“How can my husband help?”
My wife and I hadn’t discussed homeschooling and hadn’t even heard of unschooling nor deschooling when our elder son became eligible for kindergarten. A series of hiccups, annoyances, and coincidences inspired us to look at all the options we could imagine. My mind was set as I thought, “If I can’t teach him a kindergarten material, I’m a worthless dad.” We committed to a (school) year of homeschooling with the goal of honestly reevaluating at the end of it. We didn’t have a clear philosophy nor curriculum and were questioning ourselves within a month. The reevaluations came on a regular basis, never scheduled, but imposed by our failures. We talked through all the mistakes and started to see that we could work through minor adversities to discover major rewards. We didn’t stop at the end of that school year, we had established rhythms of learning and saw no reason to disrupt them. The evaluations continued, as did the failures, but our eyes lifted from the day-to-day struggles and gazed out to see what our goals were. It would be two more summers before my boys knew what “summer vacation” meant.
Our sons had shown an inherently strong capacity for learning, that part was relatively easy. What we wanted to model was thoughtfulness, confidence, kindness, and a capacity to love and help others. Although a useful shortcut for the uninitiated, we dropped the term “homeschool” in our personal discussions as we were not creating our version of school, we were practicing a learning lifestyle. Our faith community became a huge part of our mission. Not only could we bring cans of soup on Sunday, but we could hop on the trucks on Monday morning and go visit the people and places that benefited from the donations. We could spend a quiet Friday cleaning up a local park or setting up tables for the church rummage sale. Opportunity was to be had any day of the week.
We continue to find chances to help and broaden our ability to do so. We’ve learned immeasurable lessons along the way and achieved some good along the path.
God bless,
Jason
