Front Door, Bathroom, Kitchen, Classroom

Homelab Notebook #01

2024-11-26: I’ve retrofitted a few Homelab Notebook posts for consistency, including this one, for a more consistent format.

The Homelab Notebook series is a recurring section where I consolidate some of our learnings and lessons for paid subscribers. This post includes:

1. Administrivia

2. Resource Directory

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1. Adminstrivia

Our first school board meeting was contentious. Chief among the issues: where to put the whiteboard?

You have to pick carefully, because a whiteboard doesn’t just attract attention. It attracts artwork, post-its, sketches, inspirational banners, magnets, markers. All manner of learning paraphernalia. Whiteboards are patient zero, the reason classroom walls are a rash of color and tape scars and tack pocks.

Nevertheless, you need one. The whiteboard serves a critical purpose: to draw the gaze of children up, away from the floor. They sit up, look to the horizon (or slightly above). Whiteboards imbue walls, usually a means of confinement, with opportunity.

But they are awkward in a house, because a whiteboard can go anywhere. In the entrance, it’s a personalized welcome sign. In the kitchen, it’s a meal calendar. In the living room, it’s a game board. But where does it become a teaching tool?

For us, it’s the front room. It’s casual and welcoming, close enough to the kitchen to catch a quick snack, and out of sight of the TV. But most importantly, the front room is unclaimed. It’s never had an identity before. Classroom only has to compete with “random couch room” — a battle even the orneriest board members could concede.

After one week, the whiteboard is doing its job. There is a vision board on top and paintings to the side. Child #3 asks about the content on it, and wants to understand. Child #2 learned to play tic-tac-toe and hangman. Child #4 eats the markers. And Child #1, the student, learns.

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Before I share more of what we are doing, I ought to explain why we are experimenting with homeschooling. I have a few preconceptions about why people homeschool, which do not apply to us, so let’s start with those:

• It’s NOT because our public schools are inadequate. (They are excellent.)

• It’s NOT because our child does not function well in a classroom

• It’s NOT because we want to give our child an explicitly religious education (or otherwise protest school practices in some way)

We first got the idea when our oldest came home from school exhausted and irritable. When we probed why, the root reason was having to sit through phonics lessons all day — when he was already reading chapter books.

This is hardly a new-to-the-world problem, but as with everything in parenting, it forces a choice: what ought we do for this kid and our family, here and now?

Homeschooling was one of the options, and it’s the one that looked more and more attractive the longer we thought about it. Wife and I genuinely love the process of learning and teaching, and we want our oldest to love it, too. Homeschooling is not a radical break from our norm, but a natural doubling-down on practices we already do as parents.

For Child #1’s entire life, for example, we’ve spent fifteen to forty-five minutes a day reading together. I read him books that interest me: The Hobbit, Narnia, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood. Often these force awkward conversations around slavery or murder, plague or racism. But reading books is a family bonding time, and talking about plot structures, history, good and evil, science, is more fun than struggling to keep a baby away from a board game.

So when Child #1 started coming home from first grade bored and drained, we saw an opportunity to expand those discussions from a small part of the day to the whole. We aren’t looking to raise a genius. We aren’t following an ideology. If there are any pedagogical principles we follow, it’s simply this: the world is knowable, that getting to know it is a joy, and that joy makes life worth living.

Because of our great privilege, we can stretch our family routines to make it happen for our oldest. (Two of our other kids are attending preschool and public school.) We started this week.

It wasn’t a perfect start — I foolishly skimped on feeding the children breakfast on our second day, which caused a cascade of failures — but it was a successful trial run, and everyone was getting comfortable. The school board is happy, and plenty of improvements are planned. The whiteboard’s full of them. 

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2. Resource Directory