A New Approach

I started feeling a need for change in our homeschool a couple of years ago. As I added students and grade levels, we had become more and more structured in our studies, in order to pack in everything: a page a day of this, 5 chapters a week in that, in order to work our way through the curriculum and books that I had selected. Once that information was covered, we could call it a year.

It was convenient and practical to do school that way, and certainly they did learn a lot. But what began to disturb me was that my students were always wanting just to "get through it." If I suggested an enrichment activity like pulling out a map to locate the setting of a book, they groaned and said I was wasting time. Some of them wouldn't come to me for help with a workbook page, because "it would take longer," but they'd take forever to get through their work because they kept stopping to do what they wanted. I was doing a lot more nagging and a lot less teaching than I enjoyed.

I wanted to do something different last year, but the timing wasn't good, with our house on the market and an imminent move. This year, however, seemed like the perfect time for a change, with my two oldest going off to public school. My two middle sons, now the oldest at home, were usually the ones more willing to go off on a tangent with me, and they also seemed to be benefiting least from the structured approach. I could almost see their interest dying, checkmark by checkmark.

But I had never met anyone who was currently unschooling. I knew of one woman whose kids are all grown who had never done a thing with them till late junior high; then she had them tutored for a year and sent to a private high school. All ten of them are amazing people, but I never knew her well enough to ask questions or seek inspiration.

Then a friend suggested that I check out the blog of a friend of hers: Jena at Yarns of the Heart. Jena was unschooling, quite successfully, as it turns out, with her oldest acing his college entrance exams and getting a full-ride scholarship into the college of his choice. And they do musical theater!

Reading some of her posts (like Interest-Led Learning) gave me the courage to seriously pray about making a big change this year. And oddly enough, investigating the educational philosophy of the charter school that Blondechick is now attending was also a significant step toward unschooling, or perhaps I should say, away from conventional approaches. Meeting a few of her teachers--who were clearly creative learning directors, adept at arousing interest and motivation--was inspiring to me personally, reminding me of my own first love of teaching, which is so much more than checking off assignment boxes and correcting papers.

So perhaps unschooling isn't the perfect word to describe our new approach, because I'm doing more teaching than I have in a long time! But it's all in a context as we explore together; I'm just explaining, as we follow our noses, and rabbit trails, and our hearts. (It was so much fun today, when they asked me to keep reading, to keep reading!--since there wasn't a long checklist of other things we HAD to get to.) I am eager to tailor our activities to their needs, as we did today in a basic math lesson that wouldn't have been in a 7th grade math book, but was exactly what B13 needed to review and build his confidence.

And today at 5:15, when I returned home from a quick errrand, I was shocked to realize that both boys were still at it, composing essays (on subjects of high interest to them) and practicing their keyboarding skills while they did so (one on the desktop and one on the laptop).

A new approach, indeed!