Unwinding from a busy day of scout activities, schoolwork (my children's, not mine), and miscellaneous chores, I started thinking about more ways in which our family has benefited from choosing to homeschool.
(Before I get the posts that tell me -- again -- that homeschooling is not right for every family or that "public school worked great for my kids, so what's your problem," let me just say that I already know the first and have 'blogged ad nauseum about the second, i.e. public ed. wasted MY time and I don't want it wasting my kids' time.)
So, on to more reasons we appreciate and are grateful for the choice we've made:
1. Ancient Greece is much more fun when you can spend a year studying it rather than a couple of weeks. Why read about philosophers when you can debate their ideas? Why read about the fashion of the times when you can make your own chiton or peplos out of a bedsheet? Why learn about "pi" when you can read the story behind its discovery? (Archimedes and his need for a better measurement of a circle, btw.)
2. Math is much more fun when you don't have a standardized testing deadline breathing down your neck alongside a teacher, a teacher's aide, and fifty gazillion school administrators whose very salaries depend upon you nailing every question. No pressure = deeper thinking.
3. Science is much more fun -- and meaningful -- when you get to pick your own plants or flowers, draw them, study them, and then plant your own. Botany from a book isn't nearly as substantial as botany with dirt clods and flower parts scattered across your notebook.
4. Art is soooo much better when you get to do it virtually every day instead of as a special class once a week. It takes on so many more forms, some of which spring from the academic pursuit of the moment, some of which just come from inspired minds working at their own pace. Painting, sewing, building, drawing, crayoning, origami -- we joke we're gonna have to build an addition on to our house to hold all the arts and crafts our kids create.
5. Astronomy is so much more inspiring when someone bothers to introduce it to you in ways that don't confine entire galaxies to a quarter-page of a textbook. Again, drawing, painting, sculpting, observing, charting, discussing, demonstrating and experimenting -- my kids have learned more astronomy in one year than I learned in 12 years of public school and four more of state university.
Did you know there was a time in this country when to be considered truly educated meant that you'd studied astronomy? Me either, until I began preparations to study it with my children.
6. Family life -- yup, it's hard being surrounded by other people all day long. (Wait, isn't that what they do in public school?) But I've lost count of the opportunities to remind, encourage, remind, encourage, correct, discipline, train, remind, encourage, correct, discipline and train my children. And I've lost count of the undesirable habits, character traits, or behaviors that have fallen by the wayside as a result. Diligence, rather than patience, really can make a difference. And I can't write enough to describe all the things my children learn about conflict resolution and the importance of being kind over being right.
7. Personal responsibility -- sort of ties in with No. 6, doesn't it? Even my two-year-old volunteers to carry groceries, feed the cat, or take toys upstairs to their proper places. Part of education is learning to work, to have self-control, to do the hard things even when the easier things are so much, well, easier. My kids are still quite young but every day they must make choices and we clearly spell out the consequences for making the wrong ones. More and more we see smart choices born of discernment and reason. This may prove more important than anything they ever get out of a book.
8. Animal husbandry -- why study zoology or biology and take apart dead animals pickled in formaldehyde when you can have up-close interactions with live ones? We have cats, we're getting rabbits, we regularly observe birds, squirrels, and the evidence of moles. Insects of all kinds, arachnids (mostly spiders), reptiles, amphibians -- we see them, we encourage their presence in our yard, we rescue them from the side of the road (turtles). It's not about anthropomorphizing them, it's about observing them in their natural habitats (cats notwithstanding) and reading and discussing their life cycles, feeding habits, etc. When you homeschool, you get to spend a lot of time watching actual birds, butterflies, and other critters instead of seeing them on videos or the computer. You become well-versed in the place of animals in the natural order of things. Nature itself is real, tangible, and integral to your understanding of many things because you get to spend a lot of time out in it.
9. Variety of sensory experiences -- in addition to No. 8, my children sing and two of them dance and play a musical instrument. They are not always diligent to practice, but they are learning what happens when they don't, and the tide is beginning to turn.
10. Books -- my children who read are able to read and read and read on virtually any topic under the sun. Too often I get ready to present what I think will be new information on some obscure topic, say, architecture of ancient Rome and one of my older children will pipe up with, "Oh, did you know that the baths at Caracalla were made of polished marble with beautiful mosaics around the ceiling and in the floors?" and off we go. They end up telling me rather than me telling them, and it's all because they read it on their own.
11. Toys -- I never knew there were so many ways to use blocks and now I think my boys have found them all. The blocks become food, guns, money, people, swords, roadways, train tracks, books, cordless phones (my favorite), computers -- pretty much any object in the "real" world can be visualized in a set of blocks. Oh, and the time to do that visualizing? It happens because they have unstructured hours. It's called "time to think."
Okay, that's it for now. My five-year-old is begging me to show him graphics from a CD that came with a big book titled, "Cool Stuff Exploded" that shows you the insides of everything from car engines to wind turbines and robots. He wants me to print out some pictures so he can make his own book. :o)
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