I. Am. Driving. Myself. Crazy.

…by researching curriculum. All sorts – language arts, math, science, history. A person could go nuts with all the choices available to homeschoolers, and it appears that I am on my way to proving that theory true.

Well, I read The Well Trained Mind and have drunk the Classical Education Kool-aid: I am a trivium convert. It’s partly because I can see in the classical education model what has been missing from my kids’ educations, and partly because I believe in their definition of the learning/growing process. Start with building blocks, then introduce simple tools in middle school. When they’ve had a few years of practice with those, move on to power tools at the high school level. Sounds simple, right?

No.

Science. What science do you use? Especially when you’re coming from a background of virtually no science, and the little that was offered was useless? Seriously: I went to Parent’s Visiting Day at our school and sat in on the 5th grade science class. They were going over Newton’s laws. As taught by the instructor, the first two laws were incomprehensible. At least, at a 5th grade level.

“Jenny, what’s Newton’s second law? Read it from the text.”

Student, reading from teacher handout: “Acceleration and force are vectors, and the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.”

My version for the 10 year old brain: When you push on something, it goes on the direction it was pushed. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the science experiment, “Crummy Marble“.

Sit down, all you science types, and save your breath for the coffee. My objective is both to offer a general exposure to science, and keep their interest. Y’all are already interested in science. And you should know perfectly well that if a kid asks you, “What makes stuff move?”, the way to keep their interest is NOT to hand them a copy of Newton’s Principa Mathematica and say “Here ya go, have fun!”

But as I was saying. Do you cobble together your own science out of library books? Do you pick up a complete – but expensive – science class in a box? Do you hire it out to someone else? (Oh, wait, the county is trying to impose extra restrictions against doing just that.) I’ve been reading the forums over at WellTrainedMind.com because I figured, hey, these people are all within my Venn Diagram sphere of educational philosophy, I’ll see what they’re using!

My word, just plaster my picture in the dictionary under “naive”. Over there, they run the gamut from Charlotte Mason to Latin-based to The Well Trained Mind Is My Bible And If You Deviate, The Gods of Education Will STRIKE YOU DOWN. That said, it did have the benefit of introducing me to a number of publishers I never would have found on my own. Or, maybe I would have found them, but it would have taken twice as long. And as this search has already eaten my every evening for the last two weeks, I see this as a positive thing.

I figure I’ll wean myself off of this insanity and try to spend at least two days not obsessing over it, then make my choices and get on with life. Two spreadsheets, 27 pounds of borrowed books (bless you, Neile) and seventy-two thousand websites later, I think I’m almost done.

Then I can get down to the nitty gritty of obsessing over schedules.