Saving Science

Originally posted on January 1, 2015, by cruisingrunner

My first run of 2015 was an 8-mile run/walk along road, trail, and mangrove boardwalk. Following along Russell Heritage Trail #4 I had no idea how far I had gone because when I stopped to pee in the woods, I forgot to restart my Garmin. On the way back I kept the Garmin running the whole time, even if I stopped to snap a photo or pee again, because let’s face it, my pace is simply not important anymore and I really wanted to know how far I’d come. Eight miles round trip. I felt exhilarated and ready to face the new year. But then I got back to the boat and the boys had just gotten up and hadn’t started their schoolwork yet. When I urged them to get started, they moaned and complained, and I tried to pass along my leftover post run exhilaration to them, but they simply weren’t having it.

When someone asks me how homeschooling is going, I usually reply that it’s going quite well. We’re pretty efficient about it and the boys seem to have a reasonable grasp on all the important skills and concepts we go over. What I usually don’t say is that there are a few things that I don’t like about our implementation, but I’m not really sure what to do about it.

The biggest thing is that my kids hate science. I can’t get over it. Science. My consistently favorite subject in school, especially the physical sciences because they actually explain how things work, and like, make predictions and have equations that you can apply to real life and stuff. I loved it. They hate it. And I can understand why. On Exodus science has been reduced to reading a boring textbook and memorizing vocabulary words. I would probably hate that too. When we do have all of the right materials on board to do one of the prescribed experiments the boys fight it every step of the way, and at first, I couldn’t understand that. I mean, this is the fun part of school, right? But then I thought about a major difference between public school and our home school implementation: Public school is for a set number of hours each day and home school is for a set amount of work each day. If the boys finish their work quickly, they have more time to play. So, at public school spending some of their set amount of time on lengthy science projects is fun because the alternative is the more boring parts of school like reading and writing. For us, spending time on lengthy science projects is a pain and boring because the alternative is finishing up everything quickly so they can go play. I certainly am NOT going to make our school days a set number of hours no matter what, so I wasn’t really sure how to solve this. I want science to be fun, but if doing an experiment adds an hour to our school day it will simply never be viewed as fun.

So, I did something I almost never do, I asked for help. While driving into Kerikeri with a friend, a former teacher actually, she asked me how school was going, and I skipped my script of how it’s going well and honestly shared with her how I was at a loss about this science thing. It took her all of about 30 seconds to come up with a great suggestion: What about saving the experiments up and then every week or two dedicating a full school day to them. So simple. So brilliant. I loved it, and it may just save science for us.

It also got me thinking about some other things, so I’ve also decided to periodically dedicate a day to doing joint projects with more of a local theme. For example, the other day instead of doing their usual school work I gave them a project choice: 1) Fill out a worksheet on glowworms and then write an essay about it, 2) Make a timeline of the history of New Zealand with illustrations, or 3) Do Russell Heritage Trail #1 and take pictures of all of the sites and then make an electronic photo album with captions. They chose #1 because they viewed it as the easiest, but they wrote a decent essay and worked together on it.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of learning that goes on aboard Exodus that isn’t lumped into the category of “school,” so even without these changes I’m sure the boys are doing fine. But there IS this thing we do called “school,” and the way we’ve been treating science within that framework has been ruining it. I’m excited about these changes and a few others I have brewing in my mind all spurred on by simply sharing my problem with a friend. I really need to do that more.

-D.