Education Meets Real Life

Posted by Deb | 0 comments

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about my educational philosophy. I was homeschooled myself, and am very familiar with the workbook scenario. I didn’t particularly love workbooks when I was in school, and when my husband and I first started homeschooling our kids, we knew we’d want to add in lots of field trips, projects, and experiments.

But that was easier said than done. Not only had I taken on the burden of my children’s education; I (like every other homeschooling mama) was trying to stay on top of all my regular mom/wife duties, and make sure my youngest child didn’t get lost in the shuffle. There wasn’t a lot of time left over for the fun stuff. There were plenty of days when we didn’t even get through the pages I had planned, and I fretted that I wasn’t doing a good enough job.

One day, when I was beating myself up because my kids didn’t speak four languages or have early admittance to Harvard, I realized that my daughter was playing with a Leapfrog toy and my son was drawing the letters of the alphabet on construction paper and cutting them out.

Holy cow! They were doing something educational of their own free will!

I started to keep a list of the things they did during their free time. It was a huge eye-opener. They played with magnetic letters on a whiteboard, put together puzzles, built with Wedge-Its and Lego’s, drew pictures of farm animals, asked to watch the Science Channel…after a few days, I didn’t even bother to write down what they were doing because I started to see value in everything.

It was the beginning of a shift within me. I realized that just like everything else they had learned so far – walking, talking, eating, playing – they were doing things with little more than some encouragement from me. When I tuned into what they did when they were “playing,” I realized they were really practicing the things they had been introduced to in school. I started to think that new knowledge needed some time to soak in, and that unscheduled afternoons were beneficial, not merely a sign of my laziness.

I had a second epiphany a few weeks ago when my son was struggling with skip counting by fives. The fives about did me in, I’ll tell you. Every day he insisted he hated math, and every day ended in tears and frustration and him becoming more convinced that he would never be able to do it. One day I was bordering on giving up when I thought – yes, that’s exactly what I should do. He won’t go off to college not knowing how to tell time, but he might just convince himself he is awful at math and that could have lifelong ramifications. So I backed off. We did a couple of problems a day, but I helped with the counting and we stopped the minute he said he’d had enough. After a few weeks, he came to me asking to do math. He started looking forward to the next chapter. AND he suddenly skip-counted by fives with very little trouble.

Could it be that he learned MORE when I taught LESS?

I have been rethinking my role in our homeschooling journey. Now I see myself as part facilitator, part teacher – I want to provide them with a banquet of choices and give them the freedom to choose what they wish. I don’t see why history, science, geography, literature, languages, art, music, sports, and so many other things can’t be largely interest-led. What is the point of cramming dinosaurs down their brains if all they care about is volcanoes? Who says state history has to be taught in a certain grade and not next summer on a road trip?

I am not saying I am going to abandon any sense of order – I do have a mental list of the things I think they should know. But I think that many of those subjects will come up naturally and I want to be able to capitalize on their interest in the moment, before they are onto the next thing. Surely I can give them the power to study what they are interested in, within guidelines that I set, without squashing their desire under a pile of worksheets?

Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time…that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or geology or astronomy. The question is not, how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education, but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?

Charlotte Mason

Deb is a knitting, cooking, home schooling mom. Who is way cooler than that sounds. Really. She blogs about all sorts of random and sometimes even mildly interesting things at Not Inadequate.