Hanson's Ridge
I often think about my dad in my homeschooling vision. That might be surprising to some, because he was not homeschooled and neither was I. My dad attended a mix of Catholic and public schools, and I went to public school for all thirteen years of grade school. So when I say that my dad inspires me as a home educator, it's not because of actual homeschool experience. It's because of his own school experiences and his actions as an adult.
My dad was not a good student. He got in quite a bit of trouble at school. Once he got a thrashing for doing a homework assignment in red pen. I know it was the era. And there are plenty of teachers even now who wouldn't accept an assignment done in anything but the typical colors. He was also disciplined once for plagiarism...only he didn't plagiarize. The teacher (I think it was the same one as the red pen incident but I'm not sure) simply didn't believe he was capable of such well-written work. Fortunately, my grandmother pulled him from the school after that. My dad was brilliant, but he didn't do well with conforming. He didn't always fit in with his family, he dropped out of college, and then when he joined the army instead, he didn't fit that mold either. When he was in basic training and ordered to camouflage his tent, he spent his day uprooting and transplanting bushes, cutting branches, and overall doing a fantastic job hiding his tent. Then he crawled inside with a good book. No one could find him. He ended up having to do extra KP duty as a punishment. It's not really a surprise that a desk job wasn't his thing. He was a landscape architect, a community management guru, a marketing consultant, and an expert on aging. He wrote books and spoke at conferences. And almost every single night in memory, he went to bed with a book in his hands. His books are filled with annotations, sometimes on a sticky note but mostly right on the page. He read about marketing and landscaping, sure, but he read about neuroscience and anthropology and animal behavior. He read about religion and history. He occasionally read fiction, but vastly preferred nonfiction. After he passed away, I catalogued the remaining books in his library: well over 500 volumes. That was after significant downsizing both during his final days and immediately afterward. He never did go back to college. Yet anyone who knew him would describe him as an educated man. He had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and he never stopped thinking and writing. He spent his final lucid hours revising his last book, and even his less lucid thoughts were intellectual in nature. In one of our last conversations, he woke in a panic thinking he was supposed to be on a conference call with George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Admiral T-- (my brother-in-law, who is not an admiral but is enjoying a very successful naval career). I can only wonder what they were supposed to discuss. My dad encouraged me to be a lifelong learner as well. He taught me to read by accident, simply by reading to me every night and underlining the words with his finger. I valued books from the beginning because he did. He loved surprising me with books, or wandering bookstore aisles together. (Back when we had many bookstores to choose from, even in one town!) He talked to me about things far beyond my understanding, assuming that I would catch up or ask questions. Quantum physics? No big deal. He read the newspaper every morning, and despaired of my lack of knowledge of current events during my young adulthood. Classical music was a constant in our home, and he once paid me to learn how to play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata on the piano. He loved beauty. He loved passionate debate and was not afraid to be a devil's advocate. All this from a kid who did poorly in school. I'm sure most of his teachers thought he'd never amount to anything. They may have even thought he was stupid. Really, he just didn't fit the mold. One final thought: When we were deciding which books to bring home and put on our own shelves, Himself said: "All of them. It's like having your dad's brain."
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AuthorHi! I'm Stephanie Hanson. I live with my husband, Himself, on Hanson's Ridge in Virginia. Archives
September 2017
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