RAR #220: Essentialism for Homeschoolers

Sarah (00:00): You are listening to the Read Aloud Revival, the show that helps your kids fall in love with books and helps you fall in love with homeschooling. I'm your host, Sarah Mackenzie, and today I want to help you think about what's most essential in your homeschool. In fact, I've invited both Kortney and Kara from the read aloud revival team to come chat with me about a favorite book we all love when it comes to essentializing. More on that in just a minute. But first, did you know I'm going to all five great homeschool conventions in 2023? Yes, indeed. Whether you can get to Greenville, South Carolina, St. Charles, Missouri, Cincinnati, Ohio, Round Rock, Texas, or Ontario, California, I will be there at the five great homeschool conventions. And this year I'm giving three brand-new sessions. One of those brand-new sessions is called, Am I Doing Enough? Because this is the question that plagues every homeschooler, right? (01:04): Most days we rush around, not ever quite getting to everything that needs to be done. And on the rare day when things do go smoothly, we kind of worry that we've neglected something important. And so peace and contentment just sort of eludes us. How can we know if we're doing enough in our homeschools? We're going to talk all about it in this session. I'm also giving a session called How to Homeschool with Babies and Toddlers. (01:31): I had three babies, aged one and under while also homeschooling a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old and eight-year-old and lived to tell the tale. Now those babies are nine and 11. The older kids are off to college, and I'm here to give you some practical tips and inspiration for those tiring years. The reason it feels hard is because it is hard, but there is a way to do it well and to do it with joy. (01:57): So we're going to talk about it. And then finally, I'm co-hosting a session with my friend and colleague, Colleen Kessler. It's called Helping Your Differently Wired Kids Fall in Love with Reading. And if you're facing reading challenges in your homeschool, whether because you have a child who's struggling to learn to read, or you have an advanced reader and you're struggling to keep them in books that match their social and emotional development, Colleen and I have some strategies and ideas to help. In this session, you're going to get practical tips and some specific book recommendations from both Colleen and myself to help your differently wired kids become readers for life. (02:38): To join us at any of the five great homeschool conventions, go to greathomeschoolconventions.com and use the code, readaloud23, all one word. Readaloud23, and you'll get $10 off a registration at any location. (03:03): We've been talking and thinking about the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown a lot here at Read Aloud Revival, especially as it relates to homeschooling. We're reading the book in our mama book club at RAR Premium in January and February. I will tell you, this book is easily one of the books I can say has changed my life. That is not an exaggeration. I think Read Aloud Revival itself has been built on the principles in Essentialism. I've probably reread it a dozen times, which is sort of funny, if you think about a book called Essentialism Do Less. And so I read it more and more and more. (03:39): If you look at my copy, the pages are all marked up, kind of embarrassingly so, I am not an essentialist in my use of marginalia. I make copious notes, but really this book has changed the way I've thought about my own life. (03:53): And maybe this is due to me being a mother of a half a dozen kids. I don't know. This idea of less but better really appeals. I know I love this book and if anyone took my dogeared, underlined, highlighted, marked-up copy, I would probably weep. So what I wanted to do today on the podcast is dig into just the first chapter because it is so rich. And so I've invited RAR team members, Kortney Garrison and Kara Anderson, to talk with me about this first chapter and how it specifically relates to our homeschools. (04:24): Kortney, Kara, welcome back to this side of the show. Kortney (04:27): Thank you so much, Sarah. Kara (04:29): Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thanks. Sarah (04:32): Okay, so we have to delineate whose voice is who's, for everybody listening. So Kortney, do you want to tell us about your family and where you live maybe? Kortney (04:42): Sure. So I'm Kortney and I work at Read Aloud Revival as the community director. I've got three kids and I live in the Pacific Northwest. Kara (04:51): And I'm Kara, and I have two kids and we live in Northern Illinois, and I am creative director for Read Aloud Revival and Waxwing Books. Sarah (05:01): Yes. Okay, so we just finished creating a mama book club guide for RAR Premium members to go with Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism. And the guide really helps dig out the principles of the book and apply them to homeschools, which I think is going to be a game changer for a lot of us. And then RAR Premium in our mama book club, we're reading the book together and just discussing it each week in the forum over the next few months. So let's dig into chapter one because this book does not pull any punches. (05:29): It gets right to the good stuff, right away. So maybe we should start with a definition. How would you describe the term essentialism to a homeschool mama who maybe hasn't heard of it? Kara (05:40): Oh yeah, that's good. I talk about this book a lot, I share it a lot with homeschool moms and then I immediately follow up, but it's not a homeschooling book because I don't want them to feel like this is something that they should have known about already and that they already should have read it. I think I first heard about this book from you, Sarah, and I observed it like a hungry little sponge. At one point, I even wrote a whole talk about it. I was so obsessed with the idea, because I think it hits on something that we desperately need to hear as homeschool parents, and that's that you can't do it all. (06:15): And honestly, you shouldn't even try. And that sounds a little callous because it's like we're talking about our kids, don't we want to give our kids everything? Don't we want to? What I mean is that we are so inundated with resources and social media and good ideas, really good ideas, but it sometimes means we can't focus and decide on what's important for our own families because we have so much coming at us. (06:42): So I think essentialism, what is the tagline of this? The disciplined pursuit of less. I like the subhead for that, the disciplined pursuit of less. Because I feel like if we're trying to do everything