August 23, 2005

• Why homeschool?
  And why just for 6th-7th-8th grade?

  Millions of reasons. Top ones that come to mind right now (in order they occur to me):
  • Kathryn and I have both taught junior highers, in many settings: Boy Scouts (Nic), private school (Kathryn: 7th grade English), inner city Bible Clubs, World Impact summer and family camps, and Sunday School settings. We were taught age level characteristics and saw them played out, a thousand unique riffs in the same signature. I want to have my hand directly on the tiller of my child's life and heart while he/she navigates these stormy waters. Kathryn wants to be their social engineer, rather than delegating it to the randomness of classroom settings; she wants to actively craft the peer group during these years, encouraging the positive and (mostly through benign neglect) discouraging the negative peer relationships that are so influential during this time.
  • These are the years they start to learn really cool stuff, or re-learn it at a level that is interesting to adults. We want a chance to keep up with our brilliant children, one at a time!
  • Each of our kids are unusual (all kids are unique— ours happen to be really odd in a delightfully serendipitous way). We want to give them individual attention at this strategic juncture, give them a custom-fitted curriculum that can flex daily, weekly, monthly to take advantage of learning opportunities and our kids' own shifting growing passions and interests. We believe many kids lose their natural hunger to learn at this age because they no longer fit in the standard phalanx of the class setting: falling behind in some areas, wanting to surge ahead but disallowed to, in other areas. Homeschooling now, we hope, will preserve that precious hunger to learn, explore, experiment, grow, adventure, seize great handfuls of life and leap giddily about with them.

  Phillip Done says "The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and books and people and numbers and concepts and ideas that they ahve never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. you weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher."

  ...and that's why we have become teachers, private tutors for our own children, one at a time when the molten iron still gleams with inner light, still yields to the gentle touch of the smith's tools. Six other lucky adults have enjoyed Phillip Done's role in Nathaniel's life. Now it is our turn, our privilege, our joy!

  Here are those photos that didn't upload this morning:
  
  (Nathaniel's 6th grade classroom)

  
  (the newest Middle School in Los Angeles)

  
  (Nathaniel hits the books in the morning...)

  
  (...and the laptop in the afternoon. Sweet, a Mac!)

  • 12:29 am
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