Common Fears: But I’m Not a Qualified Teacher

We certainly have an idea in our society that you have to receive specialized training in order to teach things to children. While educational certification may have benefits, particularly on the secondary and collegiate levels, if you are a parent, you have actually been teaching your child since the day they joined your family. Does your child speak English and use concepts like hot and cold and big and small appropriately? You taught her that. Does he walk and eat with a fork and use the toilet? He probably learned those things from you! Now, until I had a child with developmental delays and intellectual disabilities, I didn’t even realize that there was a process in learning to walk or use a fork or speak, and working with physical and occupational therapists and speech language pathologists broke down the steps that I had unthinkingly been leading my typical children through in order to slow down and teach those things more intentionally to my child with special needs. But you don’t have to be an SLP to teach the average child to speak your native language! How did you learn to potty train your child? Did you read a book, follow an expert on social media, or ask a seasoned older parent how they did it? Guess what! You can do do those same things to teach your child all sorts of important life skills!

Let me tell you a dirty little secret about teachers that we all tend to forget. All classroom teachers have had to teach a new subject for the first time. Even if you go through a teacher education program, you’re going to enter a school as a student teacher and be handed a curriculum that you didn’t write yourself. You’re going to use common sense and the teacher guide and probably some help from more seasoned teachers, and you’re going to figure out how to communicate that subject information to a class full of kids you don’t know. Even if you’ve been teaching for some time, it’s fairly common to be asked to teach a new class or a new subject when someone retires or goes on maternity leave or you move to a new school. I think teachers are amazing heroes, but they are not all so much smarter than you that you cannot do the same thing and learn as you go.

When I was fresh out of college, I was moving from out of state and did not have a teacher’s license, but I got my first teaching job by calling around to all the private schools in the town where we had moved for my husband to go to grad school, and I just shared my credentials and expressed an interest in being on their substitute call list. At one school, the secretary’s ears perked up when I mentioned my concentration in French. They had just lost their French and art teacher a week before school started, and I sounded like an answer to their prayers! Two days before the first day of school, I was hired to teach junior high art, elementary art, elementary French, elementary computers, and 6th grade math. I had never taken an art techniques class in my life, so I quickly asked artist friends for advice and flipped through the random textbooks in the art room for a start-of-year project. I called my old homeschool French teacher for advice on how to teach French to five different grades. I opened up the 6th grade math textbook and familiarized myself with the concepts I was going to teach. The first few weeks were rough and scary, but I had a lot of support from my fellow teachers, and by the end of the year, I had successfully taught all of those subjects to those kids! So when I started homeschooling my son, I knew that the first time through was going to be rough and a little scary at first. I knew that I would become more proficient in teaching the more I did it. Fourteen years into homeschooling, I’m confident and experienced with all of the curriculum we’re going to use, so it’s no longer rough or scary.

As a parent, you are already the top expert in the world in one thing—your child! The more time you spend with her, the more you will learn about how she is motivated and how she best learns. You will become more and more of an expert on her. And you are blessed to live in the 21st century, where there is a plethora of quality curriculum that will walk you though how to teach your child every subject needed in elementary school. (See my curriculum recommendations for what we have used in our homeschool.) You do not need to reinvent the wheel.

“But what if I’m really bad at math?” you ask. Okay, if you’re an adult, you probably have at least graduated from high school, if not college and even graduate school. The level of math you had to complete to graduate is well above what you’re going to be starting with in grade school. The math concepts that may have been hard for you in 3rd grade because you had a bad teacher (or just a teacher who really loved English and didn’t care about math) are actually not that hard for you now. Pick a math curriculum (we use Saxon in elementary) that is scripted, as in, it literally has a script that tells you how to introduce a concept. Be faithful about doing math every school day, even if it’s not your favorite subject. At the end of the year, you and your child will understand the contents of that math book! If he doesn’t feel confident about something, the beauty of homeschooling is that you can go back and lean into a concept next year that still confuses him. If it’s just memorizing math facts, use Kate Snow’s excellent “Facts that Stick” books as well as just drilling flash cards to get those facts down.

I have the same advice for parents who don’t feel confident with grammar, writing, history, science, or foreign languages. Good curriculum will help lead you through teaching subjects that you’re not familiar with. You will learn so much as a homeschool parent, and it gets easier! Any by the fourth or fifth time through our materials with our youngest girls, I don’t really need the scripted teacher’s guide. I actually remember how to talk about a mathematical or grammatical concept. I now feel pretty qualified to teach any subject in K-6!