A childhood of learning
Let’s take a trip in the way-back machine. All the way back to when you were in school – high school/middle school, whatever. Try to think of all the skills you were working to improve and get better on.
I’ll start:
I went to wrestling practice for 20 years, I learned to play the piano and trumpet, gymnastics classes, swimming practice, woodworking, automotive repair, all the subjects of school. In the summer I went to various camps, during one of my high school summers I went to a workshop and built a sea kayak. My job was to study, to get better, to improve myself day after day. Adults showered us with praise for the sheer volume of skills we were learning and studying everyday! Good lord what a wonderful time of life that was and we didn’t realize how special we had it!
Why was that time so special?
Because adulthood is different. You have responsibilities, dependents, duties – and those require that you ‘monetize’ your skills. You start making money, you get better at your job.
Then your job changes, doesn’t it? You get good at networking, giving presentations, preparing documentation/proposals/contracts. And you get good at it! You are sought out for these skills, or at least relied upon. You study these skills… your ability to deliver is directly connected to your ability to provide for your responsibilities. It is good for your career —
But somewhere along the way it stops being good for you – you are developing no real skills!
You are getting better at being a reliable cog in the mechanism of your career, but YOU aren’t improving anymore. When was the last time you sat down at the piano? Picked up your guitar? Built something, anything?
But back to work we go, because we must.
So then you retire, or start a post-career path (like homeschooling) and something hits you right between the eyes – You aren’t good at anything useful. No real skills to offer.
This isn’t a pity party! But out here, outside of your office, nobody cares if you can ‘close a sale’, give a presentation, or drive a submarine. Yes, you were great at your former job, but that is in the past. You are a beginner again!
Think of it this way, if you brought the best 18th century cooper (wooden barrel maker) into today and sent him on his way – what would he do? Not a lot of use for wooden barrel makers anymore. Our out-of-time cooper would be a master of an art that nobody needs anymore. (yes, there are niche markets and arts out there that could use this skill, bear with me – its just an example to demonstrate a point!)
Our now-useless barrel maker could sit down and throw the aforementioned pity party about how useless his skills now are, or….
The homeschool path –
When you have kids, or volunteer to teach other kids, you have an enormous opportunity in front of you. Yes, you are there to teach the kids something. But, you get to choose the subject. And with all of your office skills you think are now useless, you have an entire adulthood of experience in researching and learning to draw on. Any experienced teacher, public/private/homeschool/university, will chuckle at the oft-mentioned wisdom that you don’t need to be an expert to teach something – you only need to stay one lesson ahead of your students! After all, when you teach something, two students learn (both you and your student)!
A chance for a do-over: skill building
Video games are great. I play the Elder Scrolls series of games occasionally. It is nice when you make a mistake and get killed in-game you can re-load a previous save and try it again. Teaching, whether homeschooling or volunteering, gives you the chance to ‘re-load’ a previous save. Never got to learn guitar? Pick up a beginner book and start teaching guitar to your 10 year old! Rather have learned golf in High School instead of football? Enroll both of you in a local club and take lessons together. Longing for the time to learn how to cooper wooden barrels just for fun? Grab a book and learn alongside your homeschool student (ok, not a great example – I looked, very few ‘How to cooper’ learning opportunities out there. But there are a couple… show your student how to develop a skill with minimal guidance via trial and error!) You only need to stay one lesson ahead. Better yet, don’t stay a lesson ahead – learn at the same pace, at the same time. So many of our children graduate from school never learning how to actually learn! Show them how to learn by your example, learn WITH them!
Your homeschool environment is your design. When you walk out of the office for the last time and realize that your skill set is no longer relevant, pick up the parts that are useful (your research, studying, and organizational experience) and put together a homeschool experience that enables you to develop skills that YOU want to learn. Your interest will skyrocket and spark enthusiasm in your children and they will learn to love learning alongside you.
Building new skills
The picture at the top of this post is a leather butterfly barrette I am making with my daughter. She free hand drew the design and we are doing the tooling together. Pretty much done with the tool work, next steps are staining and sealing. What have I learned with this one, tiny project?
- burnishing the edges with a dremel tool and gum tragacanth has a ‘right’ speed, and all the other speeds. No book told me that: empirical learning!
- the piece of scrap leather I used was really the wrong type. It was already finished on one side (the reverse) and wouldn’t absorb any water when we tried to ‘case’ it (soak with water so it takes tooling). Didn’t know that!
- if its too wet, the leather gets ‘muddy’ and tool marks are indistinct: again, the empirical teacher at work!
- free hand drawings your daughter makes are FAR more interesting then pre-printed ‘professional’ patterns! (but I knew that 😉
And I haven’t even started staining yet!
This one little project, done with my daughter, has taught me more new skills than the previous 5 years of ‘professional’ work. To be sure, I certainly improved my professional abilities, I am not knocking our careers – but taking the opportunities presented to us in the faces of our ‘blank slate’ children affords us the opportunity to learn things that we otherwise couldn’t justify the time investment. And the hours spent with my daughter? priceless.
One caveat!
The older your kids get, the more they will want to explore their own path. We are certainly there to guide them with our maturity and experience, but be sure to leave room for them to explore their own interests as well!