that we come across, we will, best case scenario, just be doggy-paddling in the deep end of the pool, in the homeschool pool, and never really feel like we get anywhere. And in the worst case, we can burn out and just think that we're not good at homeschooling just because we're trying to do too much and it's just impossible. Sarah (07:19): You know what strikes me now about you pulling out that subtitle, the Disciplined Pursuit of Less, is that I think I kind of tend to operate with a default mode of thinking, when I'm doing things, when I'm pursuing something, it's more, so the default is less and then I add more. But actually in homeschooling, and I think across my life in general, and all of our lives in general, if we don't intentionally root things out, the default is actually more of things that we haven't really chosen or put there on purpose. So we have to be disciplined in our pursuit of doing less, which means we have to get really clear on what that less should be. (07:59): I mean, I find myself stretched too thin, pulled in a billion directions, taking on way too many things, like a lot of us do. And so this idea, the first time I encountered this book however many years ago was, it was pretty soon after it was published. (08:14): What year was this book published in fact? Do we know? Kara (08:16): 2015. Sarah (08:18): Okay, so I probably... 2014, I think it says. Yes, 2014. So I bet I read it pretty soon after it came out. It was really mind blowing for me, sort of profound. If I was going to describe the idea of essentialism to somebody who's brand new to the idea, I'd say it's not focusing on getting more done, but getting the right things done. And of course then that is like a domino effect. As soon as we say that, we have to now know what the right things are, what the next right step is, and in our homeschool, what's the next right thing for each of these kids based on the vision that God's given you in your homeschool. (08:59): For my husband and I, based on the vision that God's given us in our homeschool and taking into consideration all those circumstances around that, like our energy levels and our budget and our available time, and moods, and developmental stages that kids are going through, what lights us up or doesn't, and what do we have the bandwidth for or don't. So it feels really custom. You can really take this idea and go, oh, this is going to help me. It's not going to tell me how to do this. It's going to help me make a good decision based on my own circumstances, the way that my life is unfolding before me right now. Kortney (09:35): It kind of feels like a cheat sheet to wisdom for me, because wisdom is what we need in discerning what God is calling us to. And this sort of gives us a lens to view all of those questions through. Sarah (09:49): Yeah. So fundamental to the book is this idea of less but better. And he says that several times, less but better, less but better. It's kind of a through line. So I'm curious, what do you both think this idea of less but better could look like in homeschooling? Kortney (10:07): Well, there's this Latin saying, it's something like festina lente, and it means make haste slowly. And I think homeschooling families live right in that tension. We feel the pressure of external timetables and standardized testing and what your fourth grader should know. And we know that our fourth grader doesn't quite know those things, but we also know that while learning is happening, it's not linear. We can't plot it on a graph, like every day just gets a little bit better. There are dips and valleys and then high places and plateaus. And that contradictory aspect is really where homeschooling lives, that there are external pressures and that we know that it's not linear. (10:52): And so I think festina lente reminds me that I make better progress sometimes by slowing down, even though that sounds counterintuitive. Kara (11:03): Oh, that's so good. I just want to sit with that for a minute. So yeah, less but better. I like what Sarah says in Teaching From Rest even better. She says, "Today, do less, do it well." Which I think is even kinder to ourselves. We've recently done some circle with our events in RAR premium where we've talked about what teaching from rest looks like at different stages. And a while back we did an event where we set a rule of six, the six most important things for us in our homeschools. And I think the idea is, when you know what you want, what's important for your unique family, it allows you to dial out a lot of the noise. And there is a lot of noise, whether it's social media or grandma's opinion, or all kinds of things. (11:55): And so in our home, one year what this looked like for us was taking a field trip with books and audiobooks of course in the car once a week, pretty much every single week. And another year it looked like spending one morning a week volunteering at a cat shelter. And I doubted those things at the time because I had to make trade-offs to make those things happen. But I could only make those trade-offs because in the big picture I had decided what mattered most for us that season. (12:27): So only you can decide what's important for your family, but once you do, it's so freeing because then you can stop comparing and just go all in. Kortney (12:39): In the book, McKeown points out that we just really have too many choices. And I love your word for that noise because it's sort of, choices sounds like a really positive thing to me, but noise, that's a different thing altogether. (12:54): And so just calling it noise sort of was a moment of clarity for me. But one of the things that happens with lots of choices is decision fatigue. It just gets too hard to keep on making decisions all the time. And I know for our family, morning time, and that's the time in our school routine when we work on subjects that we all do together, morning time is a big piece of our day and it's already settled. And so that really cuts down on decision fatigue for me. So the content of our morning time changes throughout the year, depending on the season and the church year, but the time is already structured. It's got a slot in the day. And so that time is just waiting for us. (13:38): For us, our morning time structure is prayer, hymn, scripture, poem, and there are other things that come and go with the seasons, but I don't have to think about how we're going to start our day or wonder if poetry is something that we have time for. We simply gather for morning time. Sarah (13:57): I think that decision fatigue is... We don't give it enough credit for how much it can derail us and exhaust us, mentally exhaust us. So there are some school days where I haven't even finished drinking my coffee and I'm already