Feral Fridays: School's Important Life Skills

This post is written by our special guest, Wanda Vesana, founder of the hot new homeschooling movement, Feral Homeschooling. She generously shares her wisdom through Feral Friday posts most every week.   She is the mother of two multitalented and very well behaved children, son Silas and daughter Verna.  You can learn more about Wanda here.

Recently I discovered a marvelous book called Catch a Fish, Throw a Ball, Fly a Kite: 21 Timeless Skills Every Child Should Know (and Any Parent Can Teach!) by Jeffrey Lee.  The author explains that his father, an immigrant from China, felt ill prepared to give his sons the "all-American" childhood they craved and which he had never experienced.  He wasn't prepared to teach his sons to play baseball or go fishing, and tried to learn about these things from books.  When the author himself became a father, he discovered it wasn't as easy as he'd thought it would be to teach his daughter some of these skills, and he set out to write the book his father always needed but never had.  Some more of the wonderful skills he covers are how to teach a child to plant a tree, to ride a bike, to build a sand castle, and to make a paper airplane. 

This book got me thinking.  I'm sure many immigrants want their children to have that quintessential American childhood, but don't know quite how to go about it.  And as a homeschooler I can relate to that.  From the time your littlest kids think it would be cool to ride a yellow school bus, you start to worry about what experiences they will miss.  Fortunately, homeschool groups tend to take care of these things. They create annual yearbooks, they organize social dances and proms, they host graduation ceremonies.  We tend to focus on all the positive experiences schools often provide and we'd like to make sure our kids can have them too.    And when it comes to skills, we Feral Homeschoolers tend to focus on the many things the schools aren't covering at all, like how to live the authentic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers in a suburban setting, or the proper use of dynamite.  But are we missing important skills?  Are there things kids learn in school that they are unlikely to learn as homeschoolers?

My answer is definitely yes, and I've been working on a list.  I'd certainly welcome your comments, particularly if you think of any I've missed.  I'm sure there will be quite a few.

• Spitballs.   Homeschooled children need not miss out on this wonderful skill.  It can liven up any dull routine, from family dinners to trips to the grocery store, to airplane rides and evenings at  the opera.  If you decide to create a unit study on spitballs, and would like some historical information, a wonderful book on their ancestor, the peashooter, is  The Push Cart War by Jean Merrill. You can also throw in some anthropology and herpetology if you learn about the poison blow darts of various indigenous tribes of Central and South America, which use deadly toxins excreted by certain colorful frogs.  You will find these frogs readily available in the pet trade.

• Cootie catchers.   You can teach anything with a cootie catcher.  The crucial thing that many homeschooled kids miss, besides how to make them, is how to make important life decisions with them. Whatever you do, don't neglect this facet of their function when using them for something like memorizing the facts of the Inquisition.

• Cheating. It's pretty hard to cheat when you homeschool.  Your mom knows when you aren't paying any attention in a lesson.  Don't deprive your kids of a chance to learn this important life skill.  A wonderful book on the subject is How to Cheat at Everything: A Con Man Reveals the Secrets of the Esoteric Trade of Cheating, Scams, and Hustles by Simon Lovell.  Also, don't neglect seeking out the guidance of those within your own community who make a living through cheating.  They have wonderful insights to offer.
  

• Plagiarism.  Homeschoolers can sometimes miss out on crucial motivators to learn the art of plagiarism, such as looming deadlines for book reports on novels they find incredibly tedious.   Homeschooling parents are unlikely to make their own lives difficult by centering lessons on books their children find utterly revolting.  The unintended consequence of this sort of laziness is that we deprive our kids of a chance to jump start an investigation of plagiarism.  Not everyone can learn to write well. But anyone can plagiarize,  and it's up to you to make sure your kids have the confidence to know they can do it too.  A fabulous book on all angles of plagiarism, including historical background, can be found in Stolen Words - The Classic Book on Plagiarism by Thomas Mallon.

• The art of the well-crafted insult. These come in handy so often, there are hundreds of excellent books on the subject.  I'm sure your library is bursting with them. You can quickly get your kid well beyond the usual playground taunts they are missing and into truly snarky territory.  And by all means, if you are studying a foreign language, make sure to search for fun books on insults in that tongue.  I'll never forget learning that in French, a haughty person "farts higher than his butt".

• Peer pressure.  Just getting your homeschooled child to grasp what this is, exactly, can be tricky.  But the key is to help them focus on how the power of peer pressure can be used to influence others.  It's one thing to be the parent of a kid whose waistband is well below their underwear; it's quite another if you're the parent of the kid who did it first.  This is what we're aiming for here.   

Thank you all for the many emails and comments I've been receiving.  I'm so pleased that more and more families are discovering Feral Homeschooling is the right choice for them.   I welcome readers to create their own Feral Friday posts, and share links to them in the comments.