Last week we talked about the reality of gaps. Gaps in our education and learning are inevitable. They happen. Embracing them doesn't mean not pursuing the truth, goodness, and beauty of God and His creation through traditional studies however. Acknowledging the existence of gaps places us at a decision point. What gaps do I want to fill? What gaps am I embracing as future opportunities?
My children's own education has not prioritized memorizing the periodic table of elements, although they do learn how it can be used as a tool. Contrarily, my own high school education focused more on memorizing some elements than understanding why the elements were arranged on the table in the particular format. As a homeschool parent, I chose to focus on understanding over memorizing when it comes to the periodic table. This is called opportunity cost. If I can't know all things on this side of heaven, then what am I choosing to learn at the cost of learning something else?
We do this in life, and we do this in education.
Making the decision about curriculum, learned objective, is one of the most important decisions that a homeschooler can make. This may be why we all spend a good portion of our February, March, and April weeding through catalogs of books. We desire to give our children the best education and so we spend hours picking the perfect book. There is no perfect book. Every book, even the bible, leaves something out. In fact, John tells us that the world itself cannot contain the books that could be written about the works of Christ. While I will not pretend to help you weed through the plethora of options for your student's US History course this upcoming year, I am more than happy to help with math curricula.
While it may be tricky to find the list of grammar concepts taught in a particular language arts program, math is obvious. Mathematics curriculum is particularly blatant as a proponent of certain concepts. Everyone knows the basic concepts that every pre algebra text contains, or do they? How do we confirm that a math text is leaving appropriate gaps? Let's explore that gap next week.