Keep reading

One of the great joys of homeschooling (at least in my opinion) is to choose to spend the entire morning curled up on comfy couches while I read the final chapters of a book we are involved in. In this case, we were finishing The Domesday Book by Connie Willis.

As I have mentioned before, this is a book where a historian travels to the middle ages and accidently ends up in the year 1348, the year the Black Death arrived in England. It is not as dire as you would suppose given the topic. Well, at least until the last chapters. I figured it was better to get them all read in one fell swoop rather than lingering over them. The book does a very good job of portraying the horribleness of the plague. Yet it also still tells a very good story, so it feels worth it. We'll move onto something lighter for our next book.

What I really wanted to do was to continue my campaign to encourage parents to continue reading to their teenaged children. I think it is just as valuable as reading to your younger children. You can read more challenging books together. Not only are you putting complex language in their ears (which is the single best thing you can do to improve writing), but you can share complex ideas as well. 

The Domesday Book is not one any of my children would have picked up to read on their own, but they enjoyed it and they learned a lot from it. The same with Jane Eyre from last year. By sharing complex books together they are more easily discussed. Anything that leads to a real discussion is better learned. And when everyone has heard it at the same time, there are more participants in those discussions. 

When it comes to educating high school students (and I'm specifically thinking homeschoolers here), I see so many parents wanting to abdicate... choosing virtual schools for curricula. There is a tacit belief that high school is too difficult for a mere parent to do. The math and science might be more difficult (there are many work arounds for that problem), but I fail to see what is so different from the homeschooling that has been happening all along. You just get to tackle subjects more in depth or in areas that would not be feasible for a younger child. It is more interesting, I think. 

And because it's late and I'm feeling a little kvetchy, I what did those parents learn in school that they don't feel capable of passing on that knowledge? It's high school for goodness sake, not a PhD in quantum physics. 

The short version? Read to your children. There is no such thing as a child being too old.

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I'm heading to Arizona tomorrow to visit my mom and do some piano festival judging. In all likelihood, I will not be blogging. So, when days pass and there is no new post, the worriers among you won't have to assume something has gone terribly wrong. Instead picture me sitting in the sun and reading one of four books I'm dragging along with me. I'll be back late on Monday night.