What my son needed to hear…

My youngest son was not his usual happy, carefree self. I knew something was troubling him. He usually is up early each day and often showered and dressed by 7 am. He was sleeping in until almost noon and had worn the same thing for two days in a row. It was time to talk.

He is thirteen, almost fourteen, and will be starting high school classes next year. I know this time in his life is challenging. Things are changing so fast at this age and now the craziness of COVID-19 and all that goes with it. It is not enough that his hormones and inner voice are going crazy – the world is too.

I asked him to go for a walk with me and let him choose the destination. And then we just started talking.

We started by talking about one of his classes. I am one of the mentors (teachers) for his Shakespeare class, and traditionally we do a full play Spring semester. This year we have had to make some adjustments, so we are doing it online, and his class decided to get creative and use Minecraft to put it on. While he voted for the Minecraft option, he was still disappointed he didn’t get to really act. I get it. He has literally grown up seeing his brothers doing these plays. Because he was always there, he has been able to be in more performances than most. He got his first small part in a play years ago. This year he was supposed to have a major part, and he was really looking forward to getting into the role. But the whole world turned upside down.

I tried to explain to him that his Shakespeare class is not just about doing the play. It is about working together and learning to be creative and innovative. It is about doing hard things. He kind of got it… but not really.

Then he started asking me questions. He knows I do a lot of research about education. He wanted to know why regular schools didn’t do things differently and why we do things the way we do. We talked about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and how homeschooling allows us to use the much stronger intrinsic motivation rather than things like grades (extrinsic). We also talked about some really successful men that didn’t take the traditional school route – people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that dropped out of college. I shared how these people educated themselves in what they wanted and needed to learn to be successful.

This led us to talk about what he and other students might need to learn to be successful. I shared with him how employers today were looking for people that were creative and innovative. They wanted people that could “think outside of the box.” These employers have found that many people right out of college aren’t these things and have a hard time learning how to be.

This led me right back to our Shakespeare play. What we are asking the students to do in our class is exactly what they need to be able to do to be successful in the future. They are tackling a problem with creativity and innovation. They are “thinking outside the box” by making it work inside the box (the computer). Then he got it!

And then we were able to tackle the real problem. We haven’t been given a day this is going to end, and for him, that means it could last forever. I stopped walking, looked him in the eye, and assured him it wouldn’t. There had been conversations at home about this, but he obviously hadn’t heard them. They weren’t relevant to him at that point. Now he was ready to listen to it.

This morning he was up early, showered and dressed, and ready to meet the challenges of the day.