All my life, we have had a metronome sitting on our piano and I want to tell you today how your homeschool plan is like a metronome. Stay with me now.
I liked to play with our metronome a lot when I was young. I’d move the weight up and down to adjust the tempo and watch it swing. It would go slower as I raised the weight higher and faster as the weight neared the bottom. I enjoyed reading the Italian words and noting the numbers. I’d wind it up and watch it tip back and forth. Now my kids play with the metronome and they get the same kind of enjoyment out of it.
Actually using a metronome during practice has not always been quite as enjoyable. I’d set it to the noted tempo, start playing and immediately get off track. I’d make a mistake and get off beat, floundering a bit to find the metronome’s beat again. But the metronome didn’t change. So I’d take a breath and get back on track.
You see, I often tried to start practicing at the right tempo from the beginning. My teachers would warn me though that if you make mistakes when you practice, you will often make those same mistakes when you perform. So practice slow enough that you don’t teach your fingers bad fingerings or wrong notes.
Eventually as I was able to keep pace at slow tempos, I could speed it up a bit until the song was at the right speed. It seemed like an annoying pointless endeavor and a waste of time. But my teachers were right. My metronome could set a good pace for me to work on the hard things as I could perfect all the tricky passages. If ever I came across a difficult passage, I’d just slow down the tempo and work it through.
So here’s where the metaphor comes together. Do you ever feel like your homeschool day is so fast and chaotic that you wish there was a big metronome swinging on your wall keeping things slower? Something to keep a steady pace so things don’t fly off too fast and get messy. Some sort of mental click track to keep you on beat.
Cue your homeschool plan. Your homeschool plan can be an amazing tool, a metronome of sorts for your homeschool year. It keeps you on time and if you fill up your days where you have to keep a fast pace, you can easily get off track with one missed lesson.
But here’s the thing – you can change the pace! Set the tempo for your school year, and when life pushes you offbeat, your plan is there, keeping time to get you back in sync. If you build in some “think room” or margin in the plan, you will have the built in ability to keep the pace even if there are small stumbles along the way.
Just don’t expect to be able to always quicken the pace – some songs are just meant to be slow.
The amazing thing about a homeschool plan is that you don’t have to let the metronome keep frustrating you, controlling what you can and can’t do. You have the control. But you can use it as a tool to keep things on pace and help you keep going, sometimes slowly, through those tricky passages of life.
Is a homeschool plan annoying? Sometimes. Pointless? Definitely not. It is worth spending the extra time on a plan to help perfect your practice of homeschool. And hopefully with lots of practice, you will become a homeschool maestro.
