Information Overload

Let's recap what's happened since I've last blogged.
1) I gave birth.
2) I officially started my new job (which means I joyfully received my first paycheck).

For those of you who don't know my job, it's like this. I get paid to make sure that parents who are homeschooling their children comply with the state standards and follow all the state education laws.

There are perks to my job. I get to mostly work from home. Some of my meetings take place at a coffee shop. I get to cart my new baby around with me. I meet amazing parents and kids.

And even in the short time I've worked at this job, I've realized a few things.
I've realized that some parents are natural teachers regardless of whether they have a teaching credential or not. I've realized that that could never be me and I am so thankful that I took the time to get my teaching credential-because for me, I actually learned things about teaching I wouldn't have known otherwise.

And although as parents we are the best teachers for our children, we can still benefit from the knowledge of those who have actually studied education and how kids learn and wrote books about it and stuff.

Here's my point. I think as homeschooling parents (or even just concerned parents that care about our child's education) our natural tendency is to want to cram as much information into our child as possible. At as young of an age as possible. Oh, we complain about the "system" that wants our children to write a complete paragraph by the time they are in kindergarten, and then we turn around to homeschool our kids only to find ourselves teaching our five year old about Plato and his philosophy behind The Cave. Which would be okay, except that we also throw in Alexander the Great, the American Revolution, and Little House On The Prairie all in the same week. As a result, our children are exposed to a great amount of knowledge with little understanding of what it really means. And they can't communicate anything they've learned.

Here's something good the "system" has taught me. It's better to learn a few things really well and be able to communicate our understanding of them, then to shrug our shoulders when asked, "So what did you learn about Plato and the American Revolution this week?"

In other words...and this is a note to myself as well...

Our children need to communicate what they have learned. Otherwise, they haven't learned it.