Very Scary...and here I was worried I was doing something wrong.

As a homeschooling mom I am constantly second guessing myself and worrying about the quality of my children's education.

Am I doing the right thing? Am I teaching them properly? How do we find enough hours in the day to cover everything we need to?

Some of you know of Amy's math challenges. We had Amy evaluated a couple years ago to figure out why she has such a hard time retaining certain information and discovered that she has a strong cross-dominance issue. Simply put, info goes in on the wrong side of the brain and has to travel to the other side to be processed. This can cause delays in her reasoning process and incredible frustration for her and me :(

Amy is a brilliant child. Artistic, creative, curious, funny and strong willed. After the evaluation we were able to adopt and adapt different coping strategies to help her with her lessons. We have had great success.

She has managed to move ahead a couple of grades in her math skills this past year alone and we are all very pleased and proud of her accompishments. I have no doubt that she will eventually develop a functional use of mathematics that will see her through her adult life. No, she will not be an accountant or mathematician, but she will be able to balance a chequebook and perhaps even run her own busines with the help of appropriate business software. That is my goal. To give her confidence in her abilities to live a full and rich life, not one tinged with confusion and embarrasement as it is right now when she deals with simple money issues in a store.

This brings me to the reason for this post. I receive a newsletter everyday (roughly) from Sheila Wray-Gregoire, author and fellow homeschooler. This morning her blog post redirected me to a YouTube video that just floored me. Take a look and see what you think.



Take make a long story short, here I have been worrying, praying, crying, praying and worrying some more about Amy and Simon's math skills. Si doesn't have any problems, boy can that boy do mental math! Sometimes he can totally surprise me with his mathematical prowess, especially when there's money involved LOL.

The kids in the public school system really have my sympathies. IF as they show in this video, they are being taught these multiplying in parts and lattice math algorithms here in Canada, I AM so glad I am homeschooling my kids. What about mastery of math facts? What happened? Poor Amy would be totally lost and probably "identified" with a learning disability, put on drugs and held back in school. HA! To me, Amy has a challenge to be learnt, dealt with and overcome. NOT A DISABILITY.

Whatever happened to the simple math algorithms of my youth? These are what I am teaching my children and they are understanding AND succeeding. Why does everything have to be complicated?

I guess that's also true in our Christian walk...

There are so many self-help books out there. How to pray, how to read your bible, how to walk on water, how to how to how to...

When really, all we need to do to get closer to our God is spend time with him. Sure, the bible is sometimes difficult to understand and we do need some help sometimes to understand a scripture, but all we really need is to pray and ask God to open our eyes and help us to understand.

The more time we spend with God, the more time we spend on our knees simply talking to Him and pouring out our hearts, the more time we spend in fellowship with other believers, then He will help us master our walk.

Success and fulfillment, whether it be in mathematics or our walk with our Lord all comes down to Mastery. Time and commitment.