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031: How Important is My Child’s School Career?

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One of my good friends has 7 kids and is a little further down the road than we are (his oldest are twin boys in high school) and I see him post pretty regularly about how crazy the homework is these days. I remember being a little stressed out about homework and other school activities, but it seems like today’s students are expected to take on more and more.

When I walk down the halls of my boys’ elementary school, I see posters for academic achievement initiatives, banners encouraging kids to prepare for college, and, during testing week, fliers and posters encouraging students to focus and perform well on their state mandated tests.

When I think of my child’s future and the things I want for them, I have to ask myself, “What role does having a successful school career play in their future success and happiness?”

In today’s episode we will be talking about the role of school, the pros and cons of focusing on one’s school career, and the value of being a life long learner.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins
  • These days, in order to be successful in a career, we don’t have to have a degree.
  • Teach your children to work within the system they’re in to accomplish their goals.
  • The goal is not a grade—the goal is hard work, effort, and problem solving.
  • We send our children to school so they can learn and so the things they learn can help them accomplish their goals.
  • The public school system is a learning environment that we only have so much ability to shape.
  • Our children’s choices are their own.
  • Determine if the grade is important to accomplishing your goals.
  • All of life is a learning experience.
  • Help your children understand that they’re the ones in charge of doing what’s necessary to accomplish their goals.
Show Notes
  • 01:57 Ben: Some parents take their children’s school career very seriously. Maybe, at the same time, they feel kind of frustrated by the structure and the system that is school right now. In today’s episode, we’re talking mostly about public school. Part of that is because we don’t have a whole lot of homeschool or private school experience.
  • 02:35 Rachel: I homeschooled the oldest for a year.
  • 02:40 Ben: Because we don’t have a lot of experience with that, we went to public school also, so we were very familiar with school being looked at as a career in and of itself. The things you work toward, what your GPA was, what your position or your ranking was in your class, and what activities you were involved in were all things that made up one’s school career. Especially in the high school years, that can be a very consuming pursuit. We don’t have any kids in high school, but I have a good friend with kids in high school, and they’re doing three to four hours worth of homework every night. They’re trying to work through stuff their parents aren’t familiar with, so they have trouble helping them out.
  • 03:40 On top of that, they’re involved in various activities, sports, and that kind of thing. It has this runaway effect, even if you’re trying to pursue some kind of decent standing with school, let alone pursue some kind of honor, award, or position. Rachel had a more than decent school career. She graduated Valedictorian of her class. Tell us a little bit about that, Rachel. What did it take?
  • 04:21 Rachel: It took a lot of hard work. Our oldest is very gifted in school and learning, and he catches on very fast, but that’s not all it takes to do something like graduate Valedictorian. There’s hard work. You have to study, turn in your homework, and do all the things you’re expected to do. I grew up in a poor family, and I knew the only way I could go to college was by getting good grades and getting scholarships. There was a drive within me to better the situation I grew up in. I was a first generation college student, so I didn’t grow up around people saying that college was important.
  • 05:18 I was always a really mature kid. I say, “I never really had a childhood. I was always the grownup.” I knew for myself that college was something I wanted to do, and it was really important to me. It’s funny that Ben asks me this, because I have a lot of trouble sometimes when our kids bring home stuff and it’s not something they did all they could on or where they tried as hard as they could have. It bothers me more than it bothers Ben.
  • 05:52 Ben: I can definitely see that. Rachel, it was important to get Valedictorian to you because that was going to allow you to go to college. Why was it important to go to college?
  • 06:08 Rachel: I started out wanting to major in music and play in symphonies, and in order to even be looked at as a top notch symphony player, you have to have the schooling that goes along with that. That’s what initially propelled me to college. I ended up changing things and becoming a writer, which you don’t necessarily need college for. I will say that some of my favorite years, besides these that we’re in now, were the ones I spent in college. I did a lot of growing up, I was on my own for the first time, and it was a really neat time.

Our Children’s Goals Within the School System

  • 06:54 Ben: Rachel, it sounds like even though your goals have since changed, pursuing a strong school career was in support of your goals. My experience was a bit different. I wasn’t ever intentionally focused on having a top position or having high achievement in school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do career-wise, other than be a musician and a worship leader. Those are kind of two different things. On the one hand, I wanted to be a performing musician, which you don’t necessarily need to go to college to do. I wanted to be a worship leader, and depending on the kind of denomination or church you want to get into, although this is becoming less and less important, having a strong school background can help.
  • 08:17 It’s also not totally essential. I did go to college, but I had to work for an entire summer and nights while I was going to school so that I could continue going to college. Ultimately, I didn’t finish college. I continued focusing on developing both of those careers. Eventually, as I gathered other skills and our circumstances changed, I moved into a season where I was focusing more on design and art. That’s where I am right now.
  • 09:12 Rachel: Growing up, I felt like the only thing I could do to pursue a career was to go to school for that career.

We live in a time now where people recognize that in order to be successful in a career, we don’t have to have a degree.

  • 09:32 Like a Bachelor’s, Masters, or PHD. For some specific things, like being a doctor, counselor, or a college professor, we do need that education. For me as a writer, experience is my teacher.
  • 09:52 Ben: The first question you have to ask is, “What are my goals?” For your child, you have to ask them, “What do you want to do? What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?”
  • 10:05 Rachel: What about when they’re nine years old or really young, and they don’t know that yet? This is where I have trouble. Our nine year old doesn’t care about grades, and I know that he is capable of graduating Valedictorian someday. Sometimes, honestly, I would like to shake him a little bit and say, “Don’t you understand how important this is?” For a person like Ben, it’s not quite as important.
  • 10:36 Ben: We cannot transfer our sense of importance to him. That’s got to be something he takes on himself, based on what he believes his goals are. I don’t believe Rachel’s desire to get good grades “just because” were more important than her desire to reach her goals, and that having good grades and a good position was part of the equation for doing that. For Jadon, if he decides that having good grades is essential for accomplishing his goals, he is going to hold that as important and he’s going to work toward that. We could put consequences around bad grades, and I believe there’s value in focusing him and helping him work within the learning environment around him, but that’s different from trying to give him a sense of importance that’s really us projecting.
  • 12:03 Rachel: He’s also only in third grade. I’m trying to let go in these years, before he gets to something like high school, where all of it goes on his transcript.
  • 12:18 Ben: That’s that career thinking, “This goes on my record.” I don’t want for bad grades to be on his record, but I also know that when he decides what he wants to do and what his goals are, if that takes performing really well in the public school system, he’s going to overcome those obstacles and that other stuff isn’t going to matter as much.

