Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie

Author:Laura Brodie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

In addition to our visits to the knitting cottage, Julia and I also tried field trips with other homeschooling families. Here was our opportunity for “socialization,” that word so dear to critics of homeschooling. Here, too, was a chance to learn why other parents had chosen to bushwhack their own trails through the educational wilderness.

First came a trip to the Frontier Culture Museum—acres of reproductions of seventeenth-century farms—Irish, German, English, and American—located in a town forty minutes north. We drove there with Melanie and her daughter, Sara, whom we had met when their house was featured on an “alternative homes” tour. Each spring Lexington’s Garden Club holds a “traditional” house tour, allowing folks to ogle some of the town’s fanciest interiors. But that year Lexington’s Healthy Foods Co-op arranged an alternative, which included a yurt and several solar homes with composting toilets. Sara and Melanie’s remote rural house featured prominently on the tour, and was dubbed by my daughters as the “house of straw,” because the walls were insulated with bales of carefully dried straw. A large tree stripped of leaves and twigs and polished smooth as marble rose through the interior of the house, so that Sara could sit in its branches inside her room. Outside, gnomish faces were carved into the plaster walls. The entire effect was luxuriously hippy, with large southern-facing windows that made the house passive solar, overlooking a manmade pond and a hundred or so acres.

While admiring her house, I learned that Melanie was an intermittent homeschooler. She had guided her older two sons through their elementary years before entrusting them to the local middle and high schools. Sara, her youngest child, had received one year of homebound kindergarten, before spending four years at our county’s tiniest rural school—twenty-five children per grade. Melanie hadn’t planned to homeschool again, but at the end of the fourth grade, Sara had begun to lobby hard. She was one of several children I would meet in the coming year who specifically asked to be homeschooled, wanting to spend more time learning at home with Mom. In the end, Melanie had given in, explaining, “You know, they grow up so fast.”

So there we were on a September morning, two homeschooling moms, me a part-time professor and Melanie a part-time veterinarian, strolling with our fifth-grade daughters through replicas of seventeenth-century farms, complete with crops and barns and a smattering of livestock. On the German farm, Sara showed Julia how to pick up the chickens carefully and pet them like kittens. Luckily there were no ill-tempered fowl with sharp beaks.

By the end of the afternoon, Julia had learned much about the history of agriculture, from Colonial times to Sara’s contemporary experiences. She had been able to touch and see and sometimes taste the differences in farmhouse life among various European countries, all the while getting fresh air, exercising her legs, and socializing with another child. The event met all of my requirements for a good field trip.

I followed this up by planning

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.