It’s a terrible feeling, to sit around a pile of curriculum—beautiful curriculum you paid good money for—and to realize there’s no way it’s going to work. To realize that all this effort and investment is one big homeschool curriculum fail. And failure of any kind often feels personal. It’s tempting to look at the pile and think, “I’ve failed.” Yet, there are three good reasons why your homeschool curriculum fail might have actually been the right choice.
Recently, I left our tried and true curriculum to try something new, only to realize that shiny new investment was the absolute wrong choice for us. Or was it?
3 Reasons your Homeschool Curriculum Fail was the Right Choice
It helps you to recognize your priorities.
Sometimes, you have to experience what you don’t like in order to clarify what you do like. You have to test and challenge your priorities to really discover what is most important. There’s nothing like a failed homeschool curriculum to help you identify exactly what you are willing to live with and adjust to, and what absolutely won’t work at your house. If you have to choose between two priorities, which do you actually want?
Leaving Tapestry of Grace to try something new allowed us to miss some things. And as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. When those priorities were missing, we all felt it. And I realized what I was willing to give up in order to have those priorities back in place. Case in point, whole family learning is a challenge when you have multiple layers of ADHD in play. Distractions, fights, BIG feelings—need I say more?—often made “whole family learning” feel like a disaster. Yet ironically, the one thing we’ve missed the most in our big curriculum experiment, is learning as a family. Many of Sara Mackenzie’s resources (her podcasts, Teaching for Rest book, and Read Aloud Family book) encouraged me in this area. In spite of the fact that our time together looks far from peaceful or perfect, it’s one of our highest priorities. And we miss it when it’s gone.
It helps you to narrow and refine your homeschool vision.
I understand that having an end goal, a clear vision of what our homeschool should be, is important. Yet sometimes that vision isn’t quite as clear as we think it is. When two choices seem to fit within that vision, and then the one choice ends up failing, our vision narrows. We redefine it more specifically.
Because I fall somewhere between Classical and Charlotte Mason, I’m regularly refining my vision of exactly where that blended line falls. Because both character instruction and worldview/discernment are important to our end goals, sometimes it’s difficult to narrow the vision to know exactly what today looks like on that path. I understood, when I stepped away from Tapestry of Grace, that I wanted more in the way of personal Bible study for my kids. But after trying Heart of Dakota, I have a much narrower focus of exactly what I’m looking for in those Bible resources (and what I’m not looking for). Sometimes those failures help to define our vision even more than the successes.
It helps you to discover what does and doesn’t work.
Homeschool curriculum failures also teach us about ourselves. We learn what we need as teachers, what our kids need in a resource or a schedule, what we desire for a book list. We learn both our likes and dislikes from trying new things. When a child is introduced to new foods, the only way he discovers what he likes is by trying things he potentially won’t like. That’s life.
In homeschool, it’s been our curriculum “fails” that have taught me more than even the curriculum successes. What did our most recent “fail” teach me? I’ve faced the reality that I’m a curriculum-creator, not a curriculum-follower. I’ve joked before that I can’t leave a curriculum alone, that I have to tweak and adjust and make it my own. But even when I felt like I needed the break from creating, that I just really needed someone else to take over the planning, I realized I hate not being involved. I have to create, and I can’t simply follow. Maybe you have to face the exact opposite reality; maybe as much as you would like to create, you really need something to follow. It’s actually empowering to realize those things. It’s not a failure to recognize who you are and what you need.
In the end, no experience is wasted if you learn from it. A “failed” homeschool curriculum isn’t really a failure or a wrong choice on your part. It’s a learning experience that is an important part of shaping your homeschool into what you most want it to be.
A “homeschool curriculum fail” brings perspective you didn’t have before. So don’t be afraid to make mistakes and “wrong” choices in your homeschool. Those unpleasant ingredients are all part of the final recipe, and honestly, your recipe wouldn’t be the same without them.
