The Importance of Goals

I have recently become a certified TOG Advisor. Working for Lampstand Press (the parent company of Tapestry of Grace) as a teacher at Lampstand Learning Center has been wonderful, and now I also get to help homeschool parents make curriculum decisions and see if Tapestry of Grace would be the right fit for them.

In this capacity, and also in running homeschool lists and Facebook groups, I am constantly getting questions about TOG from homeschoolers who are trying to choose the right curriculum. There is one thing that always amazes and dismays me in this process; the criteria we generally seem to be using to choose the programs for our children. It generally goes something like this:

"I want something cheap and easy to use."
"I want something that is already planned for me so I can just open it and go."
"I want to use blankety-blank curriculum because everyone I know is using it."
"I want something like blanekty-blank but for free."

Now of course every homeschooler has to consider their budget, their time constraints, and their other needs, but it seems as if we are missing the elephant in the room, the one reason that should be number one, and it is this:

"Does this fit with the goals I have for my children?"

One great quote I remember from many years ago, so long ago I can't remember the source, is this: if you're running away from something instead of towards something, you'll get nowhere. We spend so much time running away from this or that program because of what isn't perfect, or what other people say, and we end up chasing after the "latest thing" because everyone else is doing it, and, gee, it is so shiny and new! My question is, where will we end up? It may work fine, and we may be satisfied with the end result, but what if we aren't?

I would suggest that before choosing any program to use with our children, we must define what our finish line is. What are we running towards? What do we want for our children? What do we hope they will become? if we can clearly define that, now we have something to plan for. Then we can ask the most important question when looking at any program:

"Does this fit with the goals I have for my children?"

I have found that when we use this as our criteria for evaluating the latest and greatest program, we can make a more confident and even more successful choice. We will find something that fits *our* family, not our friend's family, or the family we admire at the conference that looks so perfect, or the family of the leader of our co-op or support group.

Once you decide to pause the endless search for that elusive "perfect" curriculum to create your goals, you'll need a framework for how to organize them and some ideas on what is important. You may find this task easy, but I have to admit, I did not. I found a goal sheet written by a speaker at a local conference way back in 1999, played with and modified it, then modified it again, over several years, until I was happy with the finished product. Jim helped me with some of the wording, and insisted on paring it down to the most succinct, compact document as possible, because, as he rightly noted, simply stated goals are easier to meet.

For our framework, we decided on four categories for our goals - spiritual, academic, social, and physical. Spiritual is our top priority, then academic, but we felt a well-rounded adult needs to meet some specific social and physical goals as well. We began each section with the phrase "we desire to produce adults who are...." and then stated our four to five main goals for our children in each area.

Now, we can go through this process and write out a wonderful, specific set of goals, and then put them in a file drawer and forget they exist. Instead, why don't we post them on our schoolroom wall? Let's read them over again before we go to the next homeschool convention; better yet, take a copy with us! When we are reviewing a new program that looks so great and has all the bells and whistles, let's stop and look at our goal sheet, then look at that program with a more critical eye. When we're doing our lesson plans, let's keep our goals in mind.

The convention season is fast approaching, the aisles of exhibitors with the latest and greatest, alongside the old and true, to entice and excite us with so many choices. This year, let's approach them with a plan and with the right question on our lips:

"Does this fit with the goals I have for my children?"