So, here I am with my first post blogging about my life as an unschooling dad. This blog has been a long time coming as I realize there are a lot of fathers out there that have the same questions, concerns, and "fears" about the unknown when it comes to unschooling and all that comes with it. I am certainly no expert on the matter, but I have come from a place of being insecure in this life choice to knowing with all my being that this was (and is) the most important and best choice Sarah and I have made in our lives.
Sarah and I did not have our first child (Elijah) thinking we would have him at home instead of going to public school like the majority of children who reach "school" age. We were always very career focused, and saw ourselves raising our children in what would be a considered a traditional home environment. This changed quickly as we learned more and more about what was truly important to us and what we thought to be best for him.
From a young age we always felt Elijah was extremely cerebral, but not likely to excel in a controlled classroom environment found in a public school. He is not one to try and show off what he knows to others, even when he might know much more than them on a subject or topic. We knew that he would more than likely slip through the cracks because his inner genius would not be rewarded in a school system, but rather be labeled with any one of the many labels we as a society feel we need to put on children that learn differently from others. We weren't sure initially what we were going to do, or the specifics on the best way to do it, however, we knew we had to really think about where we were headed, and what we wanted for our child and our family.
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You are filling a MUCH needed void here in blogland! Love that you are doing this!
ReplyDeleteGreat post Chris! Thanks for putting youself out there! Rock on!
ReplyDelete~Dayna
Awesome post! You express yourself really well!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for doing this! It seems that so often the dads get (or feel) left in the background or just dragged along by the moms. Yours is a much needed perspective!
I love to read things that make me think [seamlessly] as I read through them. at one point I thought this wasn't for me and then I realized th at I have the same problem. My so Gavin is very smart. At the first sit down with his teacher she didn't know that he could count as high as he could or that he could repeat his ABC's verbatim. I wanted to yank him from her blind and ignorant hands immediately! I have several blogs without a voice. Thank y for sharing you for sharing yours. PS remember me? We went to HS together.
ReplyDeleteSo glad you have a blog! I love it and think you're going to add something really important here for both dads and moms.
ReplyDeleteToday was the first time I have heard of Unschooling which makes me realize that I wish I could have done the same thing. I have worked in a public school setting for 24 years in a support staff position. After seeing a short program this morning about unschooling and found it to be a perfect choice for trailblazing parent. In the unschooling setting the parents and kids decide what they will learn while in the public school setting you learn what a bunch of polititians feel kids should learn. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a totally flawed system which actually ended up leaving millions of kids behind. How can a NCLB policy leave kids behind? Well, when I asked teachers I worked with what they thought about NCLB they all said they hated it. I had one tell me that the NCLB system did not allow teachers to work with the slower kids. Why? Because the federal government set a percentage of kids that have to pass each years benchmarks and if the school does not reach that mark the school is sanctioned. So every public schools in the nation first tried to not get sanctioned by reaching each years NCLB Benchmark Quota instead of trying to meet the actual namesake policy of "No Child Left Behind". In the NCLB system the kids that did not catch on were left in the dust while schools tried to meet their "politician pick a percentage out of the air Benchmark Quota" (the percentage of students that had to meet federal benchmark guidelines for the school not to be sanctioned). Teacher after teachers I talked to over the years HATED the NCLB but were actually forced to use it to teach kids even though they all knew it was flawed.
ReplyDeleteI found NCLB to be frustrating because the speed of the learning that was expected of the students. The school were "force feeding" information into the students while some students were not able to keep up. In example: they would teach a "base" math formula on Monday, then used that base formula the rest of the week to find the answers of the weeks questions. If a student didn't understand Mondays base formula, they could not answer the weeks math questions. Then the next weeks work continued using the base formula from the week before leaving student questioning if they were ever going to graduate or if school is just a waste of time.
As unschoolers you and your kids and not a politician decide what your child learns. It is obvious that a parent has more of a stake in their child's education than a politician. Can anyone here reading this blog give me just one example of a politician did to help the public educational system?
Aloha, Rocky