By guest author Amos C. Wilson
“Amos, did you know that Jonah was swallowed by a big dog?”
The question came from my four-year-old sister as she stood barefoot in my garden, her curly brown hair a crazy mess in the wind. Today was gardening day. Once a week I came to work on the garden at the family’s house, and my arrival was usually greeted by several of my nine younger siblings — most often my six-year-old brother Jed — running out of the house with a dozen questions for me to answer. On one such occasion, Jed informed me that “Today was fun-school,” and I was going to teach them.
“All right,” I said. “What do you want me to teach you?”
“Give us another science lesson!” Jed said excitedly.
I was a bit taken aback at this. Were I to teach science, I would most likely lead my poor students astray. Yet, not to undone by my brother’s request, I asked, “Another? When did I teach you science?”
“Don’t you remember? That’s what you told us about last time, with James I and the Stuarts of England?”
“Ah!” I said, “But that’s not science, that’s history.”
Jed shrugged. Apparently all subjects were the same to him. “Can you tell us more?”
Growing up as a homeschool scholar in Denver, both of my parents were non-stop teachers. They took seriously the verse in Deuteronomy 6:7 to teach at all times. No matter what we were doing — gardening, family devotions, dishwashing, deer-processing, national popcorn appreciation day, M&Ms — everything was a good excuse to teach. Following my parent’s example, my older brothers would spend all of their lunch break teaching us everything they had learned that day in their high school studies.
This was one of the things I loved about homeschooling: it blurred the line between life and study with no compartmentalization about learning. History, science, math, and making breakfast were interrelated subjects. To learn and to teach were just as natural a part of everyday life as eating and drinking.
I discovered that anything I learned during the course of my studies was not just a fact to be put into short-term memory for an upcoming test; it would become a part of my life as I shared it with all 11 of my siblings. No piece of information was too small or too menial.
I think it was this example of everybody teaching everybody random facts which led Maggie to approach me that day in the garden.
“Amos, did you know that Jonah was swallowed by a big dog?”
I smiled at this. Apparently she had learned this in devotions and thought it was interesting, so she was going to tell me about it, interrupting my history lesson of the Jacobite Revolution, which was led by the Stuarts.
“How’s that, Maggie?” I asked.
Maggie giggled. “Because, in Hebrew, the word ‘dag’ means ‘fish’, so Jonah was swallowed by a big ‘dag!'”
About the Author: Amos C. Wilson
Article originally published in the Homeschool Update Magazine, 2019, Vol. 1.
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