Today, if all goes well, my two oldest sons will get their amateur radio license.
I can see my oldest passing the test without any issues. He has spent hours studying. It’s something he really wants to do. My other son has a decent chance, but he has not put in the time like the oldest.
There is a balance to learning that comes from interest and desires. The 8-year-old boy is all over it when we do things that involve the radio. Yet it’s easy for him to get distracted by everything going on around him. Studying takes a back seat to playing.
I find myself questioning if I should push just a little harder so that he feels more confident, even when he pushes back and does not want to press on.
The same applies to daily schoolwork. Much of the classroom work in public school is day in day out pushing on subjects our children that they probably couldn’t care less about. Honestly, when was the last time you used that random math equation you learned in 10th grade?
And homeschooling sometimes feels no different. If you follow some of the book work, you might as well be creating a robot clone. Page after page of tasks they might never use.
So now we go back to questioning. Do they need this work? Should I make them push through the subjects they hate just to become proficient at something they might never use? Are we forcing them to conform just because?
Don’t get me wrong. They need the core skills of math, reading, and writing. And we should absolutely be giving them a basic foundation of history and science.
But could you change out the pages of math for days spent helping in the kitchen? Try teaching a child to double a recipe, measure ingredients, and adding fractions to make a whole. That comes easy and fosters a desire to learn much greater than pages of books.
Sometimes we need to push our kids to ensure they can handle themselves in life. At other times we need to let it go, or perhaps what we really need is to find a better way. It’s time to stop shoving the square pegs that are our developing children into round holes just to conform with the ideas of society.