Posted in Homeschooling

Way back in 1985, my family took a two week trip to New England.  Two of my sisters were on the trip, and they spent the entire time pretending not to know my father (they were 20 and 16, and should have been capable of behaving better).  My mother and my father were also not really speaking to each other, and for some uncomfortable reason the trip coincided with their 25th wedding anniversary, a day neither of them really wanted to remember, let alone celebrate in any way.  And I was stuck riding in a car and living in hotel rooms with everyone for two very long weeks.  This may be the only time in my life that I wore sunglasses to hide my eyes, because normally I hate them, and I spent most of my time making up a romantic fantasy that involved me and a member of Duran Duran (give me a break, it was 1985, and I'd never heard of Enrique yet! He was only 10 or so then anyway).

But I had a strategy to convince my father that I was having a good time.  Everywhere we went, I would find one interesting thing and be sure to point it out to him.  I distinctly recall being in the stupid yacht museum in Mystic, Connecticut, and seeing a model of a yacht with tiny little lifeboats, so I showed them to my dad.

Why am I telling you this story?  Well, I was thinking about it yesterday at my end-of-the-year faculty meeting.  We were discussing getting the students to follow their interests and to realize that they can make careers out of them.  And while that is an admirable goal, and one many homeschoolers agree with, I still feel that it falls slightly short of what I would like for my children.

At my son's graduation a week or so ago, I said, "To me, homeschooling isn’t just about instilling knowledge in the child, it’s about sharing the world as a fascinating and exciting place."  And I realized yesterday that one of the lessons I would like my children to learn is that everything can be interesting!  Even things you think are boring.  Even things you have no desire to know about.  Even things you don't care about.  They are all interesting in their own right.  Not just to other people, but also to you.  You can find the one little part that is like the puzzle piece you were missing in your understanding of the world, and that expands your thoughts and your horizons.

And this essentially is the reason that I could never really unschool.  As a Spanish teacher this year, I had to coordinate my classes with several interdisciplinary units the whole school was doing.  When I was doing research for one of the units, I learned why it's always windy at the beach, and thought that was so cool I made everyone in my vicinity hear the reason.  And I have now become interested in wind power and have even thought of getting a wind turbine (either a model or a real one).  Six months ago I didn't even know the word "turbine"!  I never would have sat down one day and said to myself, "Jeanne, I really think you need to research wind!"

So, maybe that vacation back in 1985 really did help me out.  My other strategy from that trip paid off too: in order to get some alone time, I volunteered to sleep on the cot every night.  And then when we ended our trip in Boston and had two hotel rooms because my aunt had joined us, my mom declared that I would get a double bed all to myself since I had so generously taken the cot the whole trip!