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.

Homeschool and the Education Cop

We got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago about truancy officers turning up at the homes of local homeschool families. In the state of Illinois, homeschools are essentially private schools. They have the all the same rights and privileges of any other educational institution. A truancy officer inquiring of a homeschool family is akin to a highway patrolman pulling over motorists for no real reason.

So, with this in mind I decided to compile a short list of suggestions in case the “education cop” comes knocking on your door.

1. Fight fire with fire.
   

   Truancy officers are primarily a product and functionary of bureaucracy. Take the officer’s name, title, agency, contact information, shoe size, favorite color, and American Idol pick. Promise to pass this information to the superintendent just as soon as he gets back and tell the officer to expect a call in two to five business days.

2. Use a prearranged signal to tip the children off.
   

   Approximately forty-five seconds after answering the door, a child should shriek like a burning cat. Apologize and explain you’ve been studying the Spanish Inquisition and you really need to go take care of that. (Don’t forget to lock the door. This sends the correct message that you don’t need any help.)

3. Dig a Burmese tiger pit. Don’t forget to warn the mailman.
   
4. Try to convert them.
   

   It is very difficult to talk about why the kids aren’t enrolled in school when someone is adamantly wielding the Sword of the Spirit to the edification of your everlasting soul. Use this to your advantage. If you are not Christian, that’s okay, borrow a bible from a Christian friend or order one from Amazon.

5. Grill the officer on state and capital names, the American presidents, English grammar, spelling, multiplication tables, etc. For greatest effect keep score and give prizes to the child (or officer) who wins.
   
6. Tell them you are in the middle of a class, but your office hours are from four to five, Monday through Friday.
   
7. Duct tape the officer to the wall while the kids explain the Law of Gravity and other applicable principles.
   
8. Cast the officer as Polonius in the HS Group production of Hamlet.
   
9. Ask if the kids may interview them for a report on Government in Action (subtitled Freedom: What makes America great.
   
10.  Don’t worry about it because you weren’t home when the officer came by. You were at the lumber yard buying project supplies,
    at the newspaper office, dairy farm, history museum, wildlife refuge center, or police station on a field trip,
    at music lessons, soccer practice, book club, co-op classes, 4-H, or just taking a nice walk in the park because you only need one-hundred eighty days of school a year and you schooled through the summer so you could enjoy  a really beautiful day when one came along.

Please add your suggestion to the list.

Rhombus Boy vs. The Irregular Polygon

I have to laugh sometimes when people ask the question. It's almost always in the midst of some social setting that would be perfectly normal for adults, although there are places people aren't used to seeing kids. But, as I mentioned before, I don't really believe in children being held back from learning the ins and outs of the adult world. I don't mean letting kids be exposed to the seedy, disgusting parts of being an adult. I don't really want to be exposed to that.


What I mean is, I think it does a child good to see what he will be doing when he grows up. Weekly shopping, banking, trips to the hardware store, you name it. The whole mundane adult world should be a familiar routine to the growing child. Why let it be a mystery?


Anyway, none of that is really the point. What the comic strip points out is that most of the people we meet have one question on their mind when they find out we homeschool. What about socialization? Presumably what they mean is, will Little Bernard make any friends shut up in the house all day? Some of the places this question is asked are: the Walmart, the library, museums, the laundromat, church, at yard sales, at family reunions or holiday gatherings. Most people that do school at home have a hard time actually staying home. During the school year we are constantly going from one project or activity to another and attending to real life in between. During the summer, when we have no scheduled classes, we are twice as busy. Why? Because for us homeschool is lifeschool.


Ask any tradesman. If you want to learn how to do something, classroom learning won't hurt, but it doesn't even begin to cover it. It's in the actual doing that real learning begins. It's no different for children. If you show them a poster of a butterfly's life-cycle, they will admire the pretty pictures. If you show them a butterfly coming out of it's chrysalis, they will wonder at it and will forever after know where butterflies come from. In the mean time, they will also know where money comes from (Dad's job), food comes from (the grocery store), clean clothes come from (laundry), clean dishes, fixed toys, newspapers, books, and so on. Everything they see every day is real. It is not just a safe, self-contained example, but real life.


The prevailing theory seems to be that children in a tradition school environment will forge long-lasting friendships that will continue and mature as the child grows into an adult. The fear is that homeschooled children will somehow be excluded from that. The truth is, only some of those school kids will have those kinds of friends. Most families move at least once during their children's education. Also, kids in school are under constant pressure to perform both from teachers and peers. This makes it a cut-throat kind of experience for many kids that impedes those friendships. Even so, it's true that most kids do have some friends after school and some of those friendships last.


Now, homeschool kids are usually very close to their siblings and families in general. Yes, that's a little weird, but is it really a bad thing for bothers and sisters to be tight? In addition to that, because of co-op groups and the like, most homeschoolers make friends across age groups as opposed to only being friends with kids their own age. I've seen my own kids playing with 'cool' teenagers and 'baby' three and four-year-olds all in the same day. And since a person wouldn't even consider homeschool if they weren't a get-involved type, these kids have the irreplaceable advantage of parents who are active and interested in their education and their life.


Parents can provide all these benefits and advantages within a traditional education, but will they be there the moment their six-year-old regales a grandmotherly stranger in the laundromat with the Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss. At least from where I'm sitting, the kids aren't having any trouble functioning in society. For the record, different isn't always bad. Isn't that what they tried to teach us in school?

Will work for Bubble-Yum...

We started a vegetable garden this week. On the surface, this seemed like a brilliant idea. Homeschool family and all, growing vegetables all summer is a great lesson on where food comes from, how to take care of a garden, etc. Besides, kids love to dig, at least, my kids do, and there's lots of digging in gardens.

Except, that kids are actually really hard workers, surprising but true, and if you give them a job they enjoy, they will do it day and night forvever and ever amen. My backyard is starting to look like a shelled out battlefield and mom and I have to be vigilant about keeping the digging away from the already planted parts of the garden.

But, to harness that drive, that power...who knows what you could accomplish. The trick is making it fun. For instance, our kids wanted to play with their toy shovels, so mom set them in garden beds and in no time they had the soil tilled up. I think I'll invent a game where ninjas must wash and wax the whole car to defeat evil. Hmm. Needs work.

Anyway, the point is, that kid's have limitless energy for playing, and they don't mind pushing themselves. They're natural workers, just like they're natural learners and natural problem-solvers. You don't have to ask them to do it, you just show them how. Who knows what a kid can accomplish if he's given a little encouragement and the right tools? Oh, and the right currency. For some reason, a pack of gum is like gold bullion in the kid economy. So turn 'em loose on something and see what they can do.