We want to teach our children to work within the system they’re in to accomplish their goals.

  • 13:06 Right now, the public school is just a system. It’s one we’re using because of various factors. We can’t afford to homeschool time wise or money-wise. We can’t do private school, and the public school is in a really good district. It has a great staff, and we’re able to work pretty closely with them. In this season, it works out for our family to use this system. The system is not the point. The system is designed to facilitate learning, though some would argue with that for the public school system. The original intent of the public school system was to give young people tools they needed to enter into adulthood with at least a baseline understanding of how to operate in our world.
  • 14:07 As things have evolved, there’s a really big emphasis on testing and those things. Whether I like those things or not and whether I agree with everything the public school does or not, I’ve made a choice to use that system for right now. It’s important to teach my child how to operate within that system and use it as a tool to learn, not to operate in that system to succeed and do really well in that system for the sake of doing well in that system. You don’t follow the rules of public school, get the good grades, and get the high ranking just for the sake of doing those things. If that helps you accomplish your goal, then that’s what we want the emphasis to be on.
  • 15:10 Because it’s a system you choose to be in, it’s also good. Some could argue and say, “I don’t choose to do public school. I have to do it now because of the circumstances we’re in.” For us, it really is a choice. Our circumstances are difficult, so it was probably one of the easier choices for us to make. If we had all the money and the time in the world, we might choose something different, but we could work toward that if we really wanted to. The alternative is choosing something on our own, and as long as we have a choice, there is value in subjecting yourself to the rules of that system.

The Meaning of Grades

  • 16:08 Rachel: Part of what getting good grades means is teaching a kid, first, how to do what’s expected, and second, to work at hard things and accomplish them. I don’t fully agree with the grading system anyway, but if we don’t have any expectation for how our kids will do in school, how do we teach them how to do hard things?
  • 16:45 Ben: The grade is just a marker.

The goal is not the grade—the goal is hard work, effort, and problem solving.

  • 16:56 Rachel: Our oldest sometimes gets in trouble at school, because he’ll fly through a worksheet. He’ll turn it in and his teacher will say, “You got a few of these wrong. That might not get you the grade you wanted, so take it back and check it over.” He says, “No, I don’t want to.”
  • 17:17 Ben: In that case, the grade is an indication of the amount of effort he put into it. The value we need to be teaching is the effort and the hard work. Because of that, we can’t point to the grade and say, “Because your grade was this…” What if they work really hard and still get a bad grade?
  • 17:43 Rachel: It’s different for him, because these things come easily for him.
  • 17:47 Ben: That’s not always going to be the case, and I want to be really careful about his belief in how easy things come to him. While that can be true for certain things, that belief can also be detrimental. You can believe that things come easily, and as a byproduct of that belief, you don’t put forth very much effort. I would rather focus him on the effort, the hard work, taking his time, and being focused, and praise those things and point those things out. His baseline talent and intelligence, those are things he was gifted with. He didn’t earn those things, so it doesn’t make sense for me to praise those things and say, “Wow, you’re so smart.” What does that really mean?
  • 18:57 What does being smart help you achieve if you’re not going to work hard and apply that intelligence? There are people who aren’t very smart, who are very hard working, who accomplish great things. That’s what I want to focus him on. That’s why the grade can be a marker, useful information. It’s similar to if you’re running a business and you’ve got a social media presence, and you get a certain number of likes, a certain number of followers, or a certain number of subscribers. There’s useful data, but the numbers, the amount, is almost meaningless. It’s really the engagement, those interactions, that move your brand along. In the same way, the hard work and focus, how much effort is being put into solving a problem or coming up with an alternative solution, that’s what’s going to serve our children well later on in life.

Benefits of the System

  • 20:25 One of the aspects of being a part of the public school system that I really like is that there is a schedule. There’s a start to the day and an end to the day, a start to certain activities and an end to certain activities. There are times when you have to line up to prepare for the next thing and things you have to cooperate with. I love the experience our children gain from having those interactions and being a part of a social group that is working toward the same thing and using the structure to do it. I’m definitely not the type of person who would have thrived in a military environment, but one of the things I love about the people I know who are in the military is how punctual, dependable, and reliable they are.
  • 21:29 They’re so used to working within a system. There’s also a part of me that’s really rebellious against that. Don’t chain me down! The way I think about it is now, when I’m the one trying to impose some kind of schedule or I’m working with other people and there’s a mutual benefit of going toward the same goal, it’s really good for me to be able to respect that person’s time and be on time to meet with them. It’s good for me to be able to cooperate and work with others. Those things are assets, and that’s something the system of public school can help instill in our children. In the past, I’ve been lax about the kids getting to school on time.
  • 22:37 I’m starting to see how important it is. If they’re late, they might miss something, and it goes down as a mark, but it also affects the learning environment of everyone else. When someone walks into class late, it’s a distraction. How much does that distraction cost? It’s not just respecting your own time, but respecting the time and attention of others. The bottom line here is that the system is a tool you can use for learning, but learning is the important thing.

