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Although I should first point out that the book Spelling Power says it should be spelled "home school". I recently had to respectfully disagree and teach my son to spell it wrong anyway.
I spent my morning fashioning a hellfire and brimstone letter to Dr. Phil about his show on homeschooling on Friday. Pushing "send" has rarely felt so good. And the whole process gave me plenty of time to reflect on our homeschool experience. Like many folks, we started homeschooling for one reason and then kept it up for scores of other reasons. We had already taken my oldest son out of the local public school and placed him in a Montessori school, and it was wonderful, but very pricey and far from home. Then my husband was sent to work in Germany for a month and the rest of us had to stay behind for school. So we thought if we reinvested the tuition we spent on private school in establishing a homeschool, we'd regain 3 hours a day in commute time AND be free to travel with Daddy when he was going somewhere interesting. So I created our very own "prepared environment" and our homeschool experience was launched.
As time marched on, I've changed my methods, added another child to the official classroom, and given birth to still another. (Actually two, but that's another long, sad tale.) And we have traveled extensively since starting our homeschool. But just within the last few months, I've begun to see many unexpected rewards. And just in time, as many of you have heard me express angst at whether my children might be falling behind in some areas. My confidence does flicker occasionally.
First, on a special mini-weekend away, our little family was having lunch out when Oldest Son (OS) recited an extremely long portion of MacBeth. Suffice it to say, we haven't covered Shakespeare or MacBeth. He memorized it on his own without our noticing and you could have knocked me over with a feather. His dad, too. It was priceless, as the people at MasterCard say. Then, there was the day I was leaving the shower and heard him through the walls in the den working out a song from the church hymn book on the piano -- he just got the song in his head and thought he'd learn it. He has since learned about ten hymns, and practices them obsessively. What could warm a mother's heart more?
My question: would he be so filled with this love of learning if he spent his best hours of the day in a room with white, concrete-block walls like the schools of my youth? I think he would come home, as I did, physically exhausted from having to be at the mailbox at 6:20 a.m., carsick from riding the school bus home, emotionally exhausted from the interpersonal social drama that takes place daily at school, and then further invest the last of his energy on whatever busy work was assigned for homework that may or may not be tailored to his individual needs.
Makes me think of what Socrates said: "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Now, what ancient Greek philosophers declared that children must spend the vast majority of the day in a society made up exclusively of other children of the exact same age in order to truly understand the Real World? Or that one must know the multiplication tables prior to leaving fourth grade? Or that... okay, enough preaching to the choir.
And my Middle Son (MS)? MS, now 7, informed me about an hour ago that he had noticed a "very poorly edited commercial" on TV, and proceeded to tell me exactly why...
Perhaps he will, in the future, go to work for the Dr. Phil Show? |
He does not have to be told to study his Latin (BloglessLeigh teaches that class) or his Marine Biology for our support group Enrichment Classes. He studies these things for fun. He is constantly telling me something I did not already know, and certainly didn't teach him myself. In short, he has become a very enthusiastic independent learner. And better yet, his brain is more switched on during the lessons that I do teach him, as it has finally sunk in that we are not engaged in work for the sake of work. Once a lesson is mastered, we move on. [And if not, we will do page 35 of Easy Grammar five times.
That is why God created copy machines...]
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