Prioritizing Work and Play

Reading on the beach in Kapalua

Recently, Henley’s education has gone from breakneck speeds to the pace of a turtle (she probably wouldn’t mind the comparison seeing as how a turtle is her favorite animal). We have held her to a pretty high standard, and she has responded beautifully, so this deceleration probably isn’t as drastic as it feels to me and John, but still . . . for lack of a better way to describe it, “life” has had us so busy that her schooling has taken a back seat for a bit. Instead of having the same one to two hour block of time every day where we sit down together and navigate through as many subjects as Henley wants, we’ve been struggling to get maybe even just an hour of academics. With the shortened time frame, that means that we are also regularly not getting through all five, four, or even three of the subjects Henley would choose at the beginning of work sessions. In these moments, we’ve been contemplating sending Henley to school more often than ever because we feel like we haven’t been giving her 100% of the education she needs and that’s scary for us on a number of levels.

The last few months, work has been overflowing for us. This is a busy time for John normally - the end of the school year, finals, last second pushes for good grade and the like - but this year has been exceptionally busy and it feels like the load is heavier than any other previous year. I have picked up around 15 hours of work per week also, which is a cool 15 hours per week more than I have worked since Henley was born. All this work means that we have finally found a need for childcare because neither of us can be home for a decent portion of each day. Luckily, we have my parents here to watch Henley during that time. And also luckily, Henley is willing to be watched by them. Mimi and Papa, well, they are awesome. They make breakfast, paint canvasses, play blocks with mountains of legos, maintain our burgeoning garden, go to the beach, swim at the pool . . the list basically includes anything and everything. And Henley loves her Mimi and Papa. She ADORES them. The only drawback is that all this G-parent time takes place during our usual work time. The easy solution would be to shift Henley’s work time back a few hours to when I come home, but when I re-enter the fray, it is most definitely NOT work time. It is “tell-me-about-your-morning” time, and “lunch” time, and “let me tell you what I did while you were gone” time, and “time to go meet friends after their school-day” time, and everything else but work time. So any semblance of even just a three-day per week work schedule has been a struggle to maintain.

John and I obviously really value Henley’s education, so we talked about how to find a remedy to all this missed time. Simply thinking about that deficit and the difficulty of trying to fit it in between Monday and Friday made John and I feel like we had to start using weekends to fit in everything that we were missing. But let’s be real, it is hard to commit to learning division on a Saturday morning when your friends, who are in school all week, are inviting you to your favorite breakfast restaurant to make your own pancakes on a tableside griddle, followed by a romp in a swimming pool where you get to practice being a shark or a dolphin. There’s a saying about “the best laid plans . . .” Do you know the rest of it? I don’t know the whole thing actually, but I know the gist of it is that great ideas can fail really quickly without great follow through. Because Henley is three, we end up skipping the weekend makeup work sessions and go along with the alternatives every time. Learning division on a Saturday can’t be THAT important, can it? I mean, would Henley even have the opportunity, or rather the need, to learn division if we sent her to school? School most definitely does not teach division to three year olds.

Instead of answer the school question, we tried something different. We had to fully acknowledge that we couldn’t commit to weekend times regularly, so we had to try and get these sessions back in during the week. This meant both of us had to shuffle our schedules just enough - a little earlier here, a little later there - to get Henley’s learning game back in the groove. John was able make a trade and free up some morning time in exchange for later nights, and we shortened our weekend academic commitment to under an hour, which included time for piano. It seemed like it would work, but the time that was freed still made the overall timing of the day pretty tight. Then we committed an enormous error on our part.

Each morning was allowing Henley about an hour of work time at most. She wakes up around seven or so, and by the time she shakes off the cobwebs, gets downstairs, grabs her breakfast snack (banana flowers, remember?), and practices her piano, it’s 8:30 am and her one hour work clock begins. Since our time was so rushed, we wanted to ensure a maximized academic experience. We thought covering some basics every day would be the best way to serve her education. Reading and math, the cornerstones of learning. Everyday, we would choose reading and math, and another third subject. We always said if we were able to fit in more work subjects, Henley could choose something that would fit in with that time frame. We weren’t sure if this change would prove fruitful or not, but even just a couple weeks saw some big improvements for Henley. It seems crazy to think it, but Henley has become an even more proficient reader. She is reading chapter books with over 100 pages in total and she is reading in-depth topics about women in engineering like Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters or The Girl With a Mind For Math - The Story of Raye Montague. Not to be forgotten, her math work has seen new milestones as well. She’s blown us away with her math skills, working through a third grade math book like a third grader would. Carrying, borrowing, and numbers into the thousands are all tangible bits of knowledge for this girl now, but there has been a price to pay for these gains. Henley’s well-rounded education has gone out the window. Or at least that’s how it has felt for the last few weeks.

