Our Story

October 2000

I just had a conversation yesterday with my son, Octavian. He’s my oldest at twelve. We were returning from a homeschooling outing and had passed by a prestigious college on our way. He and I chatted about college life and the expectations professors have of their students. We talked about whether or not Octavian would learn things there that he couldn’t learn at home. This college thing is a hot topic in our house right now. We have spent the better part of the summer deciding whether or not to pursue full-time enrollment in the fall of 2001 and it’s been an odyssey of epic proportions.

So, chatting about this college and its courses was nothing new. Octavian’s tack was. He informed me that he felt like he is wasting his childhood accruing knowledge in order to prove to adults that he knows enough to be allowed to do something useful. He told me that he opens Scientific American and finds himself reading an article about someone who has produced an invention that is identical to the one he thought of himself, and thought was unique.

My son, the adult trapped in a child’s body (as many exceptionally gifted children are), doesn’t want to go to college to learn more information. He wants to use the information he already has. He wants to build his dreams and patent them. He wants to do useful, meaningful things with his time. He wants to have a tangible product to show for the hours he spends in research.

Well, you know, so do I. I never research a subject to simply know it. I never know something just to be an expert. I always study to the end that the information will benefit someone, whether it is my family, a client, or myself. And isn’t the product of our effort the reward we get for our effort?

If most adults work towards the tangible product of their work, then what reward do our children get from learning? Well, in the institutional setting of conventional school or college their reward is good grades. The byproduct of good grades may be happy parents and pleased teachers. Indirectly, the child will be awarded with the prestige that accompanies graduation from high school and college with good standing and supposedly this prestige translates to the acquisition of a good job, high wages, a fine career. Yet, more and more college graduates feel the pinch of a market that doesn’t necessarily value their degree as highly as they anticipated. How many “overqualified” professors do you know who resort to working in a job that is not in their field? One would think that sixteen or more years of preparation should result in an accomplished expert capable of the mastery of career and life.

Many of the books I read lately tell a very different story of the college graduates coming out of the institutions of learning across our country. Our country’s test scores also tell a different tale about the success of the conventional schools our children attend. John Taylor Gatto , New York State Teacher of the Year, prolific writer and visionary has written about the dilemma our country’s children face in his book Dumbing Us Down. He joins the ranks of the likes of John Holt (yikes! Radical alert!) and Ivan Illich to point out how our present educational model doesn’t work anymore.

I remember overhearing the conversations of my classmates in the twelfth-grade AP English class we shared during sixth period my graduating year of high school. They talked about their college applications and their acceptance letters and their plans for the future. Even though they knew they wanted to go to college—The boys! The freedom! The parties!—none of them seemed to know what they wanted to study there. No one seemed to have a clue about their passions, their interests, their life’s love. Nope. Of course, they reminded one another that they had at least two years to declare a major. Hey, no sweat. They could figure it out by then, right?

Contrast this picture to the one that materializes in my kitchen around eight-thirty every morning. Three children, ages twelve, ten and eight straggle into the room, tousle-headed and bleary eyed. They may not know what they want for breakfast but they know who they are and what they like to learn. They are nibbling at the puzzle of discovering their life’s love. They are tasting life firsthand and figuring out which parts taste yukky. You know what? Not one of my high school buddies could have said the same at eighteen.

Whether profoundly gifted ,normal, or somewhere in-between all children deserve the right to find themselves in childhood and be given the tools for keeping that lodestone throughout life. That lodestone provides the child with the impetus for learning anything. It can literally propel the child towards their life’s work.

If we return to Octavian’s dilemma, we find ourselves asking at what age does that life’s work begin? Well, to a certain extent we as parents are limited by the laws of the land. My state does not allow a twelve-year-old to hold a job. And, furthermore, the local venues for scientists require job applicants to have postgraduate degrees in their field. Sigh.

I will approach this new wrinkle exactly as I have approached every other homeschooling hurdle for the last six years, with an open mind. I already know that the conventional approach taken by academic institutions in our society does not work. I don’t look for my answers in the annals of modern academia, either. At every turn I find the academic elite as stymied by “how it has always been done” as their lower grade level counterparts. With the exception of some innovators like Howard Gardner, who in his seminal work, Frames of Mind outlined the seven “intelligences” of multiple intelligences theory , most of the work I have read on the subject of gifted education simply offers a Band-Aid to those walking wounded deserving of so much more. With pullout programs, grade skipping, acceleration, and whatever else funding will allow, today’s gifted student can look forward to being a square peg who must fit into a round hole.

You know why my children are not having to fit into a hole of the wrong shape? Our homeschool morphs daily to become the hole that fits them! Our homeschool isn’t square, round, triangular or oblong. Like a pleomorphic cell-wall-deficient organism capable of quick-change artistry, our homeschool becomes whatever my children need it to be.

I am always stumped when someone asks what style of homeschooling I use (you know a movement has come a long way when people are aware of its different faces). Well, I’m not exactly unschooling I am not doing unit studies or the classical approach or Charlotte Mason although I borrow heavily from all three. I think I’d rather say that our homeschool defies definition because it changes so often. Change is good. I like change.

Some moms crave structure and a defined sense of purpose in their homeschool. Many home-educators want to have validation for their approach from “the experts”—those with degrees in education who tell others how to do it. Not me. I keep finding that those experts get stuck in ruts because they use the same track too many times. So, I use a little bit of everything and tailor the fit to my children's very unique needs. As these needs change with their maturity, some methods fall from favor and others come to the fore.

The most important feature of our homeshool is that we don’t just acquire knowledge simply because it will be useful at a later date. Rather, we approach each new subject with its immediate application in mind. When possible we learn from life.

There are so many subjects to learn and so many theories on learning that I try to keep it simple for my children. I’m the mom and therefore as a nod to the fact that I deserve the right to lead this circus; I get to institute several educational absolutes.

ABSOLUTE #1 We will learn the three R’s: reading, 'riting and ‘rithmetic!

ABSOLUTE #2 We will be culturally literate: fine art, classical music and classical literature.

ABSOLUTE #3 We will all play a musical instrument and become accomplished naturalists.

With these three objectives forming the warp and my childrens’ personalities, talents, and interests forming the woof, the fabric of our homeschool is a sturdy canvas upon which Octavian, Antony and Scarlett design their futures.

Enjoy Smart Kid at Home, we offer this site in the hopes of inspiring you to craft for your family a culture of learning. Your children contain more treasure than you can possibly imagine. You hold the key.

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