Thursday, January 06, 2011

Homeschooling = Lifestyle Design, Too

Here's a pic of my kids from five days ago in New York:


And here's a snapshot of what they have doing the past two days in Orlando and now in Naples, Florida:



While they did have a blast in the snow for a couple hours last week...

Still, they tragically hadn't been to a park in almost the past two months.

While Long Island has numerous large, beautiful, and well-funded parks I've been very disappointed with them on another front. There simply are NO KIDS there for mine to play with, EVER.

If I was one of those LOSER *likers* on Headbook...

My wall would read "CaptiousNut likes Snowbirding*!

And so do my kids.

We spent New Year's Eve last week with two other neighborhood couples and their children
up north.

Both of them have *1st graders* - girls the same age as the Prince AND also a younger child right behind like our Princess.

And both of these couples, I think, have already been captivated by the idea and evidence of us homeschooling our children. The endless stream of questions they they fire at me and my wife suggest much more than shallow curiosity. I can literally see the wheels turning in the brains during these conversations - most especially this past week over a New Year's Eve standing rib roast when we revealed that we were packing the car up for Florida.

Twice one of the guys incredulously asked me later that evening, "You're really going down for a whole month?"

Indeed I was....actually for a little longer!

4 comments:

Paul Mitchell said...

Man, if only they could find some kinda resource that talked about all the benefits of home schooling and some tools to help them do that. Man, the person that developed that resource could make a killing!

CaptiousNut said...

Working on it.

...to the detriment of my personal blog output.

Anonymous said...

the trick is to clearly demonstrate results...homeschooling is a tough topic

maybe some kind of benchmarking? international competitions like math olympiad? or maybe create/innovative work done by homeschoolers compared to regular ?

you can argue all u can, and convince(delude? some say) yourself...but it has to show in real results.

with internet and all, if your kid is interested in computers i would let him start programming.(python language is a good one). If not computers, maybe biology/genetics/chem?

i recently attended a nokia tech. conference and saw one kid, maybe 10-11 year old(?), taking notes and actively discussing just like adult. This is a premier tech conf usually adults with 10 or more years experience are the majority. I thought he may be homeschooled.

concentrated focus/delving into specific domain areas at that young age does wonders. I doubt regular kids have that kind of luxury.

CaptiousNut said...

Anon,

The evidence is already out there.

Math Prodigies

Innovators

The Prince.

Etc.

To your point, I completely agree. A homeschooling evangelist would have to overwhelm potential converts with *evidence* to open their minds. Perhaps even make them jealous?

And it is a tough book to write. The subject is too vast, too diverse, too sensitive, etc. to ever be contained in a traditional book.

I'm struggling with that very reality at the moment. Every thing I write (on my ebooks) shoots off in too many directions. So I'm exploring other possible forms of expression.

Never heard of Python programming language. Will check it out. Thanks.