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When I have kids, I might consider this. One of my big fears is that I may not be the most qualified person to teach my children. The idea of un-schooling actually reminds me of a program that I went through in elementary school. When I was in elementary school, I was identified as a "gifted" pupil. Once a week, I was removed from regular class for a few hours and sent to the GATE program (Gifted And Talented Education). It was run in a way that my natural curiosity led me to learn things that were considered above my level. For example, one of the activities that GATE provided was being able to draw pictures by plotting coordinates. You would be given a set of instructions that looked like: (2,2)
(2,6)
(6,6)
(6,2)
(2,2)
STOP
(2,6)
(6,2)
STOP
That would draw a square with a diagonal line through it. Of course, they had more interesting pictures than this example, such as a horse. Naturally, I wanted to draw these pictures, so I learned how to plot coordinates. Later, I discovered a more challenging set of pictures--the coordinates involved negative numbers, and the grid included all four quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate plane. My teacher gently nudged that it's more advanced, but when I wanted to try anyway, she taught me about negative numbers and I was successful at plotting the negative coordinates. This was all while my peers who were not attending the GATE program were still learning basic arithmetic.Later, in 4th and 5th grade, I was put in a full-time GATE class. This was a regular class in elementary school, which was comprised entirely of "gifted" pupils. It wasn't free-form like the weekly GATE sessions, but it was structured in a way that helped gifted pupils more than a regular classroom. I think the GATE program is partially responsible for me excelling in math. When I arrived at junior high (6th grade), I was placed in the advanced 7th grade math--honors pre-algebra. There's a little bit of information about the GATE program here: http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt/gt/, but that resource is mostly bureaucrat-speak. Another resource that helped me excel in math was my 2nd grade teacher. I was picking up math faster than the other students, so my mom suggested that I ask my teacher for something more challenging. I did, and my teacher gave me a different assignment from the rest of the class. (I don't remember today what those assignments were--probably double digits when the rest of the class was learning single digits.) I remember during a car ride home asking my mom and older sister how to multiply double digit numbers. They explained it to me and wrote down a few problems for me to work out. The tl;dr version of my comment is: I completely agree with the premise that a child's natural curiosity is an excellent catalyst for learning. If you're lucky, you might find a resource that nurtures your child's curiosity, even in the institutionalized school system. |
Maybe not "the most qualified", but you sound pretty smart to me, and there are a lot of thoroughly unqualified teachers in the school systems. I think you'll find you can pick up anything you need to know pretty quickly.