Why? Part II

I have been thinking about it, and I have a few more "why's" to mention. Almost as strong as my excitement and enthusiasm for homeschooling is my distaste for the public school system. Both my husband and I agree that we are less than impressed with the public school educations we received. I remember finding most of my classes boring, tedious, and unchallenging. My younger brother, on the other hand, found it extremely challenging - he just couldn't physically sit still and focus - a problem that is often remedied nowadays with medication, but which I believe could also be remedied by just letting the poor kid MOVE throughout the day. I have read lots of stories of mothers who struggled to get their kids to sit still and listen, and then one day tried just letting them run around while being read to, and amazingly the kids were better able to answer questions about what they heard. They were actually able to focus and absorb the information better because their attention wasn't consumed by trying to be still. Having the flexibility to pick and choose tools and methods that will match my kids' individual learning styles, and allowing them the freedom to learn in whatever way is natural for them, was a very strong factor in my decision to homeschool.

My problem with the public school system is not with the teachers, but with the framework that they must work within. It's a system that was originally developed to create good, obedient assembly-line workers when the country was becoming industrialized. Not to teach people to think and love learning, but to teach them to respect authority and tolerate drudgery. There is little emphasis on innovation and creativity, rather, it's just a list of things some bureaucrats have decided kids must learn, and exactly when and in what order they should learn it. Little to no deviation is permitted. Teachers are under so much pressure to get their students to perform well on standardized tests, that the tests become the sole focus of everything, with the students cramming in tons of facts to be regurgitated and then quickly forgotten. This is not true learning. Many people are unhappy and frustrated with the current public school system, and it really baffles me when some of them think I'm crazy for deciding to reject it.

And so little of what is learned in school is actually useful in real life. I think kids should be able to function in the world after graduation; to do math, follow a budget, balance a checkbook. I know 18-year-olds who don't know how to cook themselves a meal or do their own laundry. What about acquiring marketable skills, or how to write a resume, or how to act at a job interview? I think the very most important thing a person needs to learn in their education is how to remain curious about the world, how to form questions and then research to find their answers, how to find ways to teach themselves what they need to know. Basically - that learning is not something that ends on graduation day.

I often say that the only thing I took with me from all of high school, that I use every day, is what I learned in 9th grade typing class. Well, that and my love of reading which stemmed from all the books I devoured in my free time. My very favorite school memory is of this sunny windowsill, in the back of the middle-school library, where I would hide out at lunchtime and enjoy some peace and solitude and escape into a good story. I remember actually feeling annoyed when my friends finally discovered my hiding spot, and then kept showing up there to talk to me!

This doesn't really inspire confidence...

I think it's a little sad that simply achieving "adequacy" is exciting enough to merit getting a banner to announce it!

Tonight's dinner table conversation

So today we had our septic tank pumped. Max was fascinated by the great big truck in our driveway, and the whole process - we talked about the plumbing in the house and pipes under the ground and where things go, etc. At dinner, he often likes to share the happenings of his day with Daddy...

Max: "Guess what, Dad?"

Dad: "What?"

Max (very excitedly): "We saw a POOP TRUCK today!"

Can you spot the misspelling here?

Hmm. This sign doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the public school system, does it? :)

(via neatorama)

Max's first story

I just want to write this down quick so I remember it - Max made up his first story ever tonight. After watching "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (again) this evening, I asked Max if he would like to shrink himself real tiny like those kids in the movie did.

Max: "Well I was real tiny when I used to live in your belly."
Me: "Oh really, you remember that?"
Max: "Yeah, and I didn't want to come out of there 'cause it felt really nice in there."
Me: "Oh really?"
Max: "Yeah and there was another tiny baby in there too. He was a lizard. He had tiny feets. My tiny feets were bigger than his tiny feets."
Me: "Hmm. What was his name?"
Max: "Cracky." (That name comes from his name for scrambled eggs. He calls them "cracky eggs" because I crack the eggs into a bowl to make them.)

Patting myself on the back just a tiny bit...

So in our local paper, The Post, they have a relatively new feature: Guest Columnist. You can write 750 words or less about whatever topic you want, so I submitted a column about homeschooling. And they printed it! I pretty much just cobbled the article together from my first couple of posts on here - this blogging thing really helps me organize and clarify my thoughts. But it was really exciting to see my name in print!

How?

When I got home from work the other day, my 4-and-a-half-year-old son, Max, came running to meet me at the door and held up two plastic dinosaurs he was playing with. "Look Mom, this Allosaurus is biting the tail of this Parasaurolophus!" Wow! I am constantly amazed at the stuff that comes out of that boy's mouth. Another time, a few months ago, he was attempting to stall for a few extra minutes before bed, so he said to me, "Mom, I have to ask you something... *pause*... what species lived in the Jurassic?" I wasn't sure whether to be more amazed that he asked that big question, or that he asked it because he knew it would have a very long answer and would therefore delay bedtime! As you can see, he currently has an obsession with all things dinosaur - and he is an absolute sponge for information, if it's something of interest to him. He can correctly identify lots of different species, and I didn't teach him any of them. He simply absorbed the info from his favorite cartoon, "Dinosaur Train" on PBS. This leads me to think about how we are going to actually "do" homeschooling. My function in his dinosaur "education" if you will, is to simply remember when his favorite show is on and let him watch it. I didn't have to purchase expensive curriculum materials, or spend hours drilling information into him. He just soaked it up because it was fun and interesting to him. The same thing happened with the alphabet. His very first obsession was with signs. Street signs, all kinds of them, but most of all - stop signs. A little before he was 2 years old, everywhere we went, he began noticing stop signs. We were reprogramming our new tv, and there was a blue button on the menu screen to "stop" programming. Max pointed at it and said, "Op." (which is how he pronounced the word at the time.) We were so blown away that he recognized the word outside of the bright red hexagon symbol. After that, whenever we saw a stop sign, I would point to each letter and say, "Ess - Tee - Oh - Pee." He picked that up pretty quickly, and then he realized the other letters must have names too. He kept asking me to identify letters on things and he wanted me to read Dr. Seuss's ABC book to him every night. By about 27 months he knew each letter of the alphabet, even in random order. Again, he soaked all of this information up with very little effort on my part.

I have done a lot of reading on different styles of homeschooling - and there are many - but I think I am leaning toward a less formal, eclectic, almost-but-not-quite-unschooling, style. Probably with a lot of use of "unit study", which is a method where you tie in all subjects to whatever the child's current passion is. I don't really see us having a fixed "first day of school" where we begin homeschooling, but rather I see it as more of a continuing lifestyle. In many ways, we are already homeschooling right now. It's just a natural progression - he's learned how to walk, talk, feed himself, get dressed, use the potty, etc., and now he's learning how to read, how to tell time, identify types of train cars, species of dinosaurs, etc. I just pay attention to what he's into, and facilitate the expansion of those interests with toys, games, books, videos, field trips, etc. I don't really feel pressured to re-create the "classroom" environment at home - isn't that why I'm choosing to homeschool?