Do you ever find yourself going off an a tangent in terms of what you planned to study that day? This happens to most homeschoolers I know. They start off studying pollination and soon find themselves contemplating the equipment for beekeeping. Usually they make their way back to their original study plans before they actually order the beehive.
But should they?
Most homeschoolers would regretfully return to the original plan, thinking “but we have so much to cover.”
The ambitious homeschoolers of the unit study persuasion would figure out how to incorporate all the traditionally expected topics into bee keeping, poems about bees, calculating bee flight time, the social hierarchy of the hive, the role bee keeping played in the American Revolution and so on.
The unschoolers would simply try to get the most honey out of the situation before the kids go off on another tangent.
But ultimately, most wouldn’t start bee keeping.
Yet maybe they should.
After all, in today’s world you can’t possibly hope to cover everything. You are going to “miss” something whether by choice or by accident. Picking a specific curriculum means that at best, you’ll cover all the topics required by the curriculum. However, even the designers of the curriculum certainly left certain subjects out in order to cover others.
Think about it like taking a high school world history class. Can you possibly cover everything that is significant in world history in a one year high school class? Of course not.
So how horrible would it be if in the process of studying world history you end up spending a lot more time covering Chinese history than you intended? You won’t know anything about Mexico or South Africa? How much were your going to know with your original plan?
If you don’t go off on a tangent, will the necessarily limited amount learned about other subjects be of value? How often have we heard about students learning material for a test and then immediately forgetting about it. What does that accomplish?
Furthermore, colleges are looking for applicants who go off on a tangent. They want students who have delved deeply into an area-often referred to as passion- rather than simply run up a string of 5’s on AP Exams. (Just as an aside, the super competitive colleges generally expect the 5’s with the passion, unless a Nobel prize is involved, but many other schools are content with just the passion part.)
I’m not saying there isn’t a need for a basic framework of knowledge an individual requires in order to function and ultimately succeed in the world. Reading and counting still matter.
But if you can’t cover everything anyway, and you’re already brave enough to homeschool, why worry about going off on a tangent or two? And the next time your neighbor asks your kids to name the capitals of the United States, they can give her a jar of honey instead.