mentally exhausted by all the decisions I've made. (14:21): I think since I've gotten clear on this idea of essentialism, for me it feels very rock solid that read-alouds and conversation are essential pillars of our homeschool. The other stuff is important. We do all the other things, no, we don't do all the other things. We do math, under duress. No, I'm just kidding. But nothing in our homeschool, I think nothing really even remotely touches the effects of sharing books and sharing conversations about those books. I sort of have this newly reinvigorated view of this prominence of books and conversations, because we've graduated our two oldest kids, sent them off to college. We're about to do it with our third, who's a senior in our homeschool this year. (15:06): And I've asked all three of those older kids what they have enjoyed most in homeschooling. And then I've also asked my two girls who are in college, "What's been the most helpful? What should I be doing with your younger siblings? What made the biggest difference?" (15:19): And all of them have named books, different books, they've all named different ones and conversations, and shared experiences we had around those books. And they all have different memories about, "Remember that time we read the Green Embryo and blah, blah, blah." Or, "Do you remember that time that we read..." It feels like it's not making a big difference because it's hard to wrap your arms around it, quantify it, or measure it quite as easily as you can with some other subjects. But that feels to me like, okay, that's a decision I don't have to make anymore, is that the most important things in our every school day are reading. Well, I'm just going to say reading because we don't read aloud every day. But there's either read aloud or read alone happening, and then there's conversations happening and then letting those things count. (16:04): Because we talk to our kids all the time in our homeschooling, and I think we all feel exhausted by it and yet we don't count it. That is probably one of the most important, and important's not the right word, it's probably one of the most impactful things that we do. And we're doing it all the time. And so give yourself credit for it. You're talking to your kids every day, that makes a huge difference. Kara (16:27): Speaking of things that worked, since you're referencing that, Sarah, you have a wonderful conversation with your oldest daughter that looks back on the things that worked best in your homeschooling. So maybe we can link to that in the show notes too. Sarah (16:39): Yeah, that one's episode 209. I have that one off the top of my head because I've been handing it out. Kortney (16:43): It's so good. Yeah. Kara (16:46): So a friend of my mom's homeschooled her kids in the eighties and she just didn't have a lot of options because it was the eighties. (16:57): So she gave her kids... I remember her telling me about this around her kitchen table over tea, and my mouth just hanging open. She gave her kids library cards, a math program, a subscription to National Geographic Magazine and a Creek, literally, until high school. And all of them, one is a lawyer, one is a writer in Los Angeles doing something really... And the third is doing something medical and fancy, I don't even know. But what I'm saying is, all of them followed what they wanted to do and were able to achieve what they wanted to do with those four, what is that, four things? Library card, math program, National Geographic and a Creek, up until high school. (17:40): And I just remember sitting there thinking she's proud of this, she doesn't feel bad for a second that they didn't do X, Y, and Z. (17:51): And then I realized, well yeah, because she's not dealing with social media or Pinterest. She could just focus on her kids and see what was happening and what worked for them and what wasn't too stressful and what made everybody happy, and what gave her time to grind her own wheat and put up tomatoes because she was doing all that stuff at the same time. (18:12): And I just thought, meanwhile I wasted so many hours trying to do everything I thought I was supposed to be doing because somebody shared a photo of it on Instagram or something. I just feel like as homeschool parents, we are so inundated by this tsunami of options and we're often told that we can't take our foot off the gas pedal for 18 years. You just have to keep going. You just have to keep going. And if we can stop and we can consider what's really important to us, I think that can make a huge, huge difference. Sarah (18:47): Especially as our kids are getting older, I actually think we start pushing more firmly on that gas pedal as our kids tiptoe toward high school, because we're like, oh, now it really matters. It's always actually mattered and you're just at a different point in the river than you were before. But it's the same dang river, it's the same thing. But what I think you're talking about, especially with this woman you're describing, is kind of a courage to just do what she knew she should do, and she didn't have social media playing into her fears. So we now I think just have to be more intentional about that. (19:31): Something I really appreciated is McKeown wrote on page five, and he wrote that, quote, "It took courage, as it always does, to eliminate the non-essential." And I have got that line circled in my copy with a note that I wrote in the margin that says, "It's always going to feel scary in homeschooling." This is the work. So that to me feels like, I mean that's the piece about essentialism, is that it's not easy. Actually getting clear, it's easeful but it's counter-cultural and it takes some courage to go, I am going to make some trade-offs and choose these couple of things even without a guarantee that they'll work because that's what we have to do. Kortney (20:21): I think one thing that Kara mentioned that her friend did was she watched her kids, and saw that they were thriving. And so I think that's something that in the same way that we don't necessarily count everything that we're doing, we don't give our own understanding of our children and of both their gifts and their callings, and their progress, that we don't give that enough weight in our estimation of how things are going. Sarah (20:51): That reminds me of something that my husband, Andrew, and I were just talking about, and that is, what you were just saying is we don't give ourself enough credit for the progress or the kids even. We don't give our kids enough credit for the progress they've made. And I don't remember where I heard this or what I was reading, but the idea was you should compare to your baseline, not to your ideal. So when you're trying to assess, how are we doing with, fill