An interesting article my dil posted on FB. Didn't read it all (VERY long!), but it seemed to be very well done. http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoo...Case-for-Setting-Your-Kids-Into-the-Wild.html
Awesome read, Jackie! Thanks for posting. Love where he compares school to prison. LOL. Reminds me of when Elle was little and we used to refer to public education as "jail school"! LOL. Seriously, we did. Elle are you SURE you want to try JAIL school? She'd sigh and shake her head. We had a very similar ethic as the guy who wrote the article when Elle was little. Her days were extremely unstructured and self-lead. We pretty much waited for her to develop...to see what she'd become. For a while, we were all pretty convinced she wanted to be a chef. She made drawings of the restaurant she wanted to build, started compiling original recipes...cooked every meal we ate because she was obsessed with learning to cook well. Planted herb gardens. Made all sorts of ethnic foods. At age eight she talked about "breaking down proteins" and was asking for professional knives for Christmas. And then.....Alton Brown and Good Eats happened. Elle became obsessed with Alton. For anyone who isn't familiar....Good Eats is a cooking show where the host Alton Brown...explains the processes of cooking food in minute detail...what chemical processes occur...how to balance acids and sugars. The show is about cooking, but it's presented like science. And a ton of scientific concepts are discussed. One day Alton had food engineers and food scientists on the show to talk about careers...and Elle got massively excited by the idea. Around that time, I was working at the clinic more and her constant chatter about food chemistry really tickled the vets (one who was her Grandma). They started to show her things in the lab...to quench her stream of science questions. We taught her to identify parasite ova, and do a complete blood count, and a Brucellosis agglutination test. We showed her gram staining, bacteria, fungus, gel media cultures, how to prepare specimens. She watched a ton of surgery. Asked a million questions. She was hooked. And then she read about about the origin of dogs, 50,000 years of history... and was deeply bitten by the genetics bug. Why do most labs get fat, and most whippets stay thin? Why do Great Danes get more gastric torsion? Why do little dogs have problems with their teeth? Why do Boxers get cancer at higher rates than huskies? Why do cloned animals have different coat patterns? Can we do hip studies and prevent hip dysplasia? Can we find a genetic marker for Von Willebrand's disease in Dobermans? All of her cook books got taken off the shelves to make room for chemistry, biology, evolutionary biology, genetics. She started keeping and raising bugs. Spiders and praying mantis and fruit flies. She did genetic experiments with the fruit flies, and used their maggots to feed the others. She raised generations of jumping spiders....breeding for size and docility I started to realize that all the cooking she'd done....was her first laboratory. The notes she kept in her "cookbooks"....read more like crude lab reports than recipes. It was sort of an astounding progression. She just needed to figure out that she was scientist. Alton Brown pointed her toward Chemistry. The clinic pointed her toward biology. And she found her sweet place in microbiology and genetics. She started talking about going to college for biology in sixth grade. By the time she was in seventh grade, she'd researched biology curriculums and also started researching "jail school". When she found out our local high school had biology and chemistry labs and talked to older cousins about their experiences in these classes.....we knew we'd lost her. She wanted to start school. LOL. The "jail" part be damned. You can't jail the willing. Somehow, in spite of our best efforts....we raised an academic. An insanely driven, insanely competitive...academic. This was NOT our choice. This was simply who our kid turned out to be....so we supported her. If Elle had stuck with cooking, she'd be going to culinary school and we'd probably have used her college money to invest in her first restaurant. If she'd become an artist, or wanted to be a farmer or even a BUG farmer...we would have supported her dreams. But yeah....just like the guy in the article....we trusted her to find her own way. We stood back and let her become who she was supposed to become and left her fate where it belonged.....in her own capable hands. Has worked out VERY interestingly
Fun memory when Elle was little....you really haven't lived until you've asked the stock guy in the liquor department where they keep the red wine...for your 8 year old. Me: Where do you keep the red wines? Stock guy: What kind would you like? Me: (turning to address child)...what kind do you need? 8 year old: Something sweet. Port. Me: We need Port. Stock guy: (shows me a bottle) This one is nice. 8 year old: Too expensive (grabs a different one off the shelf) This one works. Seriously....you should have seen the look on his face. Priceless. (She was making this chicken dish with peppers and onions and port....have to say it's still a favorite of mine. Thank you Alton Brown!)
I am a homeschooling parent, but I think that if I were your parent I would be most impressed and persueded by a report on the topic of the pros and cons of homeschooling, and why you think that homeschooling would be right for you. Maths Tutor,Science Tutor,Private Maths Tutor,Private Maths Tuition,Private Science Tutor
You are lucky, because there are NOT a lot of cons. The only one I can really think of is dealing with people that continue to perpetuate myths such as homeschoolers lacking socialization. That is easily rebuted. What do public school students do on evenings, weekends, holidays, and during the summer? School is not the only source of socialization. Private Science Tuition,Online Maths Tuition,Online Science Tuition,Maths Tuition Skype,Science Tuition Skype
This sentence really stuck out to me - "I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that." While I agree that they make several good points in their article, part of being a child is being taught, and "learning" how to learn from someone else. That's a very important part of a school - home or otherwise.
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