Intentionally learning
About the time I was ready to throw in the towel on duplicating public school at home, I got sick. Really sick, barfing multiple times every day for months, sick. It was pregnancy. No way was I going to take people away to school when I felt like throwing up. So I threw out the lesson plans (not literally; I found them in a box years later after our next two moves).
We stopped doing formal school except for the really important things: food, sleep, exercise, cleaning, bedtime stories and prayer, devotional. Exercise was: go outside and run around and make as much noise as you want—so later when baby is napping you can be quiet. Household cleaning was only enough to keep body and soul together: bathrooms/diapers, dishes, laundry. We kept lots and lots of children’s books, purchased at yardsales; each child picked one at bedtime and we read until parents couldn’t keep their eyes open. Devotional was every morning: a song, a prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and a memory verse.
The baby came, I felt better, the baby was sick. For another year we dealt with constant illness, croup twice, ear infections, head lice from neighbor children. I recovered and the baby recovered enough for me to think about school—and we decided to move. We’d lived there six years and had a LOT of stuff, all the usual childhood and adult paraphernalia, plus educational books and papers and craft supplies. I kept a daily schedule, more or less, but schoolwork was packing, going through stuff and getting rid of it. I taught my children how to do dishes and laundry and watch their younger siblings while I went through boxes. We got rid of the bulk of our belongings, but not the books.
We moved to Laramie, Wyoming, with just our food storage and my books (plus children, clothes, a few toys, a set of encyclopedias, a desktop computer—and Lego bricks). We didn’t unpack very much, because we didn’t plan to stay there. It was remarkably freeing to have so little stuff. We had paper and pencils; I covered one wall with butcher paper and we made a chart of our ancestry, going back in one of our lines to 1640 AD!
It was awesome, and temporary. After six months we moved to Emblem, Wyoming. My husband deployed to Iraq for fifteen months while I went through another pregnancy and birth. School during those fifteen months depended very much on how I was feeling that day. We read books from the library and drew a lot; the children explored the orchard and the irrigation ditch. We went to youth activities at the church every Wednesday afternoon.
I had a lot less social pressure; we had no near neighbors and no one expected me to do everything. We took time to just be. I tried to keep the children on a good sleep schedule, but except for church, we didn’t have to be anywhere at a particular time. Doctor’s appointments and shopping were 45 minutes away, so I planned to be gone all day. We ate graham crackers on the way or ate at Walmart; we stopped at a park or a creek and they played while I nursed the baby.
We installed shelves all over one room and unpacked almost all of my books. I read and read and read; my children read and read. Internet articles, movies on DVD, and computer games became a large part of our learning. But the biggest change was: I stopped using textbooks and workbooks. Instead we read from “real” books: DK Eyewitness books with bright photography and short paragraphs, old tomes from the county library which I read aloud, lots of young adult books, Encyclopedia Brown, autobiographies, lists of children’s and young adult classics. We discussed everything, in groups, in pairs, one-on-one, all the time. We found fascinating information everywhere.
School was still something I had to consciously decide to start every day, but it was not longer teeth-pulling hard. We learned and learned and learned. We made glorious messes. In the frozen winter we played dodgeball in the living room with rolled up socks. We played music and danced. We played board games. We built with Legos. We played Civilization II, then III, then Civ IV. We played Age of Empires 1 and 2 with their initial expansions. We watched all five of the existing Star Wars movies and read Revenge of the Sith aloud before seeing the movie. We discussed political structures and the best forms of government, military units in detail, hawks, Pokemon, strategy, logic, how to manage money.
The main things we actually did were physical: eat, sleep, prep food, clean up food, wash things, wash people, wash the floor. Nap. Put things away. Get things out. Read, read, read, listen, talk about, draw, discuss endlessly. Learn to get along with people.
We learned how to say please and thank you; how to laugh with someone, not at them; how to work together to do something and how to persuade rather than force them. I tried really hard to model not getting angry unnecessarily, and going with the flow. I learned to not lose my temper when someone spilled something but just to expect that these things happen and help them clean it up. It’s still their job to clean up after themselves, but we can and should help.
I read up on educational theories; my children kept learning. I fed them and put them to bed; my children kept learning. I read aloud to them and listened while they told me all their thoughts; my children kept learning. What I finally settled on was a variation of Thomas Jefferson Education, aimed at growing leaders, critical thinkers, compassionate, helpful people. Throughout the process, nothing I did could stop them from learning something. The only really damaging thing was when I got angry or dismissed their learning as unimportant or wrong. When you don’t know anything, like a child, everything is interesting and new. The best aim of education is to keep that wonder and enthusiasm for learning.
Classroom education, I found, put wonder in chains, tied enthusiasm to a chair and forcefed it. Education can still happen in small boxes, in short snippets of time cut apart by bells and nagging, but it’s not the same.
