Maybe He'll Still Solve That Sock Problem

We homeschool our children. Acutally, I homeschool them, BuddhaWife un-schools them. Her general opinion is that if it's not relevant to their chosen life, there should be no compulsion to learn it. BuddhaWife is a free-thinker. She refuses to take anything at face value and routinely questions the relevance in forcing our kids (or herself, for that matter) to learn something that's unlikely to have a use later in life. To her, there's no way to learn it all anyway, so you're better served sticking to the relevant than what will ultimately be considered "trivia."

I believe that that may be true for some things (e.g., do they need to know plane geometry if they decide to be zoologists?) but they should also have a healthy understanding of the world around them, both present and past. It's my belief that you can't envision the future if you neither understand the present or respect the past. I'm big on math, history, science, and geography primarily, with a smattering of penmanship and typing sprinkled throughout.

We also try to raise our children to have independed personalities; to find their own place in the world and learn what they think instead of being told what's important by the talking heads in Washington, Hollyweird, or the collective media. Every so often, however, I see a glimpse of the woman I married in the personalities of the spawn we produced.

The other day our son was beginning his assingment for the day. We have a deal whereby the kids can earn an extra hour beyond bedtime if they've completed one homework - or research - project that day. Our daughter is currently honing her cursive skills, while our son is reading a book about the history of the world. From my position at the computer I noticed him scanning the pages of the book, which I thought meant he was finding where he left off or, perhaps, skimming what he was about to read to gain an overview of what was to come. What a schollar. Images of valedictorian awards from Harvard - or most likely MIT for him - floated through my head. Maybe he'd become the anthropologist who finally settled the missing link debate. Perhaps he'd develop a working solution to the problem of fusion energy, providing a virtually free, inexhaustible, and clean source of energy to the world. Or, closer to home, he'd discover what that force is that consumes one of my socks every time we do the laundry (and why it always chooses one of the good socks, leaving the old, threadbare pairs in tact). My fatherly pride swelled.

"Why do you look over the chapter before you read it?" the pride-swollen father asked.

"Because I think it's important to be in the right state of mind when doing homework."

"You organize your thoughts?"

"No, I ask myself 'do I care?' "