EVERYTHING IS AN EXPERIMENT

Your stress related to making the ‘right’ choices about school (and anything else) for your child will be reduced if you can view what you and they are doing as ‘something you are trying for now.’ (As a bonus, this is a GREAT response to anyone who is questioning what you are doing with schooling your child! ‘Right now we are trying X, maybe later we’ll try Y or Z’ - that sure diffuses things!) 

The greatest advantage to viewing your current approach to, say, English or Phy Ed or school in general as an experiment is that it takes the pressure off of it going PERFECTLY right away, or ever. I find that having this ‘experimental mindset’ towards whatever it is school-wise that I am doing with my own kiddo or with a client means that there is much less emotion involved if something ISN’T going well. We can look at the curriculum/ material/ approach much more objectively without putting blame on the parent, the kid, or the teacher. If something isn’t working it just means we haven’t found quite the right approach yet. (And if that isn’t a lesson for how life works, I don’t know what is!) 

Another GREAT benefit to having this experimental approach is how much more buy-in you can get from the kid’s end. There is a big difference between TELLING a kid, ‘this is how we are doing things now,’ versus saying, ‘let’s try this approach for a month and see how it goes.’ 

Speaking of getting buy-in from the child THEMSELVES: ask for THEIR ideas. Why not try EXACTLY what they suggest? Or at least incorporate something of it into their education? It IS their own education after all! You don’t have to do what they suggest for the entire school year or month or week. So why not just try? The benefit of the STUDENT taking the initiative and trying new things outweighs any risk of ‘wasting’ time. (For more on this see the page “Interest and Choice”)