Gardening

One of the main homeschooling tenets is that learning occurs any time, any place. The idea that learning is intended to occur in a classroom, surrounded by a plethera of kids of approximately your age and knowledge, between the hours of 9 and 3, monday through friday, during only certain months of the year, is disconcerting to us, to say the least. Sure it's true that going to school does not limit the learning opportunities to be found elsewhere or when you are not in the classroom, but after a number of years of counting down the hours until you no longer have to sit at that uncomfortable desk next to that kid with the snotty nose who likes to kick your chair when he's bored, you just might forget that learning (since learning and school and the desk and the snotty kid are all synonymous to your child mind) is also outside in the trees, in the museums, or in a book read for pleasure.

We always maintained that, if we found homeschooling to be undesirable in any way, we could change our minds and take advantage of the well respected local school system. I don't think, however, that we'll be taking that option. With every new experience that we share I find myself awed by the many things to be learned, and even more so by our son's strong desire to learn them. Everything—and I mean everything—is a learning experience simply because he sees the world that way, and he sees it that way with intense joy.

We gardened last week. We gardened a lot last week: five cubic yards of dirt and one and a half tons of boulders is a lot of gardening. We worked pretty much for three days straight, with Calvin and I getting started on Friday and the three of us, with help from my parents, continuing work right up through dinner time on Sunday. We were pretty darn busy with a lot of adult oriented activities. I expected boredom, I expected acting out, I expected discontent. What I didn't expect, but should have if past experience was any indication, was the determined four year old assistant we had all weeked. There were very few times that Calvin was not involved. He could not, for instance, move 18 inch boulders, but he did use the wheel barrow to transfer dirt from the driveway, two shovels at a time, to the back yard; he did help lay out the black tarping and shovel dirt over it; he did help relocate smaller rocks to more appropiate locations; he did work up a sweat. When we finished the majority job on Sunday just before dinner, we celebrated by getting out the hose with the intention of cleaning off the driveway (where the five cubic yards of dirt had once been), and I think we actually used some of the water for that job after all.

There isn't a logical thread to follow in this post. I'm not actually going to list all the wonderful things Calvin was learning while carting dirt from the front yard to the back, or moving rocks, or planting plants. I'm not going to list those wonderful things he learned because I'm not even sure what they were, but I trust, in fact I know, that he was learnng. Over the next few weeks in the course of our conversation and daily activities he will clue me into what those things were by talking about them. He may not remember how many 18 inch boulders add up to one and a half tons, or how many square feet of garden five cubic yards of dirt can create, but there's plenty to learn about that cache of bugs he found under a large rock, or the funny look of the root ball on one of the plants we put in. Then, once he's clued me in to the things he found interesting, I can follow those threads and take him even further down those roads. See, he actually does most of the work for me.