As you might have noticed, I have been struggling for awhile trying to find a project that is separate from my day job, but that is interesting and somehow might make a contribution to something bigger than myself. I have my GaugeCam project which meets all that criteria, but is really just more of the same kind of thing as my day job. For a long time now, my son Christian has been encouraging me to write a book about our experience in trying to educate our kids. I never thought I had much to say about how other people should educate their children because we barely knew what to do with our own. At the same time, we absolutely loved the whole process, had a modicum of success.
I have thought seriously about the idea of writing a book quite a bit over the last several weeks. I have decided to put together an outline of what I might write, then determine whether I think someone might want to read that. If I think it might be interesting to other people, I will take the next step. I always thought I would write something about our homeschool, but I do not think that will be the main focus of this effort. Our educational path was more about getting our kids educated at as high a level as possible in accordance with our worldview. It was less about which particular homeschool or traditional school methodology we used. So I believe this book would be a narrative more than a how-to.
Of course there will be big chunks about why we chose what we chose in terms of learning materials and methodology. Sonlight, The Well Trained Mind, Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad, Singapore Math, and a lot of the materials we chose would rightly have to be a part of the narrative because of their great value in helping us to figure all of this stuff out and make the whole educational task tractable. Still, this book would be a narrative about the particular path taken by a particular family. We did what we did based on what our kids needed, the best knowledge we had at the time, time constraints due to work, how much money was available, etc., etc.
We felt like our educational path was successful for us. We have no illusions that our children’s abilities and/or intelligence were greater than those of their peers. The were pretty good at some stuff, but very average at other stuff. Still we experienced some success in our educational path to the point that Christian was able to skip high school to earn a BS degree in Applied Math at age 18 while Kelly skipped three years of high school to earn a BS degree in Statistics at age 20. Both of them got funded PhD’s offers at tier one Universities which they accepted and will start this fall.
I have kept a record of our efforts on this blog for over ten years now. The idea is to turn the blog into a narrative and fill in the many, many cracks where there is missing information to determine whether I might have a story that is interesting enough that someone might want to read it and maybe even use some of our ideas.
Betty Blonde #122 – 01/02/2009
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Sounds like a very cool idea! I’m not convinced very many people would read it, but those that do would be encouraged and you’d have a very nice piece of recorded history of success in education and your family’s experience. And since you’ve been interested in doing it anyway, I say, “Go for it!”
~Luke
I think you should do it, Ken. I have been doing a little writing for a few years and will eventually publish an E-book. One of the reasons I am doing it is for future generations, perhaps to give a little glimpse into our lives now to try to be a little more than just a name on the family tree.
Luke, I think you are right that probably not very many people would read the book, but that would be very much beside the point. I think Gene has it exactly right. The point of such a narrative is family history and if someone else wants to read it, so much the better. That being said, there might be a small attraction to a certain class of parents interested in both a high level of education and the passing on of a worldview to their children, whether they are homeschoolers or traditional schools. The idea would probably be to self publish about a dozen copies of the book with a printing service and make it available as an E-book here for anyone who was interested.
I think he only attraction for people who do not know us would be to have an additional perspective on how to homeschool with notes on what we thought we did right and what we might have improved in our homeschool efforts along with stuff we really liked about the different programs we used (e.g. About 80% of the Sonlight literature) and stuff we thought was done badly (e.g. The Hakim history books provided by Sonlight).
Many people who do homeschool well (not saying we did) seem to find ways to get around the available homeschool systems to give their kids an education that works well according to their worldview while others stick to the plan so closely their kids education ends up being similar to that of a government school. We really worked at fitting into the first category with some successes and many failures.