Setting Goals

One of the reasons we decided to homeschool is because we thought project management and planning in the public schools didn't give our students enough practice. Yes, our kids had a spiral agenda, and if we're talking ways to make things easier for a teacher with 25 or more students, then paper planners are the way. However, in this day and age, most kids, or more importantly to me, my kids think digitally. I wanted my middle school students to be able to use his smartphone for information management, but that wasn't an option in public school.


I am a small business owner. I work with other small business owners. In order to communicate and collaborate it's necessary to have the tools that bring us together. I have not met one small business owner that uses a paper planner. Most independent contractors, self-employed individuals and small businesses use Google products. E-mail, calendar, tasks, documents and several industry specific applications that make it easier for people in remote (read not in the same building) able to work with one another. Pretty snazzy, huh? So to my way of thinking, the students should use a system from the onset so that their learning curve is limited when they become gainfully employed someday (please, God).


The first thing I did when we brought the boys home to school is get them on Google calendar, docs and they had been using email. Already we've seen improvement with their ability to manage short to medium range projects. Public schools create an artificial deadline for projects such as Science Fair or an Essay contest, but there is nothing like a real-world application to bring a goal into focus.


We've created a spreadsheet to manage our week. I input the lessons they are responsible for during the day as well as the household tasks they are required to complete. When they get off track they check the spreadsheet, refocus and get busy. It also helps that we have a work first, play later policy. This weekend we chatted about how the lessons are worked and both agreed they'd like to do several lessons of one subject a day rather than a lesson on each subject every school day. Pretty exciting that they were able to make the connection that something didn't feel quite as productive as it could be and offered an idea for renegotiation. I'm pretty excited about the change because it makes lesson planning easier for me and I think they'll actually finish their assignments quicker because they don't have to spend time mentally moving from one subject to another.


So now we are stretching this goal-setting skill a bit further with a middle range goal. I consider a mid-range goal to be in the 90 days or 3 months range. Over the weekend while chatting with my sister-in-law she brought up loving holding a garage sale. Ew. There is nothing I hate more that having a yard sale, but I think it's a valuable skill and she's darned good at it. So I agreed to provide the "stuff" and she agreed to hold the sale and split the proceeds. This sounds like a fine set of tasks for the boys (since most of the "stuff" is theirs). They have a plan for a June or July sale and will split the spoils of war 50-50. They're already deciding what to do with their haul. Good on 'em.


For a larger, longer project we are tackling the back yard as an outdoor living space. After our decision to homeschool we considered moving out of the county to lower our property taxes. We trolled the internet to see what was available in a the surrounding counties and ultimately decided to stay put. Looking at our options was great exercise because now we know we're in the right place to maintain our quality of life and keep our financial obligations in check.


Over the past week we talked about what we wanted the back yard living area to look like, rendered our own drawing and made a list of supplies that we would need to collect. This served as the outline of our project. We also talked about when we'd like to have our Backyard Oasis complete and listed the tasks that we could complete without additional resources. So towards that end we built a compost bin (more about that in another post), primed the chicken coop knowing we would get at least 2 chickens in the near future and trimmed several bushes (several of which croaked in the summer drought). This weekend provided immediate results and really gave us all the motivation to continue our work on this two-year project.


I love that I can see the "buy in" from the guys on these projects. Isn't that how it is in real life? In real life you either open on time or land the client or get the product to the consumer. Public school does it's best to simulate these experiences, but really when comes down to it the brass ring isn't the grade it's the result.