I called my buddy Eric in Southern Indiana tonight. I need to do that way more often. He and his wife homeschool their children and have had some pretty amazing results. They do it a little differently then we did, but then everyone does it differently than everyone else. We very much admire the way they are educating their children. One thing we have done is influenced our kids to at least get a Bachelors degree in something hard before they move on to what they love. If what they love is hard, that is great. If not that is great, too because they have already done something hard and they will be better at the soft thing they want to pursue as a career.
On the other hand, we might have gotten it wrong. Maybe the idea that a child/student is following their passion, they will excel more than if they were distracted long enough to get the “hard” degree. I think maybe Eric has done better with his family in they way the help their children follow their passion. We have no (or at least very few) regrets about how we did our homeschool. Our kids are passionate about what they are doing and in a very good place to build a career. Still, there is another path that is exciting and that we admire very much–the one that allows, even encourages the student to follow their passion–would it have helped Mozart to get a math degree before he dived into composition.
Hi Ken…long time. There are as many different ways to homeschool as there are families. We followed the ‘delight directed’, as I call it, path when the kids were younger and then had to somewhat fall away from that when they got into highschool and we started to think about college. I really did enjoy the more relaxed days of homeschooling when the kids were younger because whatever they were interested in is what we studied. It usually revolved around hands-on science. I had no trouble devising math and writing projects and even craft projects around what we were learning. I liked the unit approach, but could never really successfully actually DO someone else’s “pre-packaged” unit study since the stuff I came up with was way more interesting to me and made more sense.
We are in our last year of homeschooling My youngest son’s passion is sports. The only way that I could have him participate in team sports on a daily and regular basis was to put him in public school. He is very happy with the prospect of being able to try out for Football and baseball and maybe run track or water polo. He is currently practicing with the JV football team. I will keep you updated on his progress.
Boy! I can tell I wrote that post after pulling almost an all-nighter! Horrible subject verb agreement and grammar! I am purging all homeschool stuff to give away and hand over to the good people at the Goodwill. Attempting to beat the 108 degree weather, and reclaim my garage!
Hey Ruthie, Thanks for the great comment. I think we are on the same page. Every kid and parent has different capabilities and interests. We (including the kids) really loved the way we did the whole program, especially looking backwards, but the reality is that we were making it up as we went along and could have done better if we had had more experience before we started. Even then, though, the energy level we maintained might have been harder to maintain for 2-3 more kids.
Hang in there on the weather! We are hot here, too, but not 108!