We don’t send our children to school so they can have successful school careers; we send our children to school so they can learn and so the things they learn can help them accomplish their goals.

  • 23:40 Rachel: Even as adults, we should always be learning. When we’re children, that’s not what we enjoy doing. There is a huge value to kids learning through play, but there’s also a huge value to kids learning in a classroom setting around other children. Our oldest went to school, and he is a very gifted child, which means that he falls a little behind on emotional and social development. He had a lot of learning to do in that area in his first few years of school.
  • 24:21 Ben: That was really great for him. We were homeschooling him before school began, and we could continue to work with him at that level. He’s something of an autodidact, so if we were strict with him and put some parameters around him, I believe he could learn the things necessary to follow a homeschool schedule. The social aspect and the ability to interact with and work with others is an important part of his education, and it’s a really important part of what’s going to help him succeed in the future at whatever he does. The public school system is a learning environment, and we only have so much ability to shape that. The home environment is a learning environment, and we have a lot more control over shaping it. All of these are different learning environments, and that’s how you have to think of them.

We’re All Learning

  • 25:35 Some of those environments you can shape a lot, some of them you can’t do much with at all, but they need to be seen as a tool for learning. How can they best learn in that environment? What are they going to get out of it? As they grow older, one of the things I’ve learned for myself that has been a huge benefit is that we continue to learn. It’s something that never stops, and that’s something we want to both demonstrate and teach our children. One of the great things about being an adult is that, most of the time, you can shape your own learning environment.
  • 26:19 Rachel: You get to learn about the things you’re interested in, which is the college experience, too. You have classes you have to take as basics, but I enjoyed that about college—that I got to choose where I spent my time and what I learned about.
  • 26:39 Ben: Until the day that we die, we can always learn something. I don’t plan on not having some goal or something I’m working toward, and as long as I have that, I can always learn something more to help me achieve that. It’s a constant, and that’s what we want to demonstrate for our children. Learning is something our children can continue to do beyond their school years, and there’s a lot of joy in being able to shape that for yourself. While they’re in the system, whether that’s homeschool, public school, private school, some kind of artistic school, or whatever it is, the question we should be asking as parents is, “Do we know what our child’s goals are? If so, how can we help them learn the things they need to learn within that system in order to accomplish their goals?” If they’re young enough and they don’t know what their goals are yet, you can think ahead to what their goals might be.
  • 27:57 Rachel: In our home, the oldest is pretty focused. He knows what he wants and what he wants to be. He wants to be a filmmaker. Ben has talked about letting him help edit some of his video material, and I’ve taught him about the structure of story and what it looks like to write in scenes. We’re working on him with that, because we are our children’s greatest teachers. When we show them that we’re constantly learning new things and that we’re passionate about consistently learning, they’re going to take that on themselves, too.

Our children will either come to us to learn about the things that interest them, or they’ll go somewhere else to pursue their interests outside the framework of school.

  • 28:59 Ben: One of the really important things is to help them understand that the knowledge they’re seeking doesn’t only exist in that system. One of the amazing things about today’s world is that we have access to so much information. Jadon’s got that down. He knows how to search for videos on Minecraft, and he can watch those for hours. Maybe we should be helping him figure out a career in playing Minecraft.
  • 29:46 Rachel: Something that took me a while to come to terms with when I was a teenager and going into college was that learning exists outside of just the school experience. It took me a few years after graduating college to realize that I could still be learning things. Just because I graduated doesn’t mean that I know everything there is to know about my career choice. It’s important to pass that lesson along to our children, because I didn’t have that as a kid and it took me a while. What if you started out knowing that?
  • 30:32 Ben: One of the things we’ve done that’s a practical and fun way to encourage this is we have what’s called the “I Wonder Wall”. We need to encourage this a little bit more, but any time they have a question about something, especially if it’s something we don’t know the answer to, we say, “Let’s put it on the I Wonder Wall.” We set aside time, maybe once a week, where we take down everything from the I Wonder Wall and we actually look it up. I’ve learned some pretty surprising stuff that way.
  • 31:20 Rachel: We learned how teeth grow. That was one of the questions, and there was another really funny one. Why do toots smell?
  • 31:31 Ben: I now know the answer to that question. If you don’t know the answer to something, that sets the precedent for having a way to look that up. Sitting down and doing that together as a family is really powerful, because they get to see firsthand what it looks like to discover the answer to something. Seeking knowledge is just one part of it though. There are other things, like we’ve said, like hard work, focus, taking your time, and not assuming that you know everything there is to know about something. All of those things are things you can learn inside the public school system, and they’re things you can learn, if you’re purposeful, in the homeschooling system. It’s important not just to focus on knowledge, but to focus on the other things that come in support of that.

How Important Is My Child’s School Career?

  • 32:42 The better question to ask is, “What are my child’s goals or what might their goals be, and how can I help them work in this system to learn what they need to learn to achieve their goals?” If that means having a succesful school career, then that’s fine.
  • 33:07 Rachel: I think some parents might wonder, “How do I not feel tied to the kinds of grades my kids get or feel responsible for that kind of thing, like it reflects on us?” What our kids do has no bearing on who we are, the kind of parents we are, or the kind of people we are. The choices our kids make are their own choices. We can do all we can to teach them in the right way they should go, and we can do everything we can to love them well and pass along compassion, kindness, and those kinds of things.

At the end of the day, what our children choose to do is their choice.