in the blank, whether that's handwriting or it's reading, like phonics, or it's essay writing or it's math or whatever it is, how are we doing with this? (21:26): We tend to go, well, compared to where we, in our imagination, think a 10th grader is supposed to be in their essay writing, based on no actual human 10th graders that we know, by the way, we always will fall short. We can do this in our own lives too. I can say, well, based on how good of a homemaker I think I should be, I'm doing not so great of a job at keeping up with the laundry. (21:48): But if we compared ourself to the baseline instead where we came from, then I can look at my twin nine-year-olds for example, and I can listen to them. Last night we were doing a family prayer and Beckett was reading out of the family prayer book and he read, "The harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few," without a hit, without even looking at me. And I was like, I mean I know I'm supposed to be praying and I was praying, "Thank you, Jesus. This child can read." This is so amazing. (22:18): But if I was comparing to where I thought he should have been a year ago, I would've said, "Oh, this is terrible. It's taking so long, we're not getting anywhere." But if I can compare him to where he was six months ago, a year ago, if we can do that with ourselves, so you're not the queen of laundry, fine, but are you folding one more load a week than you were last week? Are you making a one small, tiny amount of progress? But if we can compare, I wouldn't say down, I don't think that's fair, as they can bet down instead of up. I just think it's taking stock of where we came from instead of constantly looking about where we want to be so that we're never satisfied with the progress we made because there's always somewhere else we could be. Kortney (23:00): Yeah, I mean there's the verse in Paul about, "So I press on toward the mark of the high calling of Jesus Christ." You know what I mean? There's the press of the high calling, and I mean I say Paul for you, just put the pressure on him. (23:16): So that press I think is there, and I mean I think that's built into us, that we're like, we're longing for the kingdom of God to come in its fullness. I mean, that's what we pray for. And so I think living in that tension is, that's where we live. Kara (23:31): And isn't it a message that gets reinforced all the time for us too? Like, well, if you're a good housekeeper, you do this. And so we get the same thing with homeschooling. If you're a good homeschooler, you'll exhaust yourself and do it all. But we literally can't do it all because we have finite resources. We only have so much time, we only have so much money. We only have so much energy. And those things are not renewable in the way that we can... Once the money's gone, the money's gone. Once we're done for the day, we are done for the day. Yes, [inaudible 00:24:12] paycheck. (24:12): But we have to realize that the only way to make homeschooling work long term when we're looking at it from that standpoint of having finite resources, is we have to figure out what matters and how we can do that, but also get showers and sleep and do laundry, and get to read for our own wellbeing and development. And so we don't just melt into puddles at the end of the day. (24:42): So I was thinking about it, the equation poems that we did, the Read Aloud Revival premium event, where it's an equation, it's like what's important to us, plus what we're good at, minus distractions, equals sustainable homeschooling. Sarah (25:02): Yeah. What's important to us, plus what we're good at, minus distractions, equals sustainable homeschooling. That's good. And when I say distractions, it's that noise. And they'll be different for each of us. And it's going to be different in different seasons too. (25:19): And Kortney, what did you say when you heard noise? You said, you see things as opportunities or something. But- Kortney (25:27): Right. I mean, if you say choice, it seems like everything is laid out in front of me like a beast. But if it's noise, well that sounds a little negative to my introvert, highly sensitive ears. Kara (25:41): Well, if you look at it, again as a distraction instead, then you can go, oh, well no, I don't want distractions. We all feel like we want lots of choices, but you can be like, no, no, no, I got enough distractions. Thank you. Sarah (25:55): I don't know, we were shopping for a couch several years ago and we went into one of the local furniture shops and we're just, my husband and I are standing there looking at a few different sofas, and the salesperson walked over and said, "Just so you know, we can do this particular couch in 400 different fabrics." (26:14): And I was like, we need to leave. Oh my gosh. All of a sudden I do not like this couch because out of 400, I'm going to have to... So we left, we stopped at Costco on our way home to buy the obligatory rotisserie chicken we were going to serve our children for dinner, like you do when you're not at home and it's six o'clock and you need to feed everybody. And so we stopped and we peeked in there, and they had three couches out on the floor and I'm like, "That one." And we brought it home and it was so much less stressful to have three options and go, okay, out of these three options, which ones will serve us best? Kara (26:52): It's like putting books face out, right? Sarah (26:54): Yes. Exactly. Kara (26:56): [inaudible 00:26:56] four options of books instead of a whole giant shelf of books, it's less intimidating. Sarah (27:01): I think we kind of hold onto this idea that once we get our bearings in homeschooling, once we've been at it for a while, it's going to feel easy, or we'll just feel we've arrived. And we do this on a small scale too, sort of like, once we get through the holidays, then life will slow down. Or once we get through this spring break or this family visit or this trip, or whatever it is that's coming up for your family, we'll think that then things will slow down. We kind of feel like that in our homeschool, like we're going to feel like we have arrived. And I hear this a lot in the case of teaching from rest, where I think people think, well, then I'll be teaching from rest once I do A, B, C. That's not really how it works. You don't arrive at teaching from rest. (27:43): No one is teaching from rest all of the time. It's like we're constantly having to make little adjustments and shifts, and it's just the journey. The journey is teaching from rest and constantly having to kind of, I don't know, make small adjustments I guess. And that's what we have to do here too I think, is things will crowd in and you didn't fail because things got noisy. It's just now time, this is the work. Now it's time