This will be a long post sorry….I have to play catch-up! I
set my alarm for early this morning so I could get up and do some stuff that
has been slipping. I literally just went through and deleted over 1,000
e-mails. I feel horrible that my e-mail account has seriously been neglected. I
get so many unimportant e-mails so I turned off notifications to my phone-it
was dinging all the time and driving me nuts, but they aren’t necessarily spam
either. I can tell you one thing I probably will not be winning Publishers
Clearing House anytime soon with as far behind as I am doing their
e-mails…bummer! Seriously there is not enough time in a day to keep everything in our lives perfect all the time. Food, cleaning, laundry, schooling, activities, grocery shopping, and just the everyday hum drum definitely keeps me busy. My e-mail account, laundry, and the perpetual clutter is what seems to take the back row in our theater of life though.
Mother’s Day was awesome and my kids made me an array of
things (some of which I helped with because, let’s face it, if I didn’t do
crafts with them who would). I love all of the things they made, but I
especially love the little questionnaire that I have made a yearly tradition. I
have a feeling that when my children are all grown I will LOVE to look back at
these little questionnaires and see how their perception of me changes through
the years.
The other night I had a rare opportunity to have a couple
hours of alone time (DH took the kids to his parent’s house to visit and I just
wasn’t up for a visit). So 2 glasses of wine and about 45 minutes of youtube
videos later and I was pondering the home school life. I came across several
video’s that just got to me.
Seriously our education system pretty well sucks! I love
watching videos and reading articles that solidify our decision to homeschool.
I like to know that other people have similar thought patterns. I am not alone
in my thinking that there should be a better option. Well that video lead to
several others, and then to this one:
Seriously guys! Why are we continuing on a path that just
isn’t working? Why are we "judging the fish on how they climb trees!"
Why are we continuing to force kids to learn things we know (from experiencing
it ourselves) that they will never remember, retain, or use in real life? Why
are we forcing our children into a box that is considered “normal” or “the
right thing to do.” When our children are little why do we strive for them to
be doctors or lawyers and then feel it is our parenting duty to force them to learn
on that path? What if they want to create video games, or be a tattoo artist,
work in retail, or heaven forbid be a stay at home parent? What if those are
the paths our children want to take….is that so bad? I think our society is
flawed in that we strive for being the best of the best instead of striving to
contribute our specific skills, and most importantly striving to be HAPPY in our
life.
Do I want my kids to be doctors or lawyers? Not
particularly. Does that make me a weirdo? Probably. Does that make me a bad
parent? No. I want my children to be
HAPPY with their life. I want them to feel fulfilled with their life choices,
whatever they may be.
As I am playing catch up this morning with some adulating my
kids are playing legos and barbies. They are HAPPY! I want that for them above
all else. So what if they aren’t interested in being able to break down a
sentence into the parts of speech or aren’t the best spellers….have you seen the
way people spell things now-a-days anyway? By the time they are adults no one
will know what the correct spelling is for anything. I am not saying I will not
teach my kids! I am saying why not let them lead the teaching a bit to be
subjects they are interested in. Teaching them HOW to learn is more import than
pounding information into them at an early age that they will not grasp because
honestly they don’t care.
Enough rambling, so an update on our home school…the kiddos
are doing well! They’re pretty much done with their respective grades. As I
have mentioned before I have a list of what they should be learning at each
grade level. We are going through that list, reviewing, filling in gaps, and
doing a lot of reading and comprehension activities. I want to make sure they
have a solid foundation before we move on to learning new material. We planted our garden and the kids each got to plant something for them to take care of all by themselves. Seriously every day there is something to learn!
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