  • 34:08 Ben: This question is from Nick in the chat, “Should school be a priority over other ventures—business, sports, etc, when your child’s mind is set on what they want to do in the future?” This goes back to the value of focusing on the question, “What is my child’s goal?” If you can see, as a parent, that your child’s goal is to be a writer, for example, it’s worth sitting down and having a conversation with them about the role that the system they’re in might play in helping them achieve that goal. It doesn’t have to be that one takes priority over the other. School is not a priority or a goal, it’s a tool you use to accomplish your goals. Most of the time, maintaining a decent level of interaction, involvement, and participation in class discussions, are all probably going to work toward your child’s goal.
  • 35:35 That’s where the focus of the question should be, on what your child’s goal is. Another question was from Cynthia. She asks, “How do you manage your children’s expectations for school performance?” This is an interesting question, because it takes the focus away from what we think about our children’s grades and puts it on them. I don’t know if this is going to be the case yet, but because of some of the other people in our kid’s lives, I can imagine them getting pretty upset about getting a bad grade on something.
  • 36:17 Rachel: I was that kid. The first time I got a B in college, it was devastating for me. I feel like I could help manage that by speaking from experience, telling them my story. Using all of the techniques we’ve learned in the last several episodes about empathy, it is devastating to have a grade be something you didn’t expect it to be. We can share stories of our own failures. A lot of times, kids look at us, and they see mom, who is a college graduate, and they think, “I could never do that. I could never get those grades.” When they see that we’ve slipped up a few times, they see that they’re not expected to be perfect in those grades either. This is more of a challenge for me than for Ben, because I grew up as the perfectionist. I don’t think that Ben’s story isn’t valuable, but I think my story might be really valuable to the kid who says, “I want to make all As,” and then gets a B.

Focus on the Goal

  • 37:47 Ben: On the other side, you’ve got a kid who isn’t concerned about their grades at all. Cynthia continued with her question with her own example. She said, “When I got to college, I was able to identify classes that were important and worth my time to get good grades in and ones which were a waste of time, and it was okay to get a C or a D in order to get my degree. My thought was always, ‘What I know is more important than the grade.'” As a blanket statement, that’s probably true. What you know and the skills that you acquire are important. The grade might be important in accomplishing your goals. If your goal is to get into a company or an industry in which your overall GPA actually is important, than it is important to focus on getting a good grade in that class that feels like a waste of time.
  • 38:50 If your goal is to get into an industry or a company where they don’t care about the GPA and all they care about is what you’ve learned and the skills you’ve acquired, that’s not as important. At the end of the day, for most industries, the results you can produce are the most important thing. In order to get into some industries—for example, becoming a doctor—there’s a really high academic standard. It comes back to the question, “What are your goals?” That should inform whether a grade is important to you, not an arbitrary letter on a piece of paper.
  • 39:39 Rachel: In later years, I’ve learned that everything is a learning experience. I took college algebra and college chemistry, and I don’t really use those things on a daily basis as a writer, but in those classes, there were professors and students I met who sometimes form quirky characters in some of my books.

All of life is a learning experience.

  • 40:17 Ben: Maybe your goal doesn’t include using chemistry, but maybe your goal includes doing things you don’t want to do and learning things you don’t already know about things you don’t want to do. For example, you’re an artist, but you also have to take care of the business side of what you’re doing. Taking that chemistry class, focusing, and trying to do well, you’re developing tenacity, and you’re showing yourself that you can do things that are pointless and frustrating, that seem like they’re useless, in order to accomplish a greater goal. You’ve got to make that decision for yourself. If you determine that that is a part of reaching your goal, you’re more likely to succeed in doing it with the focus and attention it needs.
  • 41:26 I guess that’s kind of the “why.” That’s the real driver there. I could do well in chemistry because I think I need a good grade. I could do really well in chemistry if I want to be a chemist. I might perform pretty well in chemistry, even though it’s something I don’t care for at all that doens’t have anything to do with what I want to do, if I believe that doing well in it is going to serve a future goal for me.

Guessing Your Children’s Goals

  • 42:10 Rachel: Cynthia Barts asked, “How do you define what the goal is for your child, especially when they’re young?”
  • 42:19 Ben: When they’re young, before they’ve identified anything, you can’t get that information from them. You can only guess at what their goals might be.
  • 42:31 Rachel: I think we can start with the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Even when they’re three or four years old, when our five year old was three and four, he’s said the same thing for the last two years—Batman. If you break that down, it’s not the literal Batman. It’s about being a superhero, helping people. When we ask our children that question when they’re really young, sometimes we can get to the heart of what they’re really interested in. It’s hard to tell sometimes, when kids are young. There are so many things to play with, to take their attention.
  • 43:28 We can start seeing patterns. I usually ask the boys every year on their birthday what they want to be when they grow up. Sometimes, it’s completely different. When I was a three year old, I wanted to be an Avon lady, because my mom sold Avon. When I was four, I wanted to be a writer, and from then on it was always some kind of writing career. We can start to see some of those things if we just ask them.
  • 44:04 Ben: Because of the potential for those things to shift and change, I would say that it’s also good to encourage them to be successful in the system they’re in until they get a sharper focus on that for themselves. What’s also really important is for us to demonstrate that we will be supportive of them as they pursue their goals, and that they have the power to pursue and achieve the things they want to achieve.
  • 44:35 I really like what Rebecka said here in the chat, “My nephew had zero interest in his grades in high school.” I’m hoping by then, my kids will be pretty certain about what they want to do. Thinking back to high school, other than a few basic things, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. She continues, “In his first year of college, he realized that he wants to pursue a career in the medical field, and his grades were holding him back from achieving his goal. Now he is highly motivated and has turned around his approach to school. It was self-initiated because he has now identified his goal.”
  • 45:25 That’s the quality we want to encourage more than anything. It’s not to have our kids depend on us pushing and prodding them. Early on, when they haven’t identified what that is yet, the best thing we can do is to get a vague idea from them and guess at what that will be, and help them to be successful in whatever system they’re in to prepare for whatever possibility.

We want to help our children understand that they’re the ones in charge of doing what’s necessary to accomplish their goals.