to do the thing. Again, we have to make a trade-off. (28:14): And that's the other piece that I think is really critical here. I think sometimes we look at experienced homeschoolers, we're like, wow, they look so relaxed. And I think they are, once they've been homeschooling for a while, because they have older kids. Now, they've seen, like, oh wow, I failed you in 100 ways and you are still kind of amazing, things really work. (28:36): And so we have this confidence that this homeschooling works in spite of us, not because we strong-armed our way through being amazing homeschooling parents, or whatever. So I know with my younger kids, I have more relaxed confidence because I just realize that it's less dependent on me making sure that all the crafts line up with the books line up, with the themes that we are studying in history. There's none of that stress. Because I know none of that really matters. I think that's what you see in experienced homeschoolers when you're like, wow, she's got that seasoned mom kind of vibe. Yeah, I mean that comes because over time I think we realize we're less in control than we thought we were. So that means that we get to relax into it a little bit and make some intentional trade-offs, but we can do less and things will still work out okay. Kara (29:26): Yeah. That it doesn't have to be perfect, that it can be messy and it can still work. Sarah (29:41): In the book McKeown often refers to essentialism as a, quote, "Relentless pursuit." So a disciplined pursuit and a relentless pursuit. And I was thinking about that word choice. And again, it's that idea that you're never going to arrive at, I am an essentialist and I never focus on things. I mean, he's even gone on lots of podcasts and interviews since then that I've heard him say, "Wow, right after Essentialism came out, the world..." I mean it was a book that kind of took on a life of its own and his life became very noisy and full again and he had to essentialize once more. (30:18): Again, it's back to that ongoing process. And I think that's really freeing for us to hear, whether it's teaching from rest or learning how to essentialize, you have permission to just learn it. Every day you're learning how to teach from rest more. Every day you're learning how to essentialize. You don't have to master it. You don't have to become a master at teaching from rest or a master at essentializing. (30:40): You just get to live in the grace of it and then keep making small adjustments to help you reorient yourself toward rest, toward essentializing what matters most. Kortney (30:50): I mean, I think that takes us back to what Kara mentioned about the subtitle of the book, the Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Because a discipline, like a spiritual discipline is a practice that you do, and you do it not because it wins you points with God, but you do it because these are the things that get you in the place where you can be in the flow of God's grace. So I mean, it's the practice and it's in the practicing that the peace and the rest and the grace come, it's right in the middle of those disciplines that we are doing every day. (31:27): That ongoingness, I kind of wish it weren't true, I mean, I wish that I could essentialize and it would be a project and I could mark it off and I would be essential and it would be great. But that's not really... I mean in the book, all of the examples that he uses are like, so when you organize your closet, da, da, da, and if I just needed to organize my closet, then I think I would approach this book a little bit differently. But I mean, we're reading it sort of in the lens of homeschooling, homeschooling human beings who are growing and learning. And so my plans for them are going to have to learn and grow just like they are. And so that means I'm going to have to review and essentialize again and think about the distractions and the noise again. Sarah (32:19): As you're saying that, I'm thinking all the most important parts of our life are never done. So relationships, you're never like, well I now have a great marriage so I don't have to worry about my marriage anymore. I don't have to tend to my marriage anymore. Even things that are important, but maybe not your favorite, like laundry and feeding your family, these are things that you never get to check off your list eternally. All the most important things, whether it's going to church or tending to your relationships or taking care of your home, this is what life is made of. That's what makes us human. We live in our bodies. We live in time. And those recurring things, we're creatures made for that. Kara (32:58): That makes me think of, my oldest is now away at college and I've been trying to find this balance between still being there for him, but letting him live his new life and how to figure that out. (33:15): And my friends... In one particularly bumpy moment, I said something about, "I just don't want him to feel abandoned." And she said, "No, you're not abandoning him. Abandoning him would be walking away and not talking to him. Your role is just changing." So it's the same thing with homeschooling. Depending on the season, depending on where our kids are with different things, it's going to change, and our role is going to change. You have to be a lot more hands-on making sure that your two-year-old isn't getting into trouble than you do with an older child. (33:59): And so I like that subhead, the Disciplined Pursuit of Less. But it's a practice, right? And when we're practicing things, we make mistakes and we have to start over. And that's learning. Sarah (34:14): There is a graphic on page six, I'll put the graphic in the show notes. It's my favorite graphic in the whole book. I'm going to describe it since this is a podcast, so I can't show you all the page. But there are two circles next to each other. And inside each circle it says energy. And on the first circle there are, I don't know, something like 10 arrows coming off of it, 10 lines with arrows coming off of it. And each of those are about an inch long. And then in the circle that's next to it, that also says energy, there's just one line. That one line is as long as if you put all 10 of those lines in the left circle together. So it's like the equivalent length of all of those 10 lines. But it goes a lot further. (34:51): Basically, this idea of all the energy from, in the first circle, all the energy going to those 10 different directions are funneled in the second circle through one arrow and that goes so much further. So basically kind of showing us that when we get clear on our focus, we make a trade-off and we say, this one thing is more important than the rest and we're going to put a lot of our attention here, we can get a lot