What I Love About Homeschooling: The School of Life

You’re walking through the Wal-Mart when it happens. You turn down an aisle and you see kids hanging off a cart. They’re not preschoolers, the oldest could be ten or eleven. It’s not the weekend. Maybe a holiday? But, your own kids or grandkids are in school right now. No holiday or teachers’ in-service.

So what are these kids doing in the middle of the store in the middle of the day in the middle of the week? They homeschool.

Homeschoolers get out. One of the myths about homeschooling is that kids are stuck at home learning in a vacuum where nobody will interact with them. Do some people do this? Yes. Do most people do this? No. Most homeschool families have an itinerant schedule that turns a minivan into a NASCAR contender.

One of the things I love about homeschooling is the places we go. We’ve been schooling for about three years now. In that time we’ve been to:

• the St. Louis Science Center
• the St. Louis Zoo (many times)
• the Cincinnati Museum Center (includes the Natural History, History and Childrens’ Museum)
• the Mt. Vernon Register printing press
• the butterfly round-up at Crab Orchard
• the encampment at Fort Massac
• The Magic House (St. Louis)
• Cahokia Mounds
• Do I need to keep going?
• a pizza parlor
• a dairy farm
• Jefferson County Historical Village
• Franklin County Historical Jail Museum
• Illinois State Police barracks

I’m going to stop. The point is the words ‘field trip’ have lost all meaning. This is just a part of school for us. We don’t just talk about things and look at the pictures. If there’s a place they can go to look and touch, we’ll be scheduling a visit. The local Homeschool Group has been a big help in this. Most places are glad to invite children in and teach them about what they do. A larger group, with parents along to supervise, can make that possible.

The thing is, a lot of these places I had never been to. These kids are going places at six or seven that I’m just now seeing at twenty-eight. You can talk about the world all you want, but there’s no substitute for going out into it.

Our kids often tag along for trips to the grocery store, the hardware store, the bank, and more. A couple of days ago, my youngest son and daughter helped me pick out underwear for their mother on a quick shopping trip. It was only slightly awkward. (look dad this kind says ‘smooth’ and it looks smooth. Yes son those are nice.) This is real life for us, it can be for them too.

Do we do the table work, the worksheets and writing practice? Yes. We are, as a rule, very busy. From the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night, we are doing something. This is what I love about homeschooling. It is so much more than school at home. It is the school of Life.

Using the Princesses.

A little girl is cute. She looks like a living doll romping around in skirts and ponytails. One moment she is mimicking the tenderness of a mother with a baby doll in her arms. The next minute, she is upbraiding the dog for its considerable sins.

My own daughter is all too aware of the power of her cuteness. She has always been able to land herself in the lap or on the hip of a teacher. For a child of one or two years, this isn’t that big of a deal. She passed the four year mark many months ago and she still has the knack of insinuating herself into places no four-year-old should be able to go. This is partly because she is quite petite for her age, but it has more to do with the fact that she sees herself as irresistible. After all, who wouldn’t want to hold her and give her everything she asks for?

From the beginning, we have tried to keep our daughter from seeing herself as only a pretty thing. We have constantly found ways to compliment her that are not based on her appearance, but on her character. Yet, she still cannot pass a mirror without being captivated and if you don’t notice what she is wearing today she will surely bring to your attention.

Like many girls in this modern age of marketing, my daughter is obsessed with the Disney Princesses. She sleeps beneath them at night. She wears their clothes. She listens to their music. She begs to watch their movies. She wants to be like them. In her four-year-old heart, she is one of them. These are her heroes.

We have resisted this as much as we can. My wife wasn’t that kind of girl when she was little. It is hard for us to understand. Yet our own girl is exactly the kind. She loves pink and wants to be pretty all day long. How do you fight something that is so ingrained? She wants to be a princess. Of course she’s obsessed with clothes and expects to be waited on hand and foot. All she needs is a ball gown and a prince and she’ll be set for life. But, is it possible there are other lessons to be gleaned from these iconic Disney debutants?

My wife thought of it. Enlist the princesses. Recruit them to our cause. In one of those teachable moments we read about in books, she began to discuss some of the things she had noticed about the princesses with our daughter. Cinderella was kind to others and a very hard worker (that front hall blings in every scene). Belle is a big reader who makes good use of the library. Snow White was fair and took care of others. Pocahontas respected nature. Ariel saved a drowning man. Mulan was brave. (Yes, I know Mulan is not a princess, but she is female lead in a Disney animated film, therefore she qualifies in my daughter’s eyes.)

The more we talked about it the more we could draw out the virtues we wanted to teach from these heavily marketed hussies. I don’t think there is much we can do to keep my daughter from being vain. Even now, if you ask her about her modesty, she will go through her pockets, look behind her and then throw up her hands and say she hasn’t got any. She doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. Time will heal this, thought, and there really isn’t anything wrong with being pretty, which she is. But, maybe we can teach her to be a whole lot more. After all, she’s not afraid to climb a tree or brawl like an animal with her brothers. I think in her heart she’s really a warrior princess.

