We’ve been homeschooling for a couple of weeks now, and we’re still finding our way. Most of our time has been spent trying to decompress from school and homework stress, the rest of the time we’ve been exploring the possibilities.
We’re playing around with some cool math history and literature, spending time studying nature, visiting ecosystems and drawing a lot of skulls. Carter’s reading Judy Blume, comics and random science and history books I’ve left strewn about.
I’m doing lots of thinking about success, parenting and schooling, and how they all fit together. I get trapped in a desire to prove we’ve had an “educational” day. We had an engaging discussion about our Constitution, with Carter reading a “minibook” about it along with a couple books about the Founding Fathers, and instead of celebrating that connection, I pulled out a worksheet with Constitution questions. Ack. Entrenched habits are hard to even notice, much less break.
20 years from now, will a worksheet matter? Is answering fill-in-the-blank sentences going to develop essential skills, or simply assuage my own parental anxieties? What are my long-term goals as a parent and a teacher?
I want to nurture his curiosity, optimism and faith. Optimism so he believes he can find the answers, even if they require patience, observation, flopping and failing; curiosity so he asks the questions in the first place; and faith so he may find equilibrium in the face of the unanswerable.
In the spirit of long-term learning, we have started a list of questions. When Carter ponders the awesome, unusual, and sometimes really strange, I jot it down. Sometimes we return to them for further analysis. Sometimes we don’t. Perhaps those are questions we’ll get to pursue later.
Here are a few of my favorites so far:
Could you make a motorcycle go fast enough to ride on the surface tension of water? Why doesn’t Jupiter draw other planets into its orbit? Why isn’t a Daddy Long Legs a spider? What would happen if we won the war in Iraq? What would happen if a two-headed snake mated with itself? Could you have a head that is a whole lot bigger than the skull underneath it?
Here’s to learning: may we all have the courage to keep asking questions.
4 replies on “Questions”
Apropos to Carter’s first question, he might like figuring out – vicariously please – how snowmobile skimming works – or perhaps you don’t want him getting any ideas..
(it just so happens that this video is shot in my home town in Easton Massachusetts, where people repeatedly create own personal existential moments at the expense of safety, for some reason)
While we don’t have the insurance to cover this as a new hobby for him, Carter and his brother are currently asking for some high-concept tech from Santa this year. Archie wants a teleportation device, inspired by Carter’s wish for some robotic dimension manipulator. Perhaps snowmobiles are the least of our worries.
At least you aren’t having to flash a peace sign and say “Peace and Quiet” or ask for active listeners! If only the kids I subbed for today could have asked even one of those questions…. it would have been a better day!
[…] Regulations aside, I still want to know what we’ve done- Carter has led us on amazing learning journeys- I want to build on them, to remember that Carter wants to find out more about what alchemists were thinking, what type of chemistry Merlin might have used and a myriad of other questions. […]