further with it. (35:16): Whenever I see that image, I instantly in my mind think of reading aloud and the incredible impact that sharing books and sharing stories with our kids can have because it covers so much ground. Kortney (35:30): I think the graphics might be my favorite part of the book. Do you know the book, Math with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin? Sarah (35:40): No, I've never heard of it. Kortney (35:41): Okay. It's an excellent book. It's great for kids who love math and it's great for kids who maybe don't love math. I would say probably middle school and up. But it's funny, I mean it's filled with drawings just like Essentialism is, really simple sort of line drawings that kind of crack open more complicated topics for you. It helps you to see it I guess. But I love your description of reading aloud, just that arrow being so long and so powerful. But also, I want to complicate it a little bit, because while I wholeheartedly agree that reading aloud will reap outsized benefits, it pencils very well, it takes time and it takes time to see those results. (36:33): It's a long-term project. I mean obviously there are short-term payoffs, but I'm really seeing the results of all of the reading aloud that we've done for the last 15 years. And all of our conversations with the 10th grader now are filled with all of those stories and all of those books, all of our conversations flow out of all of the reading that we've done for 15 years. Kara (37:01): I love that graphic, but sometimes it feels deceptively a little simple, because it's like how we talk about homeschooling our kids. It's not like a cookbook where you just follow the recipe on the one page and then on the next page you get a cake that looks just like the picture. Kortney (37:18): Is that what's supposed to happen when we bake? Because that is not usually what happens for me. Yeah, you're right, you're right though. Kara (37:26): I mean, like Kortney said, reading aloud is a super long-term investment and we may see some benefits today. We may see some this week, we may see some next month, at the end of the year. But I think the biggest wins come... Well I can speak from my experience, in 15 to 18 years when my daughter, when she saw we were doing the Jan Brett Treasury for Christmas School, picked it up and hugged it in my office because we have such warm memories around that book. (37:56): And then as we did Christmas School together this year, I realized we hadn't done a lot of projects around those books. We just read them and read them and read them over and over again and talked about them and talked about them and talked about them. And yet they're sealed for her as such a lovely memory. And this is a good reminder too, that you still have time. Because at 15 we just made apple cakes together. Stick with that single arrow heading in one direction, reading aloud, but also know in the midst of it that you are going to have real life distractions, like blowout diapers and toddlers who draw on themselves and dogs who throw up and broken washing machines. (38:39): And your job is to just keep going back to that arrow and keeping the faith. So it's simple but it's not easy. Sarah (38:49): I mean that what you just said, I mean that's what faith is for. We don't need faith for when we're pretty sure something's going to turn out right. We need faith for when we're not sure how on earth it's going to turn out right. But also what's really helpful to me is always to remember, when we're talking about humans, we're talking about images of God, that there is not linear progress, not with any of us. And so we get down on ourselves because we expect ourselves to be computers and get 0.5% better every day. But really it looks like two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, five steps back, four steps forward. And you're like, hey, things are going pretty well and then all of a sudden three steps back. That's just how parenting and it is. (39:33): And I think that's another reason why we get more relaxed the longer we're in homeschooling you. You'll find that homeschoolers tend to get more relaxed. And I think it's because we start to settle into accepting that there's not a linear growth path for our kids, or for ourselves. And I mean that's really a grace, actually. (40:03): So here's something that's interesting. McKeown says that when the word priority came into the English language in the 1400s, it was singular. There was no plural form of the word. You couldn't have more than one priority. So he says only in the 1900s did we start talking about priorities. "We reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality, somehow we'd be able to now have multiple first things first." Kara (40:34): I love that, bend reality. I'm thinking, imagine a 1400s to-do list, milk cow, period. That's it. You're done for the day. Go home. Rob from the rich and give to the poor. Okay, check. Kortney (40:53): Okay, but let me stick something in here, Kara, because it makes me think of when I lived in the jungle. Laundry actually was, when it was laundry day, that was all that the list could be because I had to take all of the laundry and go down to the creek and beat it against the rock and rinse it in the water and take it back home and ring it out and hang it on the line to dry and watch for thunderstorms because we lived in the rainforest and it was always just about to rain. It really took me all day to do our laundry. And so I think sometimes there's so much on our plate and there are so many different ways that our callings are calling to us. We have a lot to do. So I think it used to be a little bit more, I don't know, less complicated I guess. Sarah (41:44): Okay. So you know what that reminds me of? I remember hearing this somewhere, that before they had, for example vacuum cleaners and a lot of these household convenience appliances, there wasn't such a high standard actually for the inside of your house, the floor to be super clean, because there wasn't a really convenient way to do it. So then we introduced a vacuum and household appliances, like laundry or irons, for example. And now all of a sudden it's not that like, oh, you saved all this time with this time-saving device, but our standards went up really high for how clean your house should be, and your husband should go to work with a perfectly pressed shirt because you can now, because you have an iron. (42:23): So we changed our standards and just added more. Kara (42:25): Well, it's like the idea of spring cleaning. Spring cleaning came because people used their chimneys all winter and their walls had dust and grime and smoke and everything else. (42:34): And so now we call it spring cleaning, but I mean it's not the same at all as