When Cloning Yourself is Not an Option

The Imperfect Homeschooler

Cardamom Publishers

P.O. Box 4

Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235

When Cloning Yourself is

Not an Option

Some years back, there was a movie called “Multiplicity,” in which a busy man (played by Michael Keaton) had several clones of himself made in order to keep up with all the aspects of his hectic life.

I don’t remember the movie as being a particularly good one, but I could definitely relate to the desire for creating several selves to get things done. You know what I mean….one’s homeschooling, one’s cooking, one’s taking the kids to their ball games, and one’s hanging out the wash.

We homeschool moms do have many responsibilities that sometimes become overwhelming, to the point that it seems like there’s not enough of us to go around. Cloning ourselves would help us accomplish more over the course of a day. But we don’t have to resort to such extreme measures to get things done, particularly when it comes to homeschooling. Sometimes we can spread the work around by having an older child teach a younger one.

Now I’m not saying to make a daily habit of this, but you might find that having an older child teach a younger child occasionally will benefit both children as well as you. The younger child learns, the older child solidifies the knowledge they’re teaching, and you’re free to do something else (and let’s face it, there’s always something else to do.)

I know firsthand that this works, because when I was a girl, I taught my younger sister to read. She’d been having trouble with reading in school, and at that time there were no reading tutors available. Her teacher told my father that she would flunk my sister if she didn’t learn to read by the end of first grade, a sad prospect for a six-year-old.

My father, a military officer and thus very good at commanding people to do things, assigned me to teach my sister to read. This was no easy task, as we only had a couple of children’s books in our house. But we did receive the Chicago Tribune every day, and at that particular time, there was a daily phonics comic* running in the paper. I cut out each’s day’s comic strip and pasted them all into a little book I made by stapling sheets of typing paper together. In the evenings, my sister and I worked our way through those comics, and she soon learned to read.

Obviously it benefited my father (he no longer had to worry about my sister flunking first grade) and it benefited my sister (who not only learned to read, but went on to become the only one in my family to earn a master’s degree), but how did it benefit me?

Well, first of all, I learned to take responsibility for an important job. I was around 11 at the time, and was not used to big responsibilities beyond making my bed and weeding the garden. But this was much more important, and I went at it very seriously.

Second, figuring out how to teach my sister to read made me think creatively. Not having many books, I had to make my own, using the words my sister learned from the comic strips. I still remember how much fun I had, writing and illustrating those little readers.

It also taught me to be persistent. One night when my sister didn’t want her reading lesson and I didn’t want to teach her, my dad shut us in the bathroom together and said we couldn’t come out until she finished her lesson. Now I’m not saying his method was very good, but we did as we were told, and the threat of another evening in the bathroom was enough to keep us on track from then on.

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Looking back, I have to wonder if the seeds of my future homeschooling career were planted when I successfully taught my sister to read. So, there were several benefits for me, and my sister learned to read and hence did not flunk first grade. It was a win-win situation.

And that’s why you might want to consider occasionally using one of your older children to teach the younger. Your younger child will learn something new while your older child solidifies knowledge and gains useful teaching skills.

Older children can teach their younger siblings many different things, and in different ways. Perhaps a special workbook can be used by the older to teach the younger. Educational games are always a good idea and seem less like school. And you can always ask the older child to read aloud to younger ones, which helps the older child polish reading skills while keeping the younger ones interested and learning.

Taken to an extreme, this would be an abdication of your job as homeschool parent. But when used judiciously (and especially when you’re under a lot of pressure to do other things and might rush them through school if you did it yourself), this could be considered a real solution to your problems. Besides, having yourself cloned is expensive. We homeschoolers can’t afford it.

* These comics were later compiled into a book sold by the Chicago Tribune, Shortcuts to Reading You Can Teach Your Child by Joan Beck. I bought that book as a young mother and used it to teach my own children to read. It is no longer in print, but if you see one at a used book sale, consider yourself lucky!

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/sharingstories/stories/viewer.asp?StoryID=225