Sometimes..Simple IS Better

 Why do we have to make things so complicated? 

Books can open up a whole world to the reader.  

The Three Musketeers, while fictional, does open the reader up to a little bit of life as a king's guard in the Middle Ages. 

Little Women (and the rest of the series-did you know it's a 4 book series? I didn't...) can show you what life was like for the family left behind during the Civil War and Reconstruction period in the Northeast United States. 

Little House on the Prairie  series shows you what life was like for those brave souls who ventured into Indian territory and unsettled lands to find a new life on the Plains. 

Shakespeare. Just any Shakespeare.  You can use it to help pronounce, to be goofy and act out some scenes.  There's even history, geography and myths thrown in by the Bard of Avon.

The Bible.  A timeless book.  Read it for the literature, for the history, for the poetry at the very least, but as God-given scripture, it is truly an amazing work of God to teach you how to live, and how not live, of the coming days, the days of Christ, and the hope we have if we are God's child. 

I could go on. So many books.  Classic literature was so rich not only in the words used, but also in morals, stories, history, grammar, language... 

Modern-post 1960-"literature" changed that.  No longer are the books rich in grammar or morals or much else.  In fact, it could be argued they are the opposite.  And then we wonder why it's so hard to teach our children basic grammar and sentence structure.  Science fiction authors thought they were coming up with crazy stories, 40 years later how many of our inventions have come about from science fictions (AI, robots, cell phones, video calling to name a few).  Spoiler alert-it never ended well in the books, it won't end well in the real world.

And a question-why in the world do we need to learn to deconstruct sentences and identify every part of the sentence. Ah yes, the "books" we now read. 

Maths. 

First off-yes, that's how you say it-Maths. or Arithmetic.

Math shouldn't change. 

1+1 should always equal 2.

55-20 will always be a simple 35.  Not the whole Base 10 math where you tick off the 10s until you manipulate it enough to find the answer. 

Math used to be basic accounting principles.  How many bushes of apples at $0.05 a bushel do you need to sell if you need $10 to pay the bills?  Because that's the kind of math kids needed to be able to survive as adults. 

When was the last time you used Calculus? And the high school class doesn't count.  For the most part-calculus isn't used after high school. Now if you can prove me wrong, please do.. But take your average Jo Schmo, working a blue collar job.  Geometry, yeah I can see that.  I could even see some Trigonometry being used.  But it's mostly filler classes.  Because Heaven forbid you let those perfectly capable teenagers get out of a building with their brain being crammed full of things to pass tests and encourage them to work at a job to gain them true life skills.  

Do I personally see the point of higher maths? No I don't.  Will I end up teaching my kids the higher maths?  Probably, because it's expected to go so high in math to succeed. It's expected to fill your head with useless knowledge... Especially after I know they understand and know-without my help-how to budget, how to balance a checkbook, how to make something and then figure out how much to charge to make a profit, how to convert a recipe to bigger or smaller.  How to plan a quilt based on how big you want it versus the size of squares you want to want.  How to take a patch of land and plan out a garden for optimal growth for the plants (tomatoes don't like onion, potatoes don't like peppers but corn and squash are best friends).  

History.

History shouldn't change.  It gets added to, yes.  But you shouldn't look up the same thing in four different resources and get four different answers.  

HISTORY SHOULDN'T CHANGE.  

But it does.  I have spent 7 years trying to find a good history that didn't change *much*.  Just when we thought we had it, we found we were wrong.  

So back to the basics. The best possible way to teach true history is to find autobiographies of the people who lived it.  Project Gutenberg is an awesome resource for that.  I say that as I'm also editing a history course for my kids from 1776-1900.   Why?  Right now, I have no idea why.  Right now, I just want to find the important people presidents, generals, inventors, the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers and read the books with my kids.  Teach them why we came to this new land in the first place and learn how we got so far from the ideals we set out to have.  

We had started using the Robinson Curriculum with our kids.  How I understand it, Dr. Robinson's entire theology behind homeschool was to teach the kids the basics-how to read, math facts-then let them go.  Give them a guideline until they learn enough self-discipline you are comfortable with.  Once they learn to teach themselves, the sky is the limit.  They can teach themselves whatever science they want.  

What in the world is the problem with teaching kids to THINK?!! 

Yes, we need life skills. Yes, we need maths, yes we need to learn to read... When was the last time I broke a sentence down into parts? (I didn't because my public school "teachers" told me I was too dumb to learn.)  But I was blessed with an awesome history teacher who made sure we learned the truth. Who let us ask questions.  Who guided us through civil discussion-even when 9/11 happened.

It's natural when you teach, to teach your ideals.  What ideals do you want your kids learning? 

God instructs us to teach our children his ways in Deuteronomy 11:19 and Proverbs 22:6-and many others.  

As you're planning your school year-no matter what your school year looks like.  Think about it.  Not just the spiritual, not just the morals, not just the academics. Every bit of it.  What do you WANT your children to learn? What ARE your children learning.  How can you change it if it doesn't match? 

As you can tell, I'm struggling right now.  I'm having a hard time reconciling teaching my kids useless dribble that they need to get a GED to show "they can study to pass a test".  While knowing Galileo invented the first flying machine is an awesome little factoid.. Unless you're a mechanic-why? What purpose has that served me other than being able to answer random trivia questions? No purpose. At All. None. 

~Tabitha