it used to be. Sarah (42:45): As you were reminding me of this part, Kort, where priority became priorities. So here at Read Aloud Revival, I ask everybody on the team every week, "What are your top three priorities?" And I was like, oh, I should probably change that. And not only that, but most recently I changed it because I answered this question too, and I said, no, not my top three priorities, my top seven priorities because I cannot whittle this less down at all. So this is why I read Essentialism so often everyone. Essentializing is not my default setting. It's just very good for me. (43:18): Yeah, I mean I think this kind of goes back to how we were talking about, people are multifaceted and complex and so this idea of priority as a singular term kind of helps me acknowledge that every yes I give is a no. (43:34): Like we were talking about trade-offs, you had mentioned trade-offs earlier, Kara. Every yes I give is actually a no to a ton of other things because every time you say yes, now you're filling that time and energy and you can't say yes to a whole bunch of other things. There's always a trade-off. So if I can at least choose which yeses I want to make, that's kind of where the idea of this priority in me thinking I have an endless number of priorities, it's just me bending reality, which I tend to like to do, apparently. Kara (44:02): This kind of bent my mind a little bit when I started thinking about it more, that it would be so much easier for us to feel successful if we literally only had one thing on our to-do list every day. But what if we do, what if it's, take care of and homeschool our people, and letting that look however it looks on a given day, depending on the circumstances. And sometimes that means that it's going to be taking everybody to the dentist and not getting to math. And I don't know, I think we're just really, really hard on ourselves. (44:43): So I'm curious, Kort, is there a passage that you circled or maybe copied into your reading journal from this chapter? Kortney (44:51): Well, I don't have nearly as many notes as Sarah, but I do have quite a few. (44:57): I was really excited when I saw the chart, another illustration, the chart on page eight, it reminded me of the planning questions that we ask here at RAR. What do we want our students to know, do and love? In other words, what are the academic outcomes that we're working towards? How are we going to get there, and how can we grow in our love of God and the world that God made? (45:23): So in Essentialism, on page eight, McKeown says, "Think, do, get." That's his trio. But I really like the orientation towards love. So know, do, love, that was my favorite part. Sarah (45:36): I love this. I didn't see the correlation there. When I say I think Read Aloud Revival was sort of built on Essentialism, I think I could not have marked up this book as much as I have without it sort of seeping into my conscience. (45:48): So this idea of, yeah, what is a essentialist think, do and get? And when we're thinking about our students, what do they know? And then given what they know, what are they able to do now? And then now, based on all the things they know and do, how is that helping them love? What is lovely? How are we ordering their affections? It's just a beautiful way to think about it. What about you, Kara? Kara (46:10): It's so hard to pick one, because like you I had a ton of book darts and little sticky notes and circles and lots of different pens and highlighters. But there was a quote that just stuck out to me and I think maybe it was when I read this book and that's why it stood out so much. The one about, what if schools eliminated busy work and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? Because that was the year that we wanted to spend one morning a week volunteering. (46:44): And I thought maybe that's okay, because instead of doing something that would just keep my kids busy that morning, what if we actually went and we all did this volunteer work? And so it sort of gave me this permission to look at things differently, and it was so good. I mean, one of my kids too has continued to do a ton of volunteer work and I feel like that's been really, really beneficial. Certainly as much as math or chemistry or anything else. Sarah (47:15): Well, as homeschoolers we have the opportunity to ask that question and actually make a change in our homeschool based on it. What if we eliminated busy work and worked on projects that actually meant something? We could actually do that. (47:38): At the end of chapter one, McKeown invites us not to ask, how can I make this all work? Which is I think our default question. Think about your lesson plans, or you open up a new curriculum, or you're starting back to school after the holidays and you're looking at everything that you want to do and the question you're really trying to answer is, how can I make this all work? And he says, "A better question is, which problem do I want to solve?" (48:05): And I really feel like as mothers we are like ninja problem solvers. I mean that is what we do all day, every day. It's what you've been doing since your baby was born. You've been problem-solving what to do when they wouldn't sleep through the night or how to feed, or if they had a food intolerance or how to potty train, all the way up to when they're older and you're problem-solving, how to help them with friendship problems or figure out that math issue, or how to teach them how to clean the toilet actually correctly. (48:37): So we're just constantly problem-solving, and even when it comes away from our kids, we're problem-solving when we're figuring out what to make for dinner with the ingredients we have on hand, or how to make the budget stretch, or how to get that stain out of the couch after our kid drew with their pen on grandpa's couch. That happened to me. We're always problem-solving constantly. (48:58): So I think this could be a really powerful question, which problem do I want to solve right now? Knowing with a confidence that I am a professional problem-solver, that is what I am as a mother. So you have everything you need. You are superbly qualified for this, which problem do you want to solve? I think this could be a really powerful question to ask ourselves in our homeschools. And I think, Kort, you mentioned doing this regularly, like a regular review of this kind of thing. Kortney (49:24): Yeah, I think, which problem do I want to solve, because that means that you're not solving all of the problems, all of the time. And so the way that you can have peace when you're doing that is to have a time set aside to review again. And I mentioned this before because this is what I'm working on in the new year. I noticed that when I do