Life's Chapters

My wife found a sweet deal on a sale site she frequents; we got a big plastic tote full of someone's homeschooling materials for only 50 bucks. Considering how much stuff was in there, we got a major bargain. Manipulatives, flash cards, tons of books on all kinds of subjects...it's quite the haul.

One of the books in the tote is The Well Trained Mind, by Susan Wise Bauer, a long-time homeschooling mom and advocate. It's about teaching kids the way kids used to be taught before the 'progressives' got hold of education and turned it into something completely dismal. It focuses on the old trivium method of teaching, which means you stuff the younger kids' heads full of facts, the middle-schoolers learn how to analyze those facts, and the high-schoolers learn how to take those facts and understand them and what they mean in their lives.

I'm oversimplifying it, of course; you don't teach six-year-olds calculus and trigonometry, or have them memorizing passages of Plato and Aristotle. But you give them the solid foundation they need so they can master those bigger things when they reach that age.

One of the things in that book was a brief 'note from Jessie,' one of the contributors to the book. As soon as I saw it, I made sure my wife read it. The thing that really resonated with her was Jessie's discussion of how life has chapters, and we can't live them all at once. That's something a lot of people don't understand; they want it all, and they want it now. Well, life doesn't work that way. If you're going to do one thing, something else isn't going to be done right away, or at all. If you're going to homeschool your children, you're not going to be taking a round-the-world cruise in the middle of it, pandemic or not. Some things simply have to be put off until a later time.

My wife and I have both struggled with that notion, as I expect a lot of others have. I want to write a crap-ton of books and sell them on multiple platforms, and I also want to read a huge pile of books, as well as homeschool my kids, and maybe take a round-the-world cruise at some point. But that's not all going to happen at once. So, since some things can be put off, they're going to be. Some things, of course, can't be put off; homeschooling is not something I can wait to do until the kids are in their teens. So, that's priority. Feeding the family is also a huge priority, so that means working full-time. Which, unfortunately, will cut into the writing time, so I'm going to have to get as much of that done as I can while we wait for this stupid virus nonsense to go away so we can get back to work.

So, the reading takes a back seat to the priorities (although I still make a point of reading every day; I'm just not reading full novels on a daily basis). And the cruise...well, we can always hope for it. But that's a want, not a need, and it can wait forever if necessary. If my kids are well-educated and have successful careers, and I've got a bunch of books out on Amazon for people to read, then I've accomplished something much more important than a world cruise.

On the writing front, my editor just returned the last of the short stories for my next anthology, so I'm just waiting for the cover art before I publish it. It's a fantasy anthology, set in the same place as The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival. So, since it's nearly here, you might want to pick up a copy of the first book, in e-book or in paperback, before reading the anthology. Just a suggestion.