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Features
Not every day finds my children following in the footsteps of Archimedes or Howard Zinn. Some days it’s Marie Curie or Paul Gauguin or Rachel Carson or Frederick Douglass. Most times, they follow their own paths. We might get together with other homeschoolers, whether for fun or an educational activity, whom we network with through a local homeschooling support group. We might, and often do, spend time at the library. My children might be enrolled in a class, whether dance or music lessons or Spanish. We might read together or apart, or write articles for our homeschooling group’s newspaper. In warmer months we’re outside gardening and playing, and in colder months we’re outside playing and thinking about gardening. Whenever we’re outside there’s usually a biology lesson underfoot, and math is used more often than you might think, as are reading and writing. History is the house and neighborhood we live in. (My son noted on the map that our town is named after one in England, and through our civic association he found out why.) Our days are rarely dull, and never seem without something to do, even if it’s just home economics—also known as doing the laundry and dishes. We don’t follow the usual school model of a rigidly set schedule. Without the need to organize and manage a large group of 20 or 30 pupils—lining up for events, distributing work, playing UN peacekeeper—our time can be apportioned freely. We may feel compelled to cover a topic that our children aren’t otherwise getting to, but it can likely be done in minutes, not weeks. Daniel Greenberg of the Sudbury Valley School, for example, was able to teach six years’ worth of math to a dozen students, 9- to 12-years-old, in 20 weeks, with one hour per week of class time. I can attest from my own experience that this sort of learning is not limited to math. When I was young, I was suspended from high school for several months and required to continue my studies independently from home. I found I was able to complete all my work for a full class load in less than two hours a day. (I did have to repeat a semester of physical education.) This Article is also available in our Homeschooling Toolkit along with our other 4 homeschooling reprints.
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