Thursday, July 15, 2010
"Love in a Time of Homeschooling"
I just read a new book - Love in the Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie. A super easy (like 3 hour) read, and pretty cute. The author decided her daughter needed a sabbatical from school and homeschooled her for 5th grade. I appreciated mom's description of real life homeschooling - it's not always a June Cleaver world. I also thought it was cool that most of the books that inspired the author to homeschool like The Well-Trained Mind, and Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense were my inspirations as well. Since the Brodie's plan was to homeschool for just a year though, they created an insane plan to make sure they covered everything the public school was covering. This left little time for fun and flexibility, and I found that pretty sad. The main thing I am going to work on for next year, in fact, is more FUN! I did not sign up to be a Nazi homeschool mom, and I don't want to have to micromanage the kids' work. Now if they would just get their stuff done...
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I read that book too at the beginning of the summer (did I already tell you that?).
ReplyDeleteI liked it, and I didn't. I think what I liked was the book, and what I didn't like as much was the mom. Maybe it was just sour grapes bc she published this nice book that I coulda/woulda/shoulda written myself (same for you!!), but I agree with you that her mimic-the-public-school-curriculum approach was, at best, sub-optimal!
Actually this very issue is something that always vexed me as a homeschooler. I totally agree with your post--in my heart I wanted to be an unschooler, and we could start that right after we finished all our math, language arts, Catholic stuff, geography, art appreciation, etc. etc.!!!
I guess probably every thinking homeschooling mom struggles w/this, and somewhere in the middle, it all works out to be a good combination for the students.
Now that my kids are back in school, I KNOW they're getting plenty of the nuts and bolts stuff, which in some of their cases is a very good thing. With five students, it seemed to me that a little bit of unschooling led to far too great of a chance that someone would fall through the cracks on some aspect of the core curriculum (e.g., KLD's spelling still leaves something to be desired!). And I'll never be the kind of person who can just go for a nature hike all day and skip the fractions and decimals--at least not every day! What I wanted, of course, was to spend all our time doing fun field trips and self-actualizing, and then the kids just to magically absorb all their core curriculum stuff. Let me know if you figure out how to achieve that! :) (Actually...it seems to me that you're probably getting pretty close to that magical balance already!!)
Have a good day! :)
You're right - it is hard to balance fun AND the curriculum. I think partly because we are so programmed into believing the current paradigm. Go to school, get good grades, do AP classes, tons of sports, take the SAT, get into college, get a job... Where's the fun? That's what I hope to achieve more of this year. Who cares if the kids go off to college at age 18? That's too early to join the rat race anyway.
ReplyDeleteSo, this year - self-actualizing! (I hope...)