  • 46:05 They need to understand that the system is a tool, a means to an end, and it’s not the end in itself.
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One of my good friends has 7 kids and is a little further down the road than we are (his oldest are twin boys in high school) and I see him post pretty regularly about how crazy the homework is these days. I remember being a little stressed out about homework and other school activities, but it seems like today’s students are expected to take on more and more.

When I walk down the halls of my boys’ elementary school, I see posters for academic achievement initiatives, banners encouraging kids to prepare for college, and, during testing week, fliers and posters encouraging students to focus and perform well on their state mandated tests.

When I think of my child’s future and the things I want for them, I have to ask myself, “What role does having a successful school career play in their future success and happiness?”

In today’s episode we will be talking about the role of school, the pros and cons of focusing on one’s school career, and the value of being a life long learner.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins
  • These days, in order to be successful in a career, we don’t have to have a degree.
  • Teach your children to work within the system they’re in to accomplish their goals.
  • The goal is not a grade—the goal is hard work, effort, and problem solving.
  • We send our children to school so they can learn and so the things they learn can help them accomplish their goals.
  • The public school system is a learning environment that we only have so much ability to shape.
  • Our children’s choices are their own.
  • Determine if the grade is important to accomplishing your goals.
  • All of life is a learning experience.
  • Help your children understand that they’re the ones in charge of doing what’s necessary to accomplish their goals.
Show Notes
  • 01:57 Ben: Some parents take their children’s school career very seriously. Maybe, at the same time, they feel kind of frustrated by the structure and the system that is school right now. In today’s episode, we’re talking mostly about public school. Part of that is because we don’t have a whole lot of homeschool or private school experience.
  • 02:35 Rachel: I homeschooled the oldest for a year.
  • 02:40 Ben: Because we don’t have a lot of experience with that, we went to public school also, so we were very familiar with school being looked at as a career in and of itself. The things you work toward, what your GPA was, what your position or your ranking was in your class, and what activities you were involved in were all things that made up one’s school career. Especially in the high school years, that can be a very consuming pursuit. We don’t have any kids in high school, but I have a good friend with kids in high school, and they’re doing three to four hours worth of homework every night. They’re trying to work through stuff their parents aren’t familiar with, so they have trouble helping them out.
  • 03:40 On top of that, they’re involved in various activities, sports, and that kind of thing. It has this runaway effect, even if you’re trying to pursue some kind of decent standing with school, let alone pursue some kind of honor, award, or position. Rachel had a more than decent school career. She graduated Valedictorian of her class. Tell us a little bit about that, Rachel. What did it take?
  • 04:21 Rachel: It took a lot of hard work. Our oldest is very gifted in school and learning, and he catches on very fast, but that’s not all it takes to do something like graduate Valedictorian. There’s hard work. You have to study, turn in your homework, and do all the things you’re expected to do. I grew up in a poor family, and I knew the only way I could go to college was by getting good grades and getting scholarships. There was a drive within me to better the situation I grew up in. I was a first generation college student, so I didn’t grow up around people saying that college was important.
  • 05:18 I was always a really mature kid. I say, “I never really had a childhood. I was always the grownup.” I knew for myself that college was something I wanted to do, and it was really important to me. It’s funny that Ben asks me this, because I have a lot of trouble sometimes when our kids bring home stuff and it’s not something they did all they could on or where they tried as hard as they could have. It bothers me more than it bothers Ben.
  • 05:52 Ben: I can definitely see that. Rachel, it was important to get Valedictorian to you because that was going to allow you to go to college. Why was it important to go to college?
  • 06:08 Rachel: I started out wanting to major in music and play in symphonies, and in order to even be looked at as a top notch symphony player, you have to have the schooling that goes along with that. That’s what initially propelled me to college. I ended up changing things and becoming a writer, which you don’t necessarily need college for. I will say that some of my favorite years, besides these that we’re in now, were the ones I spent in college. I did a lot of growing up, I was on my own for the first time, and it was a really neat time.

Our Children’s Goals Within the School System

  • 06:54 Ben: Rachel, it sounds like even though your goals have since changed, pursuing a strong school career was in support of your goals. My experience was a bit different. I wasn’t ever intentionally focused on having a top position or having high achievement in school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do career-wise, other than be a musician and a worship leader. Those are kind of two different things. On the one hand, I wanted to be a performing musician, which you don’t necessarily need to go to college to do. I wanted to be a worship leader, and depending on the kind of denomination or church you want to get into, although this is becoming less and less important, having a strong school background can help.
  • 08:17 It’s also not totally essential. I did go to college, but I had to work for an entire summer and nights while I was going to school so that I could continue going to college. Ultimately, I didn’t finish college. I continued focusing on developing both of those careers. Eventually, as I gathered other skills and our circumstances changed, I moved into a season where I was focusing more on design and art. That’s where I am right now.
  • 09:12 Rachel: Growing up, I felt like the only thing I could do to pursue a career was to go to school for that career.

We live in a time now where people recognize that in order to be successful in a career, we don’t have to have a degree.

  • 09:32 Like a Bachelor’s, Masters, or PHD. For some specific things, like being a doctor, counselor, or a college professor, we do need that education. For me as a writer, experience is my teacher.
  • 09:52 Ben: The first question you have to ask is, “What are my goals?” For your child, you have to ask them, “What do you want to do? What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?”
  • 10:05 Rachel: What about when they’re nine years old or really young, and they don’t know that yet? This is where I have trouble. Our nine year old doesn’t care about grades, and I know that he is capable of graduating Valedictorian someday. Sometimes, honestly, I would like to shake him a little bit and say, “Don’t you understand how important this is?” For a person like Ben, it’s not quite as important.
  • 10:36 Ben: We cannot transfer our sense of importance to him. That’s got to be something he takes on himself, based on what he believes his goals are. I don’t believe Rachel’s desire to get good grades “just because” were more important than her desire to reach her goals, and that having good grades and a good position was part of the equation for doing that. For Jadon, if he decides that having good grades is essential for accomplishing his goals, he is going to hold that as important and he’s going to work toward that. We could put consequences around bad grades, and I believe there’s value in focusing him and helping him work within the learning environment around him, but that’s different from trying to give him a sense of importance that’s really us projecting.
  • 12:03 Rachel: He’s also only in third grade. I’m trying to let go in these years, before he gets to something like high school, where all of it goes on his transcript.
  • 12:18 Ben: That’s that career thinking, “This goes on my record.” I don’t want for bad grades to be on his record, but I also know that when he decides what he wants to do and what his goals are, if that takes performing really well in the public school system, he’s going to overcome those obstacles and that other stuff isn’t going to matter as much.

