Brianna Walker

“You should think about homeschooling,” my boss said, after we returned from exploring Mayan ruins in Costa Maya, Mexico. “Keep in in mind, traveling is also education.”

That was eight school years ago. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, but soon we were were elbow-deep in stories, letters, math and science projects. It wasn’t what I’d expected — but then, what in life is?

While homeschooling is far from a day at the theme park, it certainly has been a roller coaster ride. I will always treasure the memories of reading in hammocks, using hydrogen peroxide to blow up raw hamburger, and extracting carbon dioxide from soda pop. But the roller coaster doesn’t always stay on top. There have been a few tough patches — mostly involving learning to read.

And, like all things in the world of farming, school days often look different than they do on the syllabus. If there’s a problem lambing, math class suddenly morphs into animal science. Or if a tire blows en route to a piano lesson — well, music class just got turned into shop class. Although sometimes the kids complain about that morphing when they take out the trash — saying they are supposed to be students, not janitors.

For science class, we’ve recently been studying about the engineering feat of the Panama Canal. It was interesting, but we all know that observation and experience, more than books and lectures, are the real educators. So when we got the opportunity to take a “field trip” to visit the canal, we were delighted.

Seeing the canal in real life was both amazing and slightly disappointing. Living close to the Columbia River and watching barges go through the locks frequently, I was imagining something even larger and more massive than the local dams. While the locks were massive, they were sliding locks in the ground instead of hinged doors above ground, which made the initial awe slightly less.

It was still amazing to be there and watch enormous container ships go through the channel with ease. Both kids asked many more questions during their day there than they had during the weeks of reading about it. At the end of one day seeing it in real life, I felt we had all gained a greater appreciation for not only the history of the canal, but also the economics and logistics of it — more than from all the books we had read and studied about it.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time, that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” Which brings me to the second part of our trip — riding E-bikes. We went with some friends on a scenic tour around Florida on their E-bikes.

My oldest son was enthralled. That was all he could talk about, all he could think about for days. I thought that showing him the price of them would lessen his enthusiasm. It didn’t. Instead, after carefully scrolling through one expensive E-bike after another, he finally announced, “I can build one cheaper than that.”

At first I just shrugged it off, but then he was spending all his free time talking with our cousin, who is a mechanical engineer, about what all he would need. When we realized he was genuinely serious about this, school morphed again.

Instead of writing a paper on a historical figure, his assignment morphed into a paper on his hypothesis for building an E-bike. His science class morphed from Archimedes to bicycles.

Soon there was a pile of bike parts on the floor of the shop, and I was a bit horrified that I’d given him permission to destroy his bike. But soon he had that pile of pieces back into a bike that can now travel up to 30 mph.

Homeschooling has been quite the most unexpected, yet most amazing, adventure we have ever embarked on. We have learned a lot (and forgotten more), but none of it would have been possible without teaching the two most important skills first: The Golden Rule and Righty-Tighty, Lefty-Lucy.