First few days of school...musings

I am still re-reading Norms and Nobility, and thinking how much it reminds me of Marva Collins' Way (actually, they were both first published around the same time),  and how much it also reminds me of the Free Commot people in the Chronicles of Prydain, and thinking about how what we do in homeschool does or doesn't support that bigger picture.

And please don't think that because I'm in my sixteenth year of doing this, that I'm any more certain or perfectly consistent about those aims, and their application, than any newbie.  How many narrations?  How many experiments?  Are workbooks occasionally a good choice? What do I say, or not say, trying not to interfere but still trying to bring out the important ideas? What books, and what if the kid(s) start off the year already complaining that they don't like them?  There's so much I don't know myself.  Last year when I was reading Marva Collins, I went and read Candide and Emerson's "Self-Reliance" because I didn't want to have read that much less than her elementary students.  Should I admit also that I've never read Plato's Meno (as David Hicks recommends for ninth graders) or a lot of other things I should have read along the way?  We may be keeping our homeschooled kids free from particular educational follies, but does that mean we're immune from creating our own?

(I'm supposed to have answers to those questions?  Sometimes you just have to plunge ahead anyway.)