We want to teach our children to work within the system they’re in to accomplish their goals.

  • 13:06 Right now, the public school is just a system. It’s one we’re using because of various factors. We can’t afford to homeschool time wise or money-wise. We can’t do private school, and the public school is in a really good district. It has a great staff, and we’re able to work pretty closely with them. In this season, it works out for our family to use this system. The system is not the point. The system is designed to facilitate learning, though some would argue with that for the public school system. The original intent of the public school system was to give young people tools they needed to enter into adulthood with at least a baseline understanding of how to operate in our world.
  • 14:07 As things have evolved, there’s a really big emphasis on testing and those things. Whether I like those things or not and whether I agree with everything the public school does or not, I’ve made a choice to use that system for right now. It’s important to teach my child how to operate within that system and use it as a tool to learn, not to operate in that system to succeed and do really well in that system for the sake of doing well in that system. You don’t follow the rules of public school, get the good grades, and get the high ranking just for the sake of doing those things. If that helps you accomplish your goal, then that’s what we want the emphasis to be on.
  • 15:10 Because it’s a system you choose to be in, it’s also good. Some could argue and say, “I don’t choose to do public school. I have to do it now because of the circumstances we’re in.” For us, it really is a choice. Our circumstances are difficult, so it was probably one of the easier choices for us to make. If we had all the money and the time in the world, we might choose something different, but we could work toward that if we really wanted to. The alternative is choosing something on our own, and as long as we have a choice, there is value in subjecting yourself to the rules of that system.

The Meaning of Grades

  • 16:08 Rachel: Part of what getting good grades means is teaching a kid, first, how to do what’s expected, and second, to work at hard things and accomplish them. I don’t fully agree with the grading system anyway, but if we don’t have any expectation for how our kids will do in school, how do we teach them how to do hard things?
  • 16:45 Ben: The grade is just a marker.

The goal is not the grade—the goal is hard work, effort, and problem solving.

  • 16:56 Rachel: Our oldest sometimes gets in trouble at school, because he’ll fly through a worksheet. He’ll turn it in and his teacher will say, “You got a few of these wrong. That might not get you the grade you wanted, so take it back and check it over.” He says, “No, I don’t want to.”
  • 17:17 Ben: In that case, the grade is an indication of the amount of effort he put into it. The value we need to be teaching is the effort and the hard work. Because of that, we can’t point to the grade and say, “Because your grade was this…” What if they work really hard and still get a bad grade?
  • 17:43 Rachel: It’s different for him, because these things come easily for him.
  • 17:47 Ben: That’s not always going to be the case, and I want to be really careful about his belief in how easy things come to him. While that can be true for certain things, that belief can also be detrimental. You can believe that things come easily, and as a byproduct of that belief, you don’t put forth very much effort. I would rather focus him on the effort, the hard work, taking his time, and being focused, and praise those things and point those things out. His baseline talent and intelligence, those are things he was gifted with. He didn’t earn those things, so it doesn’t make sense for me to praise those things and say, “Wow, you’re so smart.” What does that really mean?
  • 18:57 What does being smart help you achieve if you’re not going to work hard and apply that intelligence? There are people who aren’t very smart, who are very hard working, who accomplish great things. That’s what I want to focus him on. That’s why the grade can be a marker, useful information. It’s similar to if you’re running a business and you’ve got a social media presence, and you get a certain number of likes, a certain number of followers, or a certain number of subscribers. There’s useful data, but the numbers, the amount, is almost meaningless. It’s really the engagement, those interactions, that move your brand along. In the same way, the hard work and focus, how much effort is being put into solving a problem or coming up with an alternative solution, that’s what’s going to serve our children well later on in life.

Benefits of the System

  • 20:25 One of the aspects of being a part of the public school system that I really like is that there is a schedule. There’s a start to the day and an end to the day, a start to certain activities and an end to certain activities. There are times when you have to line up to prepare for the next thing and things you have to cooperate with. I love the experience our children gain from having those interactions and being a part of a social group that is working toward the same thing and using the structure to do it. I’m definitely not the type of person who would have thrived in a military environment, but one of the things I love about the people I know who are in the military is how punctual, dependable, and reliable they are.
  • 21:29 They’re so used to working within a system. There’s also a part of me that’s really rebellious against that. Don’t chain me down! The way I think about it is now, when I’m the one trying to impose some kind of schedule or I’m working with other people and there’s a mutual benefit of going toward the same goal, it’s really good for me to be able to respect that person’s time and be on time to meet with them. It’s good for me to be able to cooperate and work with others. Those things are assets, and that’s something the system of public school can help instill in our children. In the past, I’ve been lax about the kids getting to school on time.
  • 22:37 I’m starting to see how important it is. If they’re late, they might miss something, and it goes down as a mark, but it also affects the learning environment of everyone else. When someone walks into class late, it’s a distraction. How much does that distraction cost? It’s not just respecting your own time, but respecting the time and attention of others. The bottom line here is that the system is a tool you can use for learning, but learning is the important thing.

