Once or twice a week, my son and I go to the library. He plays with the elaborate Brio train set in the kids' area, while I perch nearby on a toddler-sized chair and read magazines. During a difficult developmental stage earlier this year, these library visits were a welcome and necessary break for me; now, they're just a habit we enjoy.
Over the space of a few weeks, I read through the library's back issues of Home Education Magazine, and one day on a whim I pulled out a "special offer" business-reply card and mailed it in. Now HEM comes to my home; my second issue just arrived yesterday.
The magazine is a good microcosm of the wider homeschool literature. There are many regular columnists, most of whom write about their own family's experiences, and additional articles, most of which are about a family's experience. Homeschooling books often have this focus, too, and one often suspects that a hidden parental motive in writing about homeschooling is to brag about the kids, or to describe the family's extraordinary life on their off-the-grid organic goat farm (for instance). This issue (Sept./Oct. 2003) contains an article about a child who is following in his mother's footsteps as a field biologist; her author bio describes their life in the New Mexico desert as "blissful". Another mother describes her young children's passionate love of opera. A father tells us about his 12-year-old daughter, so musically gifted that in addition to the "two-and-a-half hours she spends each day at the piano with her classical repertoire" she is taking up singing jazz vocals under the tutelage of a slightly-famous jazz musician she met--and impressed with her musical talent--at one of his shows. Other children in this issue raise silkworms and log long hours in fascinating volunteer activities. Recent issues have featured a family sailing around the world in a boat they built themselves and pre-teens starting college.
Homeschooling literature can be a bit smug, and parents of unusually gifted or precocious kids, or of kids with exceptional capacity for self-control (like, I'm guessing, the opera-loving eight-year-olds), often make the mistake of generalizing what worked with their kids as if all children, treated the same, would react the same. The current issue of HEM was particularly irritating with its parade of exceptional children having exceptional experiences.
There's good stuff in the magazine, too, or I wouldn't have subscribed. Larry and Susan Kaseman contributed a long, carefully-researched article on legal issues facing homeschooling, including a recently introduced, and troubling, federal bill. Sandra Dodd writes, refreshingly, about all three of her children having been late readers, and Linda Dobson questions whether current hysteria about children never learning to write cursive is justified.
I suspect, though, that I won't renew my subscription when it comes due. 66 pages of My Kid Who Is Way More Amazing Than Yours Will Ever Be And The Amazingly Amazing Things We Do is hard to take; arriving bi-monthly, it's dangerously close to a toxic dose.
Posted by Su Penn at August 30, 2003 11:09 AM | TrackBackI don't subscribe for the same reasons. And, we're also not unschoolers. But, the Kaseman's are always quite good.
Posted by: Daryl Cobranchi on October 20, 2003 05:19 PM