Welcome to ‘A Father’s Education’!
As we get this homeschooling website off the ground, I want to take a pause and talk about what we want this place to be. There are literally hundreds of sites on the web that contain both free and paid curriculum to deliver to your children. This site will certainly have some curriculum, some I will design and produce myself and some will be links to other sites with resources we recommend and have success with. But… student curriculum isn’t the purpose of this site. The primary purpose of this site is to focus on the education and development of the homeschool educator, the parent. Every profession out there; engineers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, military professionals, etc. go through a rigorous (ok, fair point, some more rigorous than others!) training program to get their degree, license, or certificate. Then they undergo a career lifetime of continuing education to maintain that licensure. Yet the homeschool educator has surprisingly few resources that are focused on developing themselves as professional educators. A quick Google search for homeschool education reveals the vast majority of sites dedicated to either selling or ‘giving’ you curriculum options for your children. And that is good! We need curriculum choices for our kids! But how do we know which resources are in line with our own educational philosophy? How do we know which resources are any good? Perhaps you have looked for professional teaching resources to fill that gap. There are some great ones out there, but professional teachers have a huge classroom management challenge to tame that you don’t have, as a homeschool educator. Most professional teaching resources spend most of their bandwidth discussing all the different types of students, and parents, they will have to effectively manage. So these resources will have a couple of things to say to you, and the rest of the resource will simply not apply. So this site is designed to fill that gap. To focus on developing you as the teacher of your child(ren). You know them, deeply. You know, intuitively, whether they are kinesthetic learners, verbal, visual, etc. So here, I hope to bring together the tools for us to continue our development as professional homeschool educators of OUR children.
Secondary?
I mentioned that the primary purpose of this site was to provide for the continuous development of us as homeschool educators. But I did mention a secondary purpose. To state this simply, the majority of homeschool educators are women, mothers to be precise. It follows that most of the homeschool websites are written and managed by women. There are certainly fathers that are homeschoolers, but we are much fewer in number and it is very difficult to find a male homeschooling ‘voice’ on the web. Yet, about half of homeschooled students are our sons. I hope to provide a site here with a male voice as the homeschool educator. Whether you are a full time homeschool father, a father getting involved as ‘weekend homeschooler’, or a homeschool educator working with your sons, I hope that this site will provide a male perspective to the homeschool environment. I don’t really intend to have ‘male-oriented’ content, per se. There won’t be a lot of ‘boys vs. girls’ posts, contents, or curriculum. I have daughters, but I am a guy, I don’t really know what goes on in a female student’s head vs. a male student’s head! But as an educator, and writer for this blog, what I write will be from a male perspective, and that perspective is missing in a lot of the dialogue and discussion in the homeschooling community. I hope my small corner of this world will help to fill out that perspective.
Our family
You thought I would lead the ‘About’ page with an introduction to our family didn’t you? 🙂 Sorry, as my wife reminds me, I do like to talk and take ‘rabbit trails’. But here is us. We are a large family, the two of us and 7 kids. The oldest, Matthew, was not homeschooled and has graduated and successfully ‘launched’. I would have loved to homeschool him, but a 20 year career as a Navy Submarine Officer meant that I simply could not do that. The younger six are 3 daughters and 3 sons ranging in from the oldest daughter being 10 years old to an infant of 8 months old. My wife is Japanese, we met while we were going to college together at Oregon State University. Since she is Japanese, with family and a rich heritage in Japan, and I am American, with family and a very different heritage in the US, we end up splitting a great deal of our time between Northern Japan and Alaska. (Yeah, the logistics of such a life is… challenging! Will write some articles about that later). We hope to give our children the best of both worlds, but at the very least they will get a very wide range of experiences in the two cultures!
A bit of resume…
What I bring to the table: I am a Navy engineer by training and trade, with bachelors degrees in civil and mechanical engineering from Oregon State University. My time in the Navy, over 20 years, was in the submarines and focused on operational nuclear engineering, technical training, and program development. Along the way I completed a Master’s in Teaching from the University of Alaska-Anchorage.
My wife has a bachelor’s degree in media design from Oregon State University and is a licensed teacher of Japanese instruments, specifically: the Koto (a Japanese floor harp), the Shamisen (traditional Japanese guitar), and the Shakuhachi (traditional Japanese bamboo flute).
Between the two of us, I believe we have the training, background, and experience to develop a comprehensive education for our children. However, we both are also from professional worlds that have impressed on us the NEED to continue pursuing our development as educators. That requires collaboration. Collaboration with other educators like you.
We hope you join us in this conversation. Collaboration as homeschool educators IS what this website is about. Please comment on articles. Ask questions, make recommendations, reach out! If you have any questions or comments, please contact us!