We don’t send our children to school so they can have successful school careers; we send our children to school so they can learn and so the things they learn can help them accomplish their goals.

  • 23:40 Rachel: Even as adults, we should always be learning. When we’re children, that’s not what we enjoy doing. There is a huge value to kids learning through play, but there’s also a huge value to kids learning in a classroom setting around other children. Our oldest went to school, and he is a very gifted child, which means that he falls a little behind on emotional and social development. He had a lot of learning to do in that area in his first few years of school.
  • 24:21 Ben: That was really great for him. We were homeschooling him before school began, and we could continue to work with him at that level. He’s something of an autodidact, so if we were strict with him and put some parameters around him, I believe he could learn the things necessary to follow a homeschool schedule. The social aspect and the ability to interact with and work with others is an important part of his education, and it’s a really important part of what’s going to help him succeed in the future at whatever he does. The public school system is a learning environment, and we only have so much ability to shape that. The home environment is a learning environment, and we have a lot more control over shaping it. All of these are different learning environments, and that’s how you have to think of them.

We’re All Learning

  • 25:35 Some of those environments you can shape a lot, some of them you can’t do much with at all, but they need to be seen as a tool for learning. How can they best learn in that environment? What are they going to get out of it? As they grow older, one of the things I’ve learned for myself that has been a huge benefit is that we continue to learn. It’s something that never stops, and that’s something we want to both demonstrate and teach our children. One of the great things about being an adult is that, most of the time, you can shape your own learning environment.
  • 26:19 Rachel: You get to learn about the things you’re interested in, which is the college experience, too. You have classes you have to take as basics, but I enjoyed that about college—that I got to choose where I spent my time and what I learned about.
  • 26:39 Ben: Until the day that we die, we can always learn something. I don’t plan on not having some goal or something I’m working toward, and as long as I have that, I can always learn something more to help me achieve that. It’s a constant, and that’s what we want to demonstrate for our children. Learning is something our children can continue to do beyond their school years, and there’s a lot of joy in being able to shape that for yourself. While they’re in the system, whether that’s homeschool, public school, private school, some kind of artistic school, or whatever it is, the question we should be asking as parents is, “Do we know what our child’s goals are? If so, how can we help them learn the things they need to learn within that system in order to accomplish their goals?” If they’re young enough and they don’t know what their goals are yet, you can think ahead to what their goals might be.
  • 27:57 Rachel: In our home, the oldest is pretty focused. He knows what he wants and what he wants to be. He wants to be a filmmaker. Ben has talked about letting him help edit some of his video material, and I’ve taught him about the structure of story and what it looks like to write in scenes. We’re working on him with that, because we are our children’s greatest teachers. When we show them that we’re constantly learning new things and that we’re passionate about consistently learning, they’re going to take that on themselves, too.

Our children will either come to us to learn about the things that interest them, or they’ll go somewhere else to pursue their interests outside the framework of school.

  • 28:59 Ben: One of the really important things is to help them understand that the knowledge they’re seeking doesn’t only exist in that system. One of the amazing things about today’s world is that we have access to so much information. Jadon’s got that down. He knows how to search for videos on Minecraft, and he can watch those for hours. Maybe we should be helping him figure out a career in playing Minecraft.
  • 29:46 Rachel: Something that took me a while to come to terms with when I was a teenager and going into college was that learning exists outside of just the school experience. It took me a few years after graduating college to realize that I could still be learning things. Just because I graduated doesn’t mean that I know everything there is to know about my career choice. It’s important to pass that lesson along to our children, because I didn’t have that as a kid and it took me a while. What if you started out knowing that?
  • 30:32 Ben: One of the things we’ve done that’s a practical and fun way to encourage this is we have what’s called the “I Wonder Wall”. We need to encourage this a little bit more, but any time they have a question about something, especially if it’s something we don’t know the answer to, we say, “Let’s put it on the I Wonder Wall.” We set aside time, maybe once a week, where we take down everything from the I Wonder Wall and we actually look it up. I’ve learned some pretty surprising stuff that way.
  • 31:20 Rachel: We learned how teeth grow. That was one of the questions, and there was another really funny one. Why do toots smell?
  • 31:31 Ben: I now know the answer to that question. If you don’t know the answer to something, that sets the precedent for having a way to look that up. Sitting down and doing that together as a family is really powerful, because they get to see firsthand what it looks like to discover the answer to something. Seeking knowledge is just one part of it though. There are other things, like we’ve said, like hard work, focus, taking your time, and not assuming that you know everything there is to know about something. All of those things are things you can learn inside the public school system, and they’re things you can learn, if you’re purposeful, in the homeschooling system. It’s important not just to focus on knowledge, but to focus on the other things that come in support of that.

How Important Is My Child’s School Career?

  • 32:42 The better question to ask is, “What are my child’s goals or what might their goals be, and how can I help them work in this system to learn what they need to learn to achieve their goals?” If that means having a succesful school career, then that’s fine.
  • 33:07 Rachel: I think some parents might wonder, “How do I not feel tied to the kinds of grades my kids get or feel responsible for that kind of thing, like it reflects on us?” What our kids do has no bearing on who we are, the kind of parents we are, or the kind of people we are. The choices our kids make are their own choices. We can do all we can to teach them in the right way they should go, and we can do everything we can to love them well and pass along compassion, kindness, and those kinds of things.

At the end of the day, what our children choose to do is their choice.

