A Time for Reflection

I think, when you love something, and feel passionate about it, it is easy to succeed at it. Regular readers know my passions are children, families and education. They all came together in homeschooling - you could consider it an intense lab, where I got to try out all the things I believed about how children learned. An intense lab with high stakes.

I must also point out that it was a family effort. It seems as though I get all the credit - I was the primary source of education - yet I couldn't have done it without Eric. I was the one having all the fun, he was the one who had to go to work every day. He provided financial support so I could work part-time and homeschool full-time. He was my back up on all things educational - we were a nice compliment for each other. My spatial abilities and hard-science knowledge are weak - Eric's are strong. Between us we had strengths in all the major academic areas. Also, Web and Riley are the ones who did the work and they are the ones who put in the effort to achieve their college goals, and they deserve huge applause for setting and reaching those goals.

Getting back to Eric, the most important thing he did was to give me his trust. He put his faith in my abilities to educate our children, he trusted me to create an environment and a curriculum that would achieve all the goals we had for our boys. He was my greatest cheerleader. At the same time, he was an active participant in teaching. In our house every moment was a teaching moment. Everything we did had education woven in to it. It might be values based, or academic, or skills based. It might involve working with individuals or a group. It might be about relationships, or ownership, or ethics. Really, it was all about life. Our goals for the boys were simple: to be fully themselves, to love to learn, to know how to self-educate, and to be life-long learners.

I believe that children learn best through experiences. When they are young, those experiences are play. When they are older, those experiences range all over the map. I never taught a lesson in the traditional sense. Instead, I played with them when they were young, providing experiences that were rich with learning. I provided hours of free play where their imaginations ran wild. When they were older, I wrote up a daily assignment sheet and left it on the kitchen counter. There were only two rules - one was that their assignments had to be done by 5:00 pm. How they chose to do them, when and where they chose to do them, was up to each individual. Rule two was that the TV could not be turned on until they were done. (By the way, we didn't have video games, so that was never an issue). I was a facilitator - following where they led, helping if they needed it, asking the questions to make them think.

It wasn't all idyllic and wonderful. Let's get real - two boys, home together all day? They argued and fought, but at the same time were best friends. They argued with me, they whined about their school work (and lack of video games). In short we were just like every other family in the world. We spent lots of time hanging out with other homeschooling families, at 4H events, at the Y in homeschool PE, and with each other. Sometimes it was perfect, sometimes it wasn't. In the end though, I feel very content about the childhood Web and Riley had, about the time I had with them, about the gift Eric gave me when he gave me his trust.

A long time ago, we made a decision to step off the path and create our own way. It was a scary decision, one that we took a lot of heat over. Today I'm standing at the end of the new path, and I know that we made the right decision for our family. Life has thrown a few surprises at us along the way, but in the end, we are standing together, strong, confident and happy.