God bless the homeschoolers. There’s no way I could teach my own children. I’m not sure what would happen if it were up to me to get them through AP biology, pre-calculus or organic chemistry. I can’t even get my 6^th grader to work math problems actually showing how he knows 1/5 is 20 percent.

The child simply is not a process guy. He looks at the problem, sees the answer and writes it down. Done! Never mind that the “answer” is sometimes incorrect. If he worked through the process, he’d see that. Which is why the teacher’s instructions include this line: “Show all your work.”

His attitude is why bother with a lengthy process when I know the answer? When he doesn’t know the answer, he concludes it’s impossible.

This drives me crazy. The process has a purpose: it’s part of learning what you think you know. Skip the process and you don’t discover how the “impossible” is done. You also fail to learn how to avoid mistakes that later could be your downfall – say at test time!

Sounds like a life lesson God is repeatedly trying to teach me. I tend to fast forward through things that look like a complete waste of time. My attitude: “I know this.” I sometimes later discover that I’ve missed something crucial in my haste and blundered badly, which is why the Bible says it’s not good to be in a hurry. Proverbs 19:2

Process is important. Jesus spent 30 mostly silent years preparing for about 3 years of public ministry. He worked the process.