Special Guest Edition: How We Homeschool on Sundays by Brad Skow

Pushing on the open door

My previous special guest,

Latham Turner

, agreed to his son’s request to build a plane.

Brad Skow

is here to remind us that small and simple can also be beautiful. And, maybe a bit like deciding to build a plane, something good can often be sparked by nothing more elaborate than a conversation.

Brad is a philosopher at MIT. I love hearing about all the different things home educating parents do. From past guest posts, I recall a coder, a sommelier, a child-rights activist, a novelist, a historian, a classicist, a writer for TV… so many interesting people who have found themselves on the path of home education!

I am also very much enjoying hearing from more homeschooling fathers. For more, see past posts from Joel Bowman, Oliver Cresswell, and Will Orr-Ewing. All previous guest posts can be found in the Special Guest Editions tab on the How We Homeschool homepage. If you’d like to be next, get in touch!

---

‘Slide-Show Sunday’ is the newest addition to our homeschool curriculum. The story of how it came to be is one of serendipity, intrinsic motivation, and pushing on the open door.

We stumbled into it through blind luck. Not long ago my wife and I returned home from a too-rare date night to three eager kids and the eager grandparents who had been watching them. Why the eagerness? Our 14yo had previewed for them something he wanted to show us, and now here we were, and we really must see it. I was tired, and I tried to put it off till morning, but everyone insisted. So, okay, we sat down, and watched quizzically as he plugged his computer into the TV and...began a PowerPoint presentation. He argued that some of the ‘admin’ restrictions on his computer should be lifted. There were pros and there were cons. It was fair and it was in-depth. We were convinced, so of course we said we’d think about it.

I once might have stated our homeschooling philosophy, insofar as we have one, by repeating Darwin’s description of natural selection: “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” My wife used to call it strewing: put lots of educational options in front of the children, see what they’re drawn to, and build on those things. Sometimes the strewing is quite literal: we made the house messy with books and activities, and watched what they read or did. But now I see the incompleteness of this picture. Sometimes it’s they who bring the bright idea to us.

The 11yo and 8yo were spellbound by the 14yo’s presentation, and they wanted to make their own, and they wanted to do it immediately. But it was bedtime! To corral their energy my wife said okay, yes, but not this second. How about every Sunday we gather as a family for a slide show and that’s when you can do your presentations. Someone named it Slide Show Sunday. It was a plan.

The children insisted that parents must participate too, not just as audience members, but as presenters as well. Everyone would have the week to prepare. No restrictions were placed on the topics. Originally the 8yo wanted to collaborate with my wife, as she (the child) wasn’t sure she could navigate the software; but it quickly became apparent, to the kid and to us, that help was neither needed nor desired. Indeed, for all of them, parental assistance was offered only to be refused and even shunned. “What’s your slide show going to be on?”, I asked each of them, several times. Don’t forget, I needed to make one too. I had no ideas. I was fishing for inspiration. “It’s a secret,” they all said in reply.

At Sunday dinner, just before presentations, you could measure the room’s excitement by the fighting over who would go first. Randomization was required. And then...

I thought I’d share a little bit about the talks. The 14yo’s subject was, well here’s his title slide:

The 11yo, excited that The Wild Robot movie was about to be released, had re-read all the books, and assembled a summary of the whole series. In my wife’s presentation she explained how sick she was of picky eating, and argued that the kids should help more with dinner. I talked about candy and capitalism, and then our 8yo talked about the meaning of life: you “feel pain feel happiness just exist for a while then die.” That’s what she thought the meaning was. But “people think differently than me and I want to hear everyone’s thoughts,” and we went around the room, saying what we thought the meaning of life was. Each talk was maybe five minutes. There was time for Q and A.

What’s the moral of this story? Kids will devote huge energy to projects, even ‘educational’ ones, if they love it—an obvious truism, maybe, but it’s always worth having more examples. But also... some homeschooling families are all-in on self-directed learning: wait to see what the kids direct themselves at, and then clear a path for them to pursue it. And we do not do that, only. Parental pressure is applied to take online classes, and to study math, even when they don’t want to. But Slide Show Sunday, I don’t know, if we had come to them with this plan out of the blue, I’m not sure it would have worked. But it came to us, and I think it’s something beautiful. And if strategies for thinking up names isn’t the most useful skill, well, being able to put together and present such strategies certainly is, and notice also what stood on the other end of the spectrum, both of profundity and of age of child: the meaning of life. This all is worth more reflection, but—look at the time, I’m afraid I can’t pursue it further at the moment; I have to go work on my slides.

---

PS While I was putting this post together I was looking through Brad’s posts over at Mostly Aesthetics. As a fellow-glasses wearer, I loved this piece from 2022:

On not seeing well

---

Thanks for reading, If you’re not subscribed to How We Homeschool, sign up for free and never miss a post.

The image for this post is by Matt Botsford on Unsplash.