  • 34:08 Ben: This question is from Nick in the chat, “Should school be a priority over other ventures—business, sports, etc, when your child’s mind is set on what they want to do in the future?” This goes back to the value of focusing on the question, “What is my child’s goal?” If you can see, as a parent, that your child’s goal is to be a writer, for example, it’s worth sitting down and having a conversation with them about the role that the system they’re in might play in helping them achieve that goal. It doesn’t have to be that one takes priority over the other. School is not a priority or a goal, it’s a tool you use to accomplish your goals. Most of the time, maintaining a decent level of interaction, involvement, and participation in class discussions, are all probably going to work toward your child’s goal.
  • 35:35 That’s where the focus of the question should be, on what your child’s goal is. Another question was from Cynthia. She asks, “How do you manage your children’s expectations for school performance?” This is an interesting question, because it takes the focus away from what we think about our children’s grades and puts it on them. I don’t know if this is going to be the case yet, but because of some of the other people in our kid’s lives, I can imagine them getting pretty upset about getting a bad grade on something.
  • 36:17 Rachel: I was that kid. The first time I got a B in college, it was devastating for me. I feel like I could help manage that by speaking from experience, telling them my story. Using all of the techniques we’ve learned in the last several episodes about empathy, it is devastating to have a grade be something you didn’t expect it to be. We can share stories of our own failures. A lot of times, kids look at us, and they see mom, who is a college graduate, and they think, “I could never do that. I could never get those grades.” When they see that we’ve slipped up a few times, they see that they’re not expected to be perfect in those grades either. This is more of a challenge for me than for Ben, because I grew up as the perfectionist. I don’t think that Ben’s story isn’t valuable, but I think my story might be really valuable to the kid who says, “I want to make all As,” and then gets a B.

Focus on the Goal

  • 37:47 Ben: On the other side, you’ve got a kid who isn’t concerned about their grades at all. Cynthia continued with her question with her own example. She said, “When I got to college, I was able to identify classes that were important and worth my time to get good grades in and ones which were a waste of time, and it was okay to get a C or a D in order to get my degree. My thought was always, ‘What I know is more important than the grade.'” As a blanket statement, that’s probably true. What you know and the skills that you acquire are important. The grade might be important in accomplishing your goals. If your goal is to get into a company or an industry in which your overall GPA actually is important, than it is important to focus on getting a good grade in that class that feels like a waste of time.
  • 38:50 If your goal is to get into an industry or a company where they don’t care about the GPA and all they care about is what you’ve learned and the skills you’ve acquired, that’s not as important. At the end of the day, for most industries, the results you can produce are the most important thing. In order to get into some industries—for example, becoming a doctor—there’s a really high academic standard. It comes back to the question, “What are your goals?” That should inform whether a grade is important to you, not an arbitrary letter on a piece of paper.
  • 39:39 Rachel: In later years, I’ve learned that everything is a learning experience. I took college algebra and college chemistry, and I don’t really use those things on a daily basis as a writer, but in those classes, there were professors and students I met who sometimes form quirky characters in some of my books.

All of life is a learning experience.

  • 40:17 Ben: Maybe your goal doesn’t include using chemistry, but maybe your goal includes doing things you don’t want to do and learning things you don’t already know about things you don’t want to do. For example, you’re an artist, but you also have to take care of the business side of what you’re doing. Taking that chemistry class, focusing, and trying to do well, you’re developing tenacity, and you’re showing yourself that you can do things that are pointless and frustrating, that seem like they’re useless, in order to accomplish a greater goal. You’ve got to make that decision for yourself. If you determine that that is a part of reaching your goal, you’re more likely to succeed in doing it with the focus and attention it needs.
  • 41:26 I guess that’s kind of the “why.” That’s the real driver there. I could do well in chemistry because I think I need a good grade. I could do really well in chemistry if I want to be a chemist. I might perform pretty well in chemistry, even though it’s something I don’t care for at all that doens’t have anything to do with what I want to do, if I believe that doing well in it is going to serve a future goal for me.

Guessing Your Children’s Goals

  • 42:10 Rachel: Cynthia Barts asked, “How do you define what the goal is for your child, especially when they’re young?”
  • 42:19 Ben: When they’re young, before they’ve identified anything, you can’t get that information from them. You can only guess at what their goals might be.
  • 42:31 Rachel: I think we can start with the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Even when they’re three or four years old, when our five year old was three and four, he’s said the same thing for the last two years—Batman. If you break that down, it’s not the literal Batman. It’s about being a superhero, helping people. When we ask our children that question when they’re really young, sometimes we can get to the heart of what they’re really interested in. It’s hard to tell sometimes, when kids are young. There are so many things to play with, to take their attention.
  • 43:28 We can start seeing patterns. I usually ask the boys every year on their birthday what they want to be when they grow up. Sometimes, it’s completely different. When I was a three year old, I wanted to be an Avon lady, because my mom sold Avon. When I was four, I wanted to be a writer, and from then on it was always some kind of writing career. We can start to see some of those things if we just ask them.
  • 44:04 Ben: Because of the potential for those things to shift and change, I would say that it’s also good to encourage them to be successful in the system they’re in until they get a sharper focus on that for themselves. What’s also really important is for us to demonstrate that we will be supportive of them as they pursue their goals, and that they have the power to pursue and achieve the things they want to achieve.
  • 44:35 I really like what Rebecka said here in the chat, “My nephew had zero interest in his grades in high school.” I’m hoping by then, my kids will be pretty certain about what they want to do. Thinking back to high school, other than a few basic things, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. She continues, “In his first year of college, he realized that he wants to pursue a career in the medical field, and his grades were holding him back from achieving his goal. Now he is highly motivated and has turned around his approach to school. It was self-initiated because he has now identified his goal.”
  • 45:25 That’s the quality we want to encourage more than anything. It’s not to have our kids depend on us pushing and prodding them. Early on, when they haven’t identified what that is yet, the best thing we can do is to get a vague idea from them and guess at what that will be, and help them to be successful in whatever system they’re in to prepare for whatever possibility.

We want to help our children understand that they’re the ones in charge of doing what’s necessary to accomplish their goals.

  • 46:05 They need to understand that the system is a tool, a means to an end, and it’s not the end in itself.
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