SCHOOL AT HOME.
Even before we had children, Jesse and I discussed schooling. A lot. We went back and forth, between decrying the evils of public schools to the merits of diversity in public education and the fact that both of us (public school kids) turned out just fine! We still have mixed feelings - for example, there are many things wrong with our education system, but if we opt out of the system entirely how will it ever get better? And isn’t it just out of my place of privilege that I can choose an option other than public school - is my child better than other children who don’t have the choice? BUT for now, since Further is only 3 and he is already home with us all day, we are trying out a very loose homeschooling curriculum.My main goals for the year are to establish a rhythm of school and work within our days, to introduce Further to structured learning, and to basically just see if this is something that is going to fit for our family and for Further and my relationship. That’s it! No real pressure on him or me.So far, our days have ended up being mostly play, outside time, reading, art, and anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour of actual, structured “school.” It is pretty free and relaxed - I have been trying to take cues from what Further is interested in, what his body language tells me (as in: sitting down for a craft vs. turning him loose outside to get the crazies out), and involve him in practical life skills tasks (as in: just doing our normal life stuff like chores, farm work, cleaning, cooking). That being said, I have very much appreciated having a curriculum to guide my days and give me structure: we are using The Peaceful Preschool along with resources from Simply Learning. I’m stretching the “one letter a week” units to two weeks per letter, so that I have lots of flexibility for those “nope not happening” sort of days.Essentially, I have no idea what I am doing. Within just these first two weeks I have had days of feeling like “This is amazing and I am a rockstar and Further is a genius and the online homeschooling community is so inspiring and helpful” to “I am failing and we are accomplishing nothing and why can’t Further count correctly and the online homeschooling community is a horrible, dark place of shame and guilt.” FUN! I would love to know your thoughts! Are you homeschooling? Public school? Private? I obviously have no judgement on choices either way - we hope Further likes it but also want to respect his choice if he someday wants to go to school. I hope to hear from some of you!- Hannah.
TOWARDS A FUTURE.
"My second grader has decided on a career in electrical engineering. He is leaning towards MIT, but I do not find them helpful and would prefer a Southern culture. Would you please tell me how to prepare him for admissions?"The amazing above quote comes from an episode of This American Life called "How I Got into College" where they talk to an Admissions Director at Georgia Tech who lets them read real letters from parents. And as you can tell, they're exceptional.However, I get it. And so do they. We all do. We all want the best for our children and as the world grows increasingly more competitive we feel pressured to get our children started on the path to success as early as possible. (It is no mistake that I am thinking about this with a 2 week old baby in the other room.)But for what kind of future do we need to be preparing them? Will their future be much like today, only with robots and autonomous cars, drones and Martian colonies? Or will it be a future with an even more cavernous gap between the rich and poor, month-long floods in coastal cities, widespread oil, water and food shortages worldwide or [insert any other depressing potentiality scientists are predicting by the year 2050]? Maybe it will be neither. But it could also be both. No matter the case, the future looks much different for our children than it did for us. And we need to at least consider (while we're, ahem, preparing our second graders for college admissions) that the latter is a possibility, too––that they might need a different set of skills to get along in their world than we did in ours.So for us we hope to prepare Further for both possibilities. And our plan, since no one has opened the Bugtussle Waldorf school yet, is to educate him on the farm. Here, his education can be both practical and prepatory. We can teach him math through baking and carpentry. We can teach him biology in the garden and forest, astronomy staring at our amazing view of the stars. English and history will come from the books we read together on rainy days, while science and chemistry will be everywhere. But he will also learn to hunt and forage and take care of animals and grow food which isn't really most public schools' thing. Hopefully these skills won't ever be a necessity, but at least they will be available for his use. By the time he's old enough, our only hope is that he will be prepared to thrive in whatever kind of future he finds himself in. Whether that's a world of academia, or a simple life back here on the farm, he'll have the luxury of being able to decide for himself. At least, that's the goal.-Jesse