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.