review, both I make better decisions because I'm sort of cued into what is happening right now. It's not an old plan that I'm trying to force to work, but it's the plan that works in this season. So I make better decisions, and I can unmake decisions quicker, I can make those course corrections that you were talking about. (50:14): So as much as I wish I were just organizing the closet and I could do it once and it would stay fairly organized for a good stretch of time, this is an ongoing project, and I'm going to see the fruit over time as I regularly review the ideas of Essentialism. Kara (50:33): This is kind of how we homeschooled. I wrote a blog post way back in 2017 about creating a three thing to-do list and then reviewing those three things every six weeks or so. And the three things were not all we did, but they were, here's that word again, they were three priorities. (50:56): And if we got to them, I felt like, okay, we've done our work for the day. Everything else was extra on top of that, because I needed to simplify things because I felt like I was ending every day feeling behind, and feeling like I was never going to get caught up. So those three things could vary a lot depending on what was going on in our world at the time. They could include a certain class or something with co-op prepping for a book club that one of the kids was doing, learning particular math skills, studying certain places, working on a certain project. But it all came down to that idea of which problems do I want to solve? Where do I see flashing lights right now? (51:44): Did my child just say, "I don't feel like I know that much about the geography of South America." And then you go, okay, that's something to work on in the next six weeks. And like you said, Sarah, those things became my marching orders. Sarah (52:05): Well, I think we should probably wrap up there, and that was just chapter one, which is why I love this book so much. We could just keep going and digging into this. There are 20 chapters in this book, and we actually are digging deeper into those 20 chapters in RAR Premium, in our mama book club just about the next. So join us at RAR Premium, if you had some light bulb moments happening today, join us. We'd love to chat with you about it and see how the ideas in Essentialism could show up in your homeschool and help you breathe a little bit more and find a little more spaciousness in your homeschool. (52:43): So you can join us at RAR Premium by going to RARpremium.com, or you can just text my name, Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, to the number 33777, and I'll send you a direct link to join us. Kara, Kortney, thanks so much for chatting. I always love chatting with you and it was really fun to talk about one of my favorite books today. Kara (53:05): Thanks. Yes, it was so much fun. Kortney (53:07): Yeah, thank you so much. Speaker 4 (53:12): My name is Violet Virginia, and I really like the book The Pencil by Allen Berg. I like it because there's an eraser that erases everything in that book, and also, there's a paintbrush. And I think everything in the book has a name, even a ball. And I'm also from Oklahoma City. Speaker 5 (53:43): Hello, my name is Summer and I live in Minnesota, and my favorite book is called Charlotte's Web because I like Charlotte's Web, I like Charlotte and Wilbur and I'm four years old. Speaker 6 (54:05): Hello, my name is Brooks and I am six years old. My favorite book is the Mercy Watson series. My book that I like in the Mercy Watson series is Mercy Watson Goes for a Ride, and what I like about that is when she eats, and I live in Avon, Minnesota. Speaker 7 (54:25): Hello, my name is Sarah. I live in Avon, Minnesota. I am 10 years old. My favorite book is Penderwix on Garden Street. I like it because there are lots of schemes. And Ms. Sarah, I also love listening to your podcast with my mom. Speaker 8 (54:40): Hi, my name's Emma Garra, and I'm from Springfield, Missouri. And the book that I recommend is Home in the Woods because I love reading how they try to survive when their dad is with the angels and how they can afford money and how they build back together with their life. Speaker 9 (54:59): My name is Abby Garon. I'm from Springfield, Missouri. I would recommend the BFG because whenever I read it or listen to it, it feels like I imagine it, and then I feel tingly when I imagine that, I'm big or when I'm small. Sarah (55:23): Thank you so much, kids. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to read Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism, with you in RAR Premium. Join us for our RAR Mama Book Club where we help mamas fall in love with homeschooling and fall back in love with their own reading lives. This episode has been produced by the team at Yellow House Media. I'll be back soon with another episode for you. In the meantime, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. (56:03): So many of us feel overwhelmed in our homeschool. There's a lot to do and it feels like every child needs something a little different. The good news is, you are the best person on the planet to help your kids learn and grow, and home is the best place to fall in love with books. (56:30): I'm Sarah Mackenzie. I'm a homeschooling mother of six, the author of Teaching from Rest and the Read Aloud Family. And I'm the host here on the Read Aloud Revival Podcast. This podcast has been downloaded over eight million times, and I think it's because so many of us want the same things. We want our kids to be readers, to love reading. We want our homes to be warm and happy havens of learning and connection. We know that raising our kids is the most important work of our lives. That's kind of overwhelming, right? You are not alone. In Read Aloud Revival Premium, we offer family book clubs, a vibrant community, and Circle with Sarah coaching for you, the homeschooling mom. So you can teach from rest, homeschool with confidence and raise kids who love to read. (57:31): Our family book clubs are a game changer for your kids' relationship with books. We provide you with a family book club guide and an opportunity for your kids to meet the author or illustrator live on screen. So all you have to do is get the book, read it with your kids, and make those meaningful and lasting connections. (57:53): They work for all ages, from your youngest kids to your teens. Every month, our community also gathers online for a Circle with Sarah, to get ideas and encouragement around creating the homeschooling life you crave. They're the most effective way I know to teach from rest and build a homeschool life you love. We want to help your kids fall in love with books, and we want to help you fall in love with homeschooling. Join us today at rarpremium.com.