Mission Impossible: The Adult Without Gaps

As I prepared for my most recent presentation about "homeschooling fears," I thought a great deal about fears that haunt homeschoolers:

-socialization
-curriculum
-adequate time
-enough patience

Many of these fears need to be looked squarely in the eye to identify, what is it that I am really afraid of?

One of these fears (and a concern I hear over and over again either directly or subliminally) is that "I am afraid that I will either not know 'enough' or teach 'enough' to make my child into a well-rounded adult."  When we look that fear head on, I believe many of us are paranoid that we will not teach our children everything.  And I mean that, everything.  We see ideas in a book, curriculum on another homeschoolers shelf, or even just "remember all that we have forgotten" from our own homeschooling and the panic sets in.

Okay...let's look that fear in the face.  What adult do we know that knows as much as we in the back of our fear-filled minds stress about "making sure" our children know?  We as adults have our strengths, our passions,...our weaknesses.  And, somehow, for the most part, we are all doing just fine.

So how do we know what to teach?  That is one reason I love the four lens approach.  I know that if I am teaching, connecting, and applying the beauty of looking at and for truth using the different lenses, my children are learning how to do the same.  The area of specializing or the actual "tools" we are using to look for truth may vary: writing vs. speaking, biology vs. geology, algebra vs. geometry, American history vs. world history.  We will emphasize or highlight some more than others.

However, this brings me back to something I remind myself of often...why do we teach them?

I just read a fantastic article called "A School in Zion" by Jeffery Holland (the link takes you to a more complete version than the one I read).  In it, Jeffery Holland says this:

"The connectedness of things is what the educator [must pursue]," said Mark Van Doren.  "No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does...

"[We need a school] to help [students] sort through much intellectual nonsense that is inevitably in an inert swamp of facts."

If I wanted my children to simply memorize and regurgitate facts as the objective of my homeschooling, I could easily hand them the internet and say, "have fun!"  or "let's do trivia games!"  There is a place for memorization, but as a tool and a means and not as the end itself.    We have been blessed with more knowledge at our fingertips than we will ever know what to do with. I believe this has been true for several centuries, sure that even Thomas Jefferson had books on his shelf that he never got to and wish he could have read.

However, knowing what to do with information, how to give it context in our minds, how to apply it and let it change our lives, that is my objective.  We have a super-highway bogged down with more truths and half-truths and outright lies than one person will be able to read in a lifetime, let alone process.  Let us create students who know how to find and identify truth and apply it in a life-changing, world-changing way!  "Inert swamp of facts," indeed!

Using the four lenses and focusing on principles opens the way to make those connections and find truth all at the same time!  From there, interests in particular subjects (biology, Japanese, the history of WWII) are kindled and depth happens quite on its own.

For example (because we all like examples, right?) we are talking about motivation this week.  I am going to be teaching the chapter on paths that light travels in the "In the Beginning" science text by Wiles today. In it, he teaches about fiber optics and how light can be "bent" to follow a path.  There is a great yet simple experiment involving a 2-liter bottle, water, and light like the image at the left (although I do not have a cool green light :)...).  (It didn't work, but apparently Bill Nye covered it in the video I had them watch...sweet!)

As you can see, the light actually bends to follow the path of the water.  We will talk about how our motivation will bend our light, our testimony, our goodness into the path we are motivated to follow.  As we have read books aloud this week, encountered information from the news, or even looked at our behavior one towards another, we have discussed questions like "what is the motivation behind this?" or "what are we seeking for by doing this or that?"  Even my 6 year old is making connections and looking for examples of motivation--for good or bad!--in the world around her.

Now, having done the above science experiment, my children (the boys in particular) know that they love science and looking at the world scientifically.  Will that not serve them well when they are older and come across a course on biology or chemistry or physics? They will be able to delve deeper, gaining more understanding of laws and insight into current theories about how this amazing universe of ours runs.  As Stephen Hawking puts it in his short essay, Our Picture of the Universe (from "A Brief History of Time"), "the eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe."

In my context, to become like God, to know as He knows and think like He thinks.

Ancient mathematicians concurred that math was the pursuit of truth: truth that they identified and organized into numerical and conceptual patterns that reflected that truth.

If we know the why of what we are teaching, it becomes more attainable to teach it without getting bogged down by the scope of everything we are not (and cannot realistically!!!!) teach our children on our own.  Let us teach them, rather, how to use the different lenses, the different true ways of discovering knowledge and applying it and then awaken in them in the process an excitement with making connections and finding context to the truths they are learning!  The depth will come.

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(http://momlifetoday.com/2011/10/homeschooling-fears/...great article about fears and homeschooling!)