Roadschooling
The year of Covid offered parents new routines they had not thought about before, including me. I never thought I would homeschool my youngest. I was working full time and for the most part I believed in the school system. Well, not really, I was thinking of changing school systems, but I was not thinking of homeschooling.
When Covid happened, I had just pulled my daughter out of her current school and enrolled her in online school. Online school in my opinion was a joke, all it taught and reinforced was short term memory skills, useful if you have to cram for a test. After she took the test, all the information left her brain, immediately. So, we changed to homeschool, and I bought a curriculum guide. My idea was to try and create an environment of learning, “soaking in the knowledge”, and hopefully wanting to learn more. In short, I wanted her to love learning again. So, for the next year, I worked, and she studied. We settled into a routine, she slept until almost lunch, while I was at work, but when I came home around 3pm it was magical. She would sit at the kitchen bar, and we would do schoolwork together while I prepped dinner. Spending additional time after dinner to finish up, if needed. She seemed to enjoy our time of learning together and I enjoyed our time. What I learned that year was, we as a family can continue to learn without a public/private school but, the most important thing I learned was we like each other and we as a family enjoy being around each other.
This year I am going to test the idea of how much we like each other by cramming us all into a smallish camper for a year and roadschooling. I will loosely follow a curriculum guide as we did last year, although for me it will be a challenge to change lesson plans on the fly, I like to have a plan. I want book learning to be important but, I want it to provide resources and support for her personal experiences.
I gave some thought as to what my goal of roadschooling this year is, “why am I doing this”? The most obvious statement comes to mind, to show her “we are all alike.” After deeper contemplation I think that old saying has created some of our current challenges. I want her to learn, we are all very different, neighborhoods are different, each town, each large city, and each region of the United States is different. But that is ok, everyone and everyplace has something special to offer.