Why we homeschool...

Sometimes people ask me why we homeschool. Sometimes I wonder myself.

Homeschooling can be exhausting. I'd be lying if I said that I enjoyed every moment. In fact, some days I have fewer enjoyable moments than frustrating ones. Today was one of those rough days that has ended with my being up past 10pm prepping for my six hour seminar tomorrow. It's like a college cramming class all over again, and I'm tempted to question the "why."

BUT

Yesterday I had a sweet and poignant moment with one of my kiddos. She was trying to find the area of a oddly shaped figure (essentially a square with a missing corner). When she filled in the missing piece, she took a guess at one of the measurements. She guessed incorrectly, for which I am grateful.

You see, we had, in that moment, a great opportunity to discuss the difference between what appears to be true and what actually IS true.

What we think we see in our math books or in our daily lives isn't always what is true. Math is amazing because it points out truth. There are principles and laws and properties...all sorts of things that demonstrate the consistency and reliability that we crave because we are created to know what is true. We can place trust in mathematics when we do it properly.

My dad likes to tell stories of how USAF pilots are trained to trust their instrumentation over what they see. Apparently, city lights look an awful lot like stars, and pulling that nose up to climb into the heavenlies can be deadly if the plane were actually upside-down.

That principle applies not only in aviation, but also in math, and in real life. The hypotenuse of a right triangle may look to be a certain length, but only by taking the square root of the sum of the squares of the other sides can we be sure.

So it is in life. What we think is true may not be what is actually true, and what is true may not be what we see. Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Only by fixing our eyes on the Truth can we be sure of what is real. This brings great comfort in a world full of confusion and competing 'truths.'

I imagine that homeschooling can be compared to mining for gold...lots of time panning with only nuggets of the prize here and there. Yet, it is these little moments that I would miss if weren't with my children all day, every day. 

This is but one of the myriad reasons we homeschool.

To me, that is worth it.