The focus on reading and math has meant that we have neglected EVERY other subject we have ever taught her. We haven’t moved forward on the periodic table or talked about new molecules or bonding. We haven’t moved into discussions on how birds fly, and why people can’t (not without a plane anyway). Paul Klee is still popular with Henley, but we haven’t added anyone else to her portfolio. No chemistry, no physics, no art, no nothing other than reading and math. And everyday she asks if she can choose one of those neglected subjects ,and everyday we want to say yes . . . but we know that in order for her to keep up in general, she needs the basics. Everyday we sit to read, our cart of possibilities sits right next to us, but we don’t touch it. Our boxes of resources gather dust. We don’t play with the beads or blocks; we don’t place a single puzzle piece, or read a single map.

Now, the reality is that Henley is a really good kid with a huge heart, so she doesn’t really seem to mind. There is always more that she wants to do, more content she wants to learn, but she’s never upset about doing just reading and math lessons. Geez, that would be a totally different problem. She genuinely does love reading new books and working new math concepts and reinforcing older easy ones. However, we have always wanted her to explore and learn everything there is to learn, and had previously vowed to make it all as accessible as possible, and now we are the ones holding her back.

So guess what we did. . .

We got honest about the problem, and we took it on, full force. Starting last week, we said Henley could choose ANYTHING she wanted, and we would not say no. The light in this girl’s eyes seemed like it was made from the same bright shine that I imagine a bike would flash with pride when the training wheels were finally taken off. The first day of the new plan, Henley pulled out five subjects. The next day, it was seven. It was exhilarating to see how eager Henley was, but that exhilaration was a double edged sword. While it made is so proud, it also made us feel really disappointed in ourselves for holding her back so much previously. That shame is, and has to be, short-lived though, because we were on a new roll! These last few weeks we have learned to draw dolphins, gone back to maps of North America and Africa, studied music theory, Newton’s Laws, and cranial nerves. If she knew what it meant to John and Jay-Z, Henley would stand up and dust her shoulders off, just a little bit.

Then guess what happened. . .

We had this one busy day that started at the beach and ended at the pool and felt the need to stuff in some work time somewhere. And what did WE choose? Reading and math. And guess what else? Henley struggled. Not badly, but she needed pretty consistent reminders to work through each problem and even needed help sounding out words. After that, we felt even more torn. Had we made a mistake again? Was the reading and math focus better? How do you balance work and play? How do you balance what subject supersedes other subjects in the academic hierarchy? Does she need to spend more time on all of this? Henley is three. She doesn’t need to sit inside and do work all day while her friends are jumping at the trampoline park or miss out on another beautiful beach day because we gotta fit in a physics lesson, but she does need to continue her education. She has learned so much in such a little amount of time that we know her potential is extremely high right now and nurturing that growth will be a great foundation for learning and growth later. It would feel like a waste to us if she just settled into a new normal without including everything we could possibly offer.

At the forefront of our educational philosophy with Henley is her ownership of her learning. We placed and still do place a high value on her right to choose whatever she wants to learn in any subject. That is what we need to look back to. We can’t be disappointed with what has happened over the last month or more, but we can look forward and know what our plan is at its core - to include all that Henley wants educationally and socially with everything that we want for her as parents. It may sound like we need an extra 10 hours in the day, but I am hoping that if we plan this right, we can make it all happen. We are going to be okay with working in the afternoons if we have to and we may just have to split our work time into two sessions. It may not be the extremely focused sessions that we are used to, but they can still be extremely focused sessions that we get used to. There is a learning curve for everything, even learning when the right time to learn is.

Free time!