by Melissa Alderman
If you wish to educate the
student by science [or in any subject], love your science and know it, and the
students will love both you and the science, and you will educate them. -Leo
Tolstoy
We get this question a lot, "Why do you homeschool your
kids?" The answer is not in theories of public and non-public education,
nor is it in religious protection or in pursuit of educating a super-brain such
that the world has never known. Our
answer is that our kids have us, their parents, and a wealth of friends and
neighbors that are highly qualified to teach what they are passionate about.
And as Tolstoy says, that passion is contagious, and they can't help but
be influenced and taught.
Three years ago we started a homeschool co-op. A
few families from the neighborhood and our church decided to meet once a week
to hold classes. Some parents would teach and others would help watch
kids that were not old enough to be in class. We started with History,
Art, and Science. Our friend around the corner, a school teacher turned stay
at home mom, taught our history lessons just because she loves teaching and
jumped at the opportunity, even though she didn't have a kid old enough to be
in the class. I taught art because I couldn't imagine teaching anything
else at the time, and my neighbor taught science, an obvious choice since she
holds a degree in physics. That year we met every week for twenty
four weeks with breaks in between. In the history class, each kid made a
mummy entombed in its own sarcophagus. Our oldest daughter went so far as
to bury hers in the back yard. The students entered their Jackson Pollock
lesson pieces in the kids’ art exhibition at the Caldwell County Arts Council.
In the biology class, they studied metamorphosis by observing and
recording caterpillars transforming into butterflies.
Since then we have kept up the co-op, sometimes formal,
sometimes not, sometimes the same teachers and subjects and sometimes different
ones. But we see a lot of value in continuing to do it no matter
what the format because we love it, the kids love it and they learn a great
deal. We have found that a large part of our homeschool experience is
with others.
We teach others, and they teach us. We teach what we
are passionate about, and we learn from others what they are passionate about.
So far, it has worked.
It has been incredible to see what this group of people can
accomplish together. Classes, book clubs and field trips aside, we've
seen the kids come up with ways to raise money to buy books for kids that don't
have books. That was last year's project and they raised around
$200. That's not a huge amount of money, but it is impressive when 5-10 year
olds are doing most of the work. This year, however, we saw the largest
culmination of our efforts. We held a production of Shakespeare’s
‘Twelfth Night’ in our backyard. This play started as a homeschool
project, but by the time it was done we had student actors and stagehands from
both public and private school as well. Most of the kids in the play were
from our neighborhood and all of the assisting adults live within walking
distance of each other.
Our co-op of passionate and intelligent friends is not the
only reason why we homeschool, but it is an important factor in our decision to
continue. What we do collectively is more than we can accomplish as
individuals or individual families.
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