Teaching From Rest

I read this book, Teaching From Rest,  after hearing the author, Sarah Mackenzie, speak at the homeschool convention back in April.  I had so many great takeaways from it that I wanted to save them here.  Such truth ... not just for teaching, but for parenting and discipling our children.

• I desire to teach and mother in a way the pleases God.  Some days that feels like feeding the five thousand.  But He is not asking me to feed the five thousand; He just wants me to bring my basket of loaves and fish and lay them at His feet.
• This work of homeschooling and raising hearts and souls and bodies is hard.  It is more than I can do in my own strength.
• The true aim of education is to order a child's affections - to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought.  Our greatest task then, is to put living ideas in front of our children like a feast.  We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish them in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence.  It is to those ends that we labor.
• Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender.
• Whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it's also an opportunity to enter into rest. 
• It's important to remember that rest is not ease. ... Teaching from rest will take diligence, attention, and a lot of hard work.
• Rest is the virtue between negligence and anxiety.
• Most of my own frustration comes from forgetting what my real task is in the first place.  He called me to be faithful, yet I'm determined to be successful.
• Because whatever or not he becomes an excellent writer or a proficient mathematician is not your business to worry over.  Your business is that single assignment today and loving him through it...  Rest looks like stewardship.  Consider a garden ...  Those seeds our Lord has tucked into your hand can bear great fruit in the kingdom of God - but it takes something from you.  It takes a reliance on  providence, a commitment to faithful stewardship, and a state of restful trust.  Cultivate your garden.
• We are weary because we forget about grace. ... You are insufficient, but His grace is not.
• Some of the best learning happens when a child encounters an idea for himself.
• Change the way you assess your success.  The quality of study matters far more than the mere quantity of learning.
• Live your life, relish ideas, wrestle.  Remember, think, and converse.  That is a curriculum you cannot buy, but your child's heart will feast on it for years to come.
• ... participate in slow, sane education.
• If I did not already have this resource on my shelf, how much trouble would I go through to obtain it?  If the answer is "not much," it can likely be taken off the plan.
• The point, then, is to put true, good, and beautiful ideas in front of our children, and then to let them feast on them.  To sit alongside them and model how one might go about dipping into the feast.  We share a giant meal of idea - contemplating, beholding, loving.  We allow ourselves to be transformed by what we come in contact with.  
• ... the fundamental skills of humanity itself are  remembering, thinking, and speaking.  That's really all there is to it.  When I look at a potential curricular program or book to add to the plan for my child's year, I need to ask myself: Will this help her remember?  Will it help her think?  Will it teach her to speak?   We need to come face to face with good ideas - with order, with logic, and with truth.
• Insist on Margin.  Once you figure our how much time you have in your daily budget, fill only 80 percent of it.  "Margin is the space between load and limits.  Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating."
• Today, do less.  Do it well.
• Rest is not the opposite of work, but rather work of a different order. 
• We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book. 
• These children, entrusted to our care, are not mere mortals.   Your child?  He is God's.  And the Almighty put him in your charge for relationship. Don't damage that relationship over something so trivial as an algebra problem.  And when you do (because you will, and so will I), repent.
• They are little reflections of the Almighty.  ... Therein lies the reason we've taken on this arduos task of home education at all - because a government school would not see our children as the image bearers they are. 
• The only time we really care about how our children compare to other children is when we're giving in to our own vanity.
• Some people call it multitasking, as though it's a skill to be desired and honed, but I know it's really a lack of focus - a refusal to seek out the important things.