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Here's a wonderful news flash:
Not everyone is meant to have a college degree.
There, I said it.
I know folks are supposed to think of college as the "end of all ends", but education used to be thought of as a "means" to an end.
If there is anything that strikes fear in the hearts of homeschooling parents, it is the pressure to get one's children ready for college.
But what if a young man is more interested in building things? What if he just can not help but want to tear down all the appliances and build them back again? What if higher math escapes him? Is there any hope?
Absolutely! Just think of all of the workers in this country--the ones who really make it run. These are the plumbers, the street workers, the appliance repairmen, the painters, even the garbage truck drivers. If you will read this post over at Smockity Frocks, and pay especial attention to the comment thread, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that there are many with sheepskins that would rather get their hands dirty!
Here is an essay that has been passed along among homeschoolers for quite a while:
Of Daffodils and Diesels
Author Unknown
I'm not very good in school. This is my second year in the seventh grade, and I'm bigger than most of the other kids. The kids like me all right, even though I don't say much in class, and that sort of makes up for what goes on in school. I don't know why the teachers don't like me. They never have. It seems like they don't think you know anything unless you can name the book it comes out of.
I read a lot at home-things like Popular Mechanics and Sports Illustrated and the Sears catalog-but I don't just sit down and read them through like they make us do in school. I use them when I want to find something out, like a batting average or when Mom buys something secondhand and wants to know if she's getting a good price.
In school, though, we've got to learn whatever is in the book and I just can't memorize the stuff. Last year I stayed after school every night for two weeks trying to learn the names of the presidents. Some of them were easy, like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, but there must have been 30 names altogether and I never did get them straight. I'm not too sorry, though, because the kids who learned the presidents had to turn right around and learn all the vice presidents.
I am taking the seventh grade over, but our teacher this year isn't interested in the names of the presidents. She has us trying to learn the names of all the great American inventors. I guess I just can't remember the names in history. Anyway, I've been trying to learn about trucks because my uncle owns three and he says I can drive one when I'm 16. I know the horsepower and gear ratios of 26 American trucks and want to operate a diesel. Those diesels are really something. I started to tell my teacher about them in science class last week when the pump we were using to make a vacuum in a bell jar got hot, but she said she didn't see what a diesel engine has to do with our experiment on air pressure, so I just shut up. The kids seemed interested, though. I took four of them around to my uncle's garage after school and we watched his mechanic tear down a big diesel engine. He really knew his stuff.
I'm not very good in geography, either. They call it economic geography this year. We've been studying the imports and exports of Turkey all week, but I couldn't tell you what they are. Maybe the reason is that I missed school for a couple of days when my uncle took me downstate to pick up some livestock. He told me where we were headed and I had to figure out the best way to get there and back. He just drove and turned where I told him. It was over 500 miles round trip and I'm figuring now what his oil cost and the wear and tear on the truck-he calls it depreciation-so we'll know how much we made. When we got back I wrote up all the bills and sent letters to the farmers about what their pigs and cattle brought at the stockyard. My aunt said I only made three mistakes in 17 letters, all commas. I wish I could write school themes that way. The last one I had to write was on "What a daffodil thinks of Spring," and I just couldn't get going.
I don't do very well in arithmetic, either. Seems I just can't keep my mind on the problems. We had one the other day like this: If a 57 foot telephone pole falls across a highway so that 17 and 3/4 feet extend from one side and 14 and 16/17 feet extend from the other, how wide is the highway? That seemed to me like an awfully silly way to get the size of a highway. I didn't even try to answer it because it didn't say whether the pole had fallen straight across or not.
Even in shop class I don't get very good grades. All of us kids made a broom holder and a bookend this semester and mine were sloppy. I just couldn't get interested. Mom doesn't use a broom anymore with her new vacuum cleaner, and all of our books are in a bookcase with glass doors in the family room. Anyway, I wanted to make a tailgate for my uncle's trailer, but the shop teacher said that meant using metal and wood both, and I'd have to learn how to work with wood first. I didn't see why, but I kept quiet and made a tie tack even though my dad doesn't wear ties. I made the tailgate after school in my uncle's garage, and he said I saved him $20. Government class is hard for me, too.
I've been staying after school trying to learn the Articles of Confederation for almost a week, because the teacher said we couldn't be a good citizen unless we did. I really tried because I want to be a good citizen. I did hate to stay after school, though, because a bunch of us guys from Southend have been cleaning up the old lot across from Taylor's Machine Shop to make a playground out of it for the little kids from the Methodist home. I made the jungle gym out of the old pipe, and the guys put me in charge of things. We raised enough money collecting scrap this month to build a wire fence clear around the lot.
Dad says I can quit school when I'm 16. I'm sort of anxious to because there are a lot of things I want to learn.
Do you have something wonderful you'd like to brag about? How about a machine your child has fixed, or even something wonderful that has been built around your house? Leave a link below and let us all enjoy!
Here is something we are all proud of--the time all of our kids got together and built a playset in our back yard:
I love this! We are not ones to "push" our children into college, and for that we are always looked upon with eye-brow's raised. In fact my son has a goal of graduating at 16 yet understands that his education and learning will take a life time. Once he graduates he hopes to pursue a variety of traded to find what would be honoring to the Lord, something he would delight in doing and provide for a future family. His goal is that he would find his niche during those four years, then pursue it further rather that get into college when he is 18, spend four years, and thousands of dollars to come to the conclusion that after he graduates, he hates the field he chose. I am looking forward to the other site that will link up with you. ( I have been spreading the word and decided that maybe I should start my own homeschooling blog to document our journey as well!)
ReplyDeleteI have a ten-year-old son who could have been the boy in that essay. My husband will have to read it!
ReplyDeleteOur on now has his own workbench in the garage. He is constantly collecting what looks like GARBAGE to me and turning it into working machines adn useful tools. He has taken a few of my household appliances that were broken and doomed to the landfill and fixed them for me. He does the same with his little brothers’ broken toys (and he knows how to remove annoying, clicking, grinding noisemakers in otherwise nice toys).
The latest project was an old grinder he got from somewhere that he fixed the wiring on. He found an old electric motor, fixed the wiring and added a switch, hooked it up, and now we have a sharpening grinder (taking up way to much space in the garage). On a sunny day, you can usually find him in our driveway with an old solar panel, inventing machines and making them run on solar energy. He is now working on motorizing an old bicycle. He took apart an old weed-trimmer motor, repaired it and tried to retrofit it for a bike, but apparently it did not have a clutch so he has put the word out that he needs an old chainsaw motor (I didn’t even know they had clutches :-)). He even wrote a paper on how he would do it, and he is determined to finish it before our county fair so he can enter it. Oh, and one more thing: he just learned to read this year at age 10. I do so love homeschooling. I love this blog post, too!