You can do anything?

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As a homeschool mom, I often think that if I can just get my children reading strongly that almost anything else they will ever want to learn will be available to them.

One of my friends had a son who wanted to study Akkadian when he was in high school. Akkadian was the language of the ancient Mesopotamians; he wanted to be an archaeologist. My friend told him, "If I can find a self study program for you, you can study it. Otherwise, you'll have to do something else." She figured that there was no such creature as self study Akkadian. It turns out there's around eight to ten such programs.

Certainly over the years, I have learned lots of subjects by reading about them. Including fairly tactile things like learning to quilt. Those books had a lot more pictures and I did take some classes along the way.

But there have been things I learned that only came from personal observation.

A few years ago, I participated in a homeschool PE class where the moms were expected to stick around and model good behavior for our kids by participating in a sport together. Now, I am often envious of the Delta Burke character on Designing Women who claimed she had her period four years straight to avoid PE. I wasn't smart enough to figure that one out.

But being married to a college athlete means I've watched him play a lot of athletic games. I don't think my skill set improved, but I did learn a few things like using your brain to come up with a workable strategy. I once shut down some other homeschool moms in a basketball game by having a man to man defense and putting our best player on their best player. While it worked out that neither of the good players scored much our team capitalized on this by having the rest of us schleps work to score while the other team kept working to get the ball to their best player. Later when the graduate student who worked with us, had had enough of our strategy she came in for their side. The next thing I knew rebounds were being taken out of the air from over my head (she'd played college basketball). After a few rounds of this devastating strike at our lead, I decide to employ another strategy I'd learn from watching my husband and other adults play sports. I trash talked! Yes, I called her Elastigirl. We still didn't win, but at least I'd tried all my knowledge out. (And yes I did make sure her feelings weren't hurt, but she liked it.)

So much as I'd like to think that reading is the golden road to learning, I will have to admit that on occasion there are other roads.