Yesterday I peeked into the older boys' room and found them crouched on the floor intently taking turns flashing light back and forth at each other and scribbling into little notebooks. They were sending each other messages in Morse Code, and they kept at it for hours. At lunch Linc mentioned that he was starting to memorize certain words in Morse Code and could send them to Ivan without having to look them up on the key chart first.
Ollie proudly presents me with a finished water color painting. "Tell me about this." I say, "What is it?"
"I haven't decided yet." Is his answer.
"Well," I say, "the colors sort of remind me of sunflowers."
"No." He decides. "This (the big brown section on the bottom) is the beehive, and these (the brown dots) are the bees. They are flying around to the flowers (yellow) to try and such up the nectar. The flowers are hiding in the grass."
Ivan shows me a picture he's drawn of fireworks and says, "What do you think of my poem?" On the back of this picture he's written:
Crack, Bang, Zoom, Foom, Boom!
Look at all the colors in the sky.
Don't you see how they fly?
Making sounds that hurt your ears
People fear them too.
Is one of those people you?
Sit right down and take your seat.
Make it fun, and make it great.
Adelia is writing a book. It's about a lost fox. She explained to me that she wants to be the author AND the illustrator. But also she wants it to be a chapter book. :) She's started piano recently, and I am delighted by how much she loves it. Her favorite part is the "Noodling around" she gets to do as part of her assignment each week. That basically means she gets to play around on the piano and compose her own songs. She tells me when she grows up she either wants to be an engineer or a dance teacher, but hasn't decided yet. She keeps asking me when she'll be old enough to baby-sit Cal.
We finished memorizing our first Shakespeare piece clear back in October, but due to a whole string of craziness, I'm just getting around to documenting and delivering the promised candy bars to the kids. :)
As I sit here observing how differently each of my kids chooses to spend his/her free time, and as I consider how differently Aaron and I choose to spend ours, and as I read stories about famous mathematicians who have almost zero formal education, who can barely string together a coherent English sentence on paper, but who persevere an change the world of mathmatics; and as I hear stories about people who have a "disorder" that in this day and age they'd be medicated for without question, but who weren't medicated, and now own successful businesses revolving around those strengths....as I hear and read and see these things, I have to question a little bit our society's obsession with getting a "well rounded education.".
Stop.
Before you start throwing tomatoes in my general direction.....YES. I agree, there are a few things that everyone needs to learn. I believe everyone should learn how to read. I believe everyone should be able to communicate through writing. And I believe that we need to be able to manipulate numbers to a certain extent. Life skills, etc.
But sometimes it boggles my mind, how intensely focused we/I can become on making sure our child knows EVERYTHING, is exposed to EVERYTHING, needs to test well in EVERYTHING. Straight A's and all that. What if our children are supposed to be the Ramanujan's of the world? He had "almost no formal training in pure mathematics" yet somehow he "made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions". God provides a way. He has a plan. I know this. So why do I continually find myself caught in this trap that I need to provide ALL for every one of my six children?
Maybe Ramanujan is an extreme example. But I think there is value in considering his story. I carry so much stress around with me all the time about my children's education. If I'm doing enough, if I'm ruining their lives. (And I seem to be able to find evidence that I AM ruining their lives, no matter what choices I make. Everything has pros and cons, and we can't see or predict the outcome of everything.)
I do firmly believe in teaching my kids HOW to learn, and to help them develop a love of learning. And in isolation, I can tell myself that's all I need. Morse Code, multiplication, marbles.....are all the same to the extent that you learn how to learn by learning and mastering them. It doesn't matter which vehicle you learn how to learn in, as long as you acquire the skill of learning how to learn, then when you need a particular knowledge, you'll know how to go about getting it. And if you don't ever need a particular piece of knowledge, well, then what's the point of having it?
I know these things, and believe them to my very core......except for when I falter and stutter and doubt myself while putting them to practice.
But I watch my kids and I am happy with what they choose to learn in their free time. I can honestly say I think it's time well spent. So why is it so hard to make that the fulcrum of our education? Why is it so hard to let go, and to trust?
More of Ivan's art:
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