questions wrote of her son:

>I said to the psychologist last year that he learns best when he doesn't know he's learning at all.

Yeah, don�t we all?

Most adults I know have some hobby � cooking, gardening, etc � that they know a huge amount about but not as a result of taking formal classes for a grade. Humans are designed to learn � we can�t run fast like a cheetah, fly like an eagle, etc. � but, boy, can we learn.

Let me make clear that I am not making excuses for not ultimately achieving adequate mastery in important subjects. But no one can achieve complete mastery of a significant subject in just a year. The idea that someone �knows� calculus or physics or US history because he �had� the subject in school is simply foolish: what he �had� was a very brief overview of a very deep subject. Specifically, I have never met a human being who really �got� calculus on the first exposure � and I have known some people who were among the most gifted in my generation in math (for example, I went to college with a kid who started graduate school in math in his mid-teens).

So, people who think that diligently working through one textbook gives mastery of a subject (especially given how horrible most American public-school textbooks are) are just fooling themselves. Better, for example, to casually read a half-dozen good, serious books about biology and slowly start to pick up and master the concepts than to diligently try to memorize one single mediocre biology textbook.

After all, no great cook simply memorized one cooking textbook! She perused and borrowed from a variety of cookbooks, and then, of course, started doing her own thing.

You also wrote:
>It's funny, but I've been thinking that what I won't know how to do is the silly fun stuff. For example, this weekend, DS's assignment is to make a leprachaun trap and to bring it into school on Monday. It's all he can think about and talk about. If we go forward with the HS, I have to remember things like that. Or maybe that's what I have a babysitter do?

Well, I suppose �arts and crafts� is my own weakest spot. By and large, I didn�t much like them as a kid (except for perspective drawing � but then that�s really math). I was sort of nervous about that when we started homeschooling. But my experience has been that it more or less takes care of itself. Let kids have access to crayons, pencils, paper, scissors, and tape and they make stuff (we seem to end up buying a lot of tape for some reason!). One of my daughters seems to have some real talent for drawing, which I certainly did not teach her (although we have made books available that explain how to draw).

Also, this is the sort of thing that your local public library has weekly sessions for and that most homeschooling moms are very good at, so it�s not too hard to seek out group activities for arts and crafts. We did that initially, but now I pretty much just let the kids do it on their own. Of course, I can�t teach the kids, for example, how to do wall frescoes, but unless someone is serious about pursuing art as a career, I doubt that is really central to one�s education.

Remember, too, that almost all homeschoolers do rely on outside sources for some subjects. I�m a marginally competent swimmer, so we paid for the kids to take swimming lessons. Obviously, I cannot teach ballet, and, though my wife plays piano, she did not feel competent to teach it. So, our girls take dance and piano lessons outside the home. That sort of thing also provides some of the all-important �socialization.� We were worried about �socialization,� too, but we�ve found out what we should have known all along: humans are naturally social beings, and kids will make friends with other kids easily and rapidly. They do not need to be with other kids thirty-forty hours a week to make friends.

I hope I�m not sounding as if I�m pooh-poohing anyone�s concerns and nervousness about homeschooling. I�m still nervous about it after four years of doing it, to tell the truth � I�m always trying to think about what we�re missing. However, it does seem in the end to take care of itself, if the parent is diligent about supervising the kids� learning and, most importantly, about making learning resources available to the kids � above all, books, which thanks to public libraries and modern Internet interlibrary loans, simply requires a parent to seek out good books via the Net and through information from other parents and kids.

My own education is in physics, not teaching, after all. But we under-rate ourselves if we think we do not know how to help our own kids learn. Human parents have been teaching their own children for tens of thousands of years. Our ability to do this is tied in to the basic and extraordinary human ability to learn. It ends up being easier, and more fun, than it might seem.

One caveat: it does require a parent who is willing to continue learning on his or her own. I�m currently teaching my kids Chinese; however, I don�t know Chinese � my wife is fluent in speaking Mandarin (she�s the daughter of Chinese immigrants), but I only knew a few dozen words before starting to teach the kids. So, I�m �teaching� by learning along with them (actually, they�re a bit ahead of me and I�m frantically trying to move fast enough that I can continue to supervise their work). I�m having fun with this, but I suppose there are people who would hate this situation and could not tolerate their kids� being ahead of them.

I don�t think this is a problem for anyone on this forum, but I suppose that people who really hate the idea of learning themselves probably should not be homeschooling parents. I�m pretty sure you yourself would have fun homeschooling (but, yeah, there will be some nervousness and anxiety, now and then!).

All the best,

Dave