Finding Balance in your Planning

I've been discussing balance with a friend this morning. I tend to think very symmetrically, so much on this, the same amount on the other side. It appeals to my aesthetics. But that isn't always balance. There are two sides to our brain and I've been doing some simple studying on left-brained versus right-brained thinking. Z is more right-brained than left, I land somewhere just to the right of center, and this has created some challenges in how he learns and how I teach. Notice I said challenges, not problems.

One challenge is that we tweak any pre-planned curriculum. Add his varied interests into that and we do better when I custom plan each subject. Now that sounds all snazzy, but it's not. It's not a huge amount of work most of the time, but it does that time, hence the need for balance. In many pre-packed plans, the entire curriculum is centered around history.

 When we started on our classical journey several years ago (after homeschooling for four years) we opted to use The Latin-Centered Curriculum as our focus. It revolutionized our homeschool. It freed up our schedule to not center around history, but Latin. I like history, but we tend to meander through it, get lost in a different direction, skip something, linger here. If our entire schooling were centered around history we'd be behind all the time. With a Latin center you focus on multum non multa and history falls from the focus. Well...we're not doing Latin anymore. We aren't studying the language that was part of the foundation of Western Civilization. So  what do we do????

Z, as I've said in previous posts, is developing his own unique interests. He's slid over to the Eastern Hemisphere and wants to study Japanese and Russian. Not what I had planned. Not the lingering and bathing in Ancient Western culture that I had planned for high school. In essence, we have lost our center and it is up to me to find a new one.

Not simply out of respect for what The Latin-Centered Curriculum (LCC) did for our school, but because of the multum non multa approach, we will keep LCC as our guide. We'll simply change the language, add some world focus in our history and literature, and find balance instead of symmetry.

Today I'm working on history plans, trying to figure how to balance our Great Books study with the rest of the learning that must take place. First, I need to make more coffee.