homeschooling – Living Outside The Box

Some of you may be familiar with the fact that my wife and I homeschool our kids. As someone who was bored stiff in public school (and still struggles with “ADD” to this day) I was perfectly fine with our kids receiving individualized schooling and delight-directed learning. It seemed like such a natural idea to me, it made me wish I’d been able to do it when I was young. Alas, I managed to survive institutionalized learning, and in the process, I even learned a few things.

However, I’ve come to realize that most men aren’t like me, and don’t really understand the benefits of schooling their kids at home. Some of them are pretty hostile to the idea, in fact. At first, I was completely befuddled by this. I mean, why wouldn’t you?

But then I started seeing why, as I learned more about how other men saw things. I spent time reading story after story about men who didn’t have a clue about the basics of education, or why certain things work and others don’t. It’s not that they were stupid, they just assumed (incorrectly) a lot of things about how learning actually happens. When you throw that in with an over-inflated sense of discipline, you get a train wreck of confusion and misinformation.

So I’m writing this to help clear up some confusion, and possibly shed some light on the subject for those who either 1. don’t get it, or 2. are trying to get their spouses to get it. Continue reading “The Homeschooling Dad’s Expectations”

My wife and I homeschool our kids. I think it’s an awesome way for kids to reach their potential, and I wish I had been able to do it when I was young. There’s a lot of people leaning towards homeschooling now (thank you, Common Core…) but all of these new “home teachers” have questions on whether they’re doing it “right” or not.

My wife and I have gradually over the last few years gravitated towards something called “Delight Directed” learning. This is essentially what it sounds like: we use things the kids are already excited about to teach things they need to know. As it turns out, you can work math, science, history and language into just about anything if you look at it long enough. So far, it’s working very well.

But the question we get asked the most is “How can you let your kids learn whatever they want, and still have them be effectively learning what they need to know? What if they get out into the world and just fail miserably?”

Understandably, this is based on fear of failure, for you and your children. Nobody wants their kids to fail, and nobody wants to be a failure. However, the fear of delight-directed learning is both unfounded, and counterproductive. To bust the myth that kids need tons of structure to learn, we will need to dissect it piece-by-piece. Continue reading “Homeschooling The Delight-Directed Way”