to not want to show some sort of metric of success to validate your choices.

What lessons did I learn from teaching math?

A lot can be achieved with a little bit of consistent effort

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

– Confucius

Math, when I was younger and in school, consisted of maybe 30–45 minute blocks each day. When you add up all blocks of learning in a day, you end with 6–7 hours of time in school each day. Here and now, however, my kids were only spending just 10–15 minutes per day on the subject.  

The result of such little effort over time?  My son completed the entire first grade curriculum five months after starting it.

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”

– Ovid

In some sense, in school, the pace is limited by the children who struggle to grasp any specific concept. This is the case, at least, if a teacher can ensure that all students understand a concept before moving on to the next one. Where that’s not the case, the children with uncertainty either need to seek additional help or get left behind. 

My experience was that I could rely on the content, created by experts (i.e. not me) to explain each topic. For example, they used an animation that turned a Greater Than sign “>“ into a hungry crocodile that eats the bigger number. In most cases, the content was sufficient to teach the concept on the first pass. In the inevitable instances where there was some confusion, that’s where I could step in and provide different ways of explaining the concept. This is of course one major benefit of homeschooling: the 1:1 instruction ensures that the pace of learning is always exactly where the child is.

While that’s true in some sense, I found that I was unable to contain myself and my ambitions. If he can achieve this in just five months, where would he be in another five months? Where would he be in a year? If he can do this with just 10–15 minutes per day, where could he be with 30 minutes per day? An hour?

Admittedly, these fantasies were born of pride and ego, and drove me to a not-so-great place. I had to step back and look at the bigger picture to understand that my own psychological baggage was manifesting itself in my children’s’ home and school. I wasn’t alone, though. In fact, I fielded that question of “shouldn’t they be doing more?” from many places, even those closest to the kids. It all seeped into my mind, that because they could do more, they should do more.

That’s the recipe for a life of eternal discontent: always seeking more.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

– Seneca

Taking my foot off the gas pedal

The other reason we achieved so much was that I never took my foot off the gas pedal. Life in our small coastal town of Ayampe was beautiful, flowing with beach days and adventures spontaneously emerging at all times. In order to “flow” with life as it came, I had to work to insert these math sessions at any given opportunity. Ideally in the mornings, but maybe in the afternoons or possibly crunching it in before bedtime, or worst of all – skipped. We planned for math seven days a week, 365 days a year, to account for the inevitable times we would miss it due to life.

But once we hit that pace, I found it very difficult to relent. I was able to rationally think through and say, “Okay, tomorrow’s a busy day, so we’re going to take a day off.” But when tomorrow came, some part of me still clung to the desire of squeezing in one or two subjects of study.  Ten minutes during the morning? Late in the evening before bed? It was a double-whammy: when a math lesson only took 15 minutes: the lure of being able to move one day ahead proved irresistible, and the idea of falling one day behind felt lacking and lethargic.

I would map out in my head where they’d be after a projected streak of uninterrupted progress, and find myself constantly readjusting that target whenever we moved ahead or fell behind. It meant that I always felt like we were on the precipice of falling behind because I never left any room in my mind to spare.

I had to consciously stop myself. I was able to hit pause before beginning the 2nd grade curriculum because it just didn’t make any sense to me that we were accomplishing so much, but that it never felt like enough. Sure, we celebrated each success and milestone, but I could sense that the undertone of our learning adventure was tinged with this sense of lack. It’s a terrifying thought that my own expectations and perspective could infiltrate his own sense of being. Perspective: he could feel so proud of all the progress and work he did, or feel dismay and lack at never being able to put in enough effort in the face of an unending path forward.

It’s sad to honestly say how hard it was to do, but I was able to implement our first ever week-long break from studies after completing that 1st grade curriculum. It happened to coincide with our moving from one home to another, but perhaps that was merely a coincidence? But seriously, it was hard. Really hard. I had to fight every impulse each day to try and ask them to do 5 minutes of math or to read me a book.

When we resumed our studies after the move, Instead of continuing right onto the next grade, the plan was to go back and revisit all the lessons, completing the provided Spanish problem sets to reinforce the mathematical concepts while also developing his Spanish.  Even here, though, I find myself plotting the path for his completion of the work and resumption of his next math course, and thus I still find myself struggling to accept the delay of a missed day.

While I sought to escape feeding my kids to the wolves of competition, I found that I had them competing against an impossibly perfect version of themselves and my own expectations. 

They do need to understand that nothing is achieved without practice and effort, but right now, they deserve the chance to be children and to have a father who supports them at their pace.  In all matters of their lives, I have to constantly remind myself that this isn’t a race, and that there’s nothing for them to prove.

Similarly, when I find myself feeling judged and measured for how my kids are doing, I can choose to let go of that mental baggage, and in doing so, I can stop burdening them with it.

“A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.”

– Zen Shin