Because we are different...

We have a rule at our house. The rule is ‘no guns’. We own no toy guns despite having three boys that are as rowdy and aggressive as ever a man-child was. We have this rule because I don’t want them pretending to kill each other. That’s not a game.

Perhaps I am being too serious about it. Perhaps. It’s my house though. It’s my rule.

My children say, “What about hunting?”

If you believe in reincarnation then believe my children were trial lawyers in a previous life. If you don’t, then understand that my children are like all others in Western Civilization. They like to argue, so they ask about hunting.

“That’s true,” I say. “If you want to pretend to hunt with rifles and shotguns, you could. Do you want to play with toy rifles or toy pistols?”

I explain that pistols are hand guns.

They say, “We want toy pistols.”

I say, “I know.”

Now it’s October and it’s time for another hard decision. Halloween has been heavily marketed, like most holidays, toward kids. Each year my wife and I have grown more uncomfortable with the grisly displays that captivate and creep out our children when we go to the store. Skeletons, zombies and ghosts lurk in every Wal-Mart. Horrific movie posters decorate the windows of video stores.

I know that my kids don’t have to dress up like monsters and murderers. They could wear any number of innocent costumes. It would still be Halloween. It is the season for haunted houses and horror movies. These things belong. We do not.

I don’t know when vampires and witches became the good guys. I do know I have to draw the line somewhere. I’d rather not eat a brownie at all than eat a turd by mistake if there’s a chance of a mix up. I think in this case, there is a chance.

Maybe I’m sheltering them. In fact, I know I am. It’s my job. If I’m wrong, they can have all the Halloween fun they want when they grow up and leave home. They will be little the worse for wear, I think. We can play dress up any day of the week and candy is always in season. I see no reason to observe a holiday that is the traditional night of the deathly, the macabre and the nightmarish. Rather, I will take a pass. Let it be another day on the calendar like Bastille Day or Yom Kippur.

"Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good."
John the Beloved in a letter to his friend, Gaius ~ A.D. 90

Daddy.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a family. Wanting such a thing is like wanting to get married. All you know is what you see other people doing and you want what they have. You don't know how hard it can be even thought they tell you it's hard. You don't understand how great it can be, even though you can see it in their faces.

When we got married, I felt like I was coming alive all over again. It was like something that had been missing so long I'd forgotten about it was suddenly back. When we had our first born, the feeling returned. Something I didn't even realize was gone had returned to me.

Since then we've rounded out the fold to four children, wild and wonderful. Each of them is so different, but so intricately connected to each other. I wonder if I'll ever really know them or if I only just see the things they show me. A few days ago, that first born, the one that changed my life forever, lost a tooth. I came home from work and that tiny bit of sharp enamel was sitting on the desk. This one is the benchmark, the child by whom I mark my years as a father, and now he smiles with a gap in his lower row. I think, my God, it's going too fast. Mommy says it out loud so I don't have to, so I can just be strong and proud of him for being older.

He smiles a lot now, too. There was time when he didn't. Families are organic.They grow and change, usually for the better. It's hard sometimes, changing. Sometimes it's too hard. Maybe we were just being selfish, but I couldn't let them go. I decided to teach them myself rather than let them leave me for a faculty of strangers every day. We learn together, reading books, learning about science and history and everything. We go to the park. We go to the library. We build, laugh, learn and love. And I'm there. I can see it all. If they figure something out for the first time, I don't have to wait for them to tell me or to bring home a test paper a week later. I saw the moment they understood.

I play with them. Not as much as I should, but as much as I can. They delight in play. I am a hero. I have the golden touch of play. Whatever I want to play with them becomes the best game in the world. Frisbee, Catch, Lego, it doesn't matter. If nobody wants to color with the little one, I can. If I do, they all will. Suddenly coloring in a coloring book becomes great entertainment. They all show me what they've colored. I look and laugh and notice all the right details and they swell with pride. They won't remember this as an adult, but they'll remember I always loved them.

I got called a lot of names as a kid. Most slid off without hurting but not all. But now I get called something that is as commanding as it is respectful. It is a higher calling that's common as dirt. From the lips of my children it can be the most endearing term of affection. They call me Daddy.

A dangerous job...

Fatherhood has got to be the most insanely difficult thing a guy can take on. The only thing more difficult, I think, would be motherhood. Since stuggling seems to be entertainment in this country I thought I would start broadcasting my fatherhood triumphs and failures across the internet like a good American. After all, isn't that why Al Gore invented the internet? Or was it military intelligence? Umm. Must do more research.

Anyway, since this is my first post and I'm new, I'll info dump and get it all out of the way. I have four kids and a loverly wife who stays home with them while I trot off to work in the afternoons. We homeschool, so it's a full contact kind of parenting situation. We generate chaos at a rate of about ten incidents a minute, and for the most part that's the way we like it.