Reflections about Home School Teachers

You provide three things to your children who are your students that are very rare in our public schools that also are extraordinarily valuable: unconditional love; a catalyst for learning; and fundamental values.

1. You are a source of unconditional love for your students:

• You hold the lives of your remarkable children in your hands and in your hearts.
• You see in these young people gifts they often do not see in themselves.
• You inspire them to take their gifts seriously.
• You enable them to work hard to develop their gifts.
• You empower them to begin to excel and to understand what that really means.

2. You are a catalyst in that magical transmutation of the locus of learning from outside to within:

• At some point, your presence as the source of knowledge and expertise at the Teacher becomes less critical, less necessary, and less important.
• As that happens, the locus of learning shifts from your voice to your students’ own voices.
• When that happens, what your students learn from one another and on their own becomes more significant to them than what they learn from you.
• For they are beginning to acquire their own passion for lifelong learning.
• And your role has shifted from that of expert to that of mentor, guide, coach, and even cheerleader.

3. You conserve, foster, and enhance fundamental values, and you share this wisdom with your students to use in their lives beyond school:

• Your students are called by the Cosmos to live lives of meaning and purpose which they must find midst the cacophony of choices confronting them.
• Each of your students has been given unique gifts and experiences to develop over a lifetime to use to serve others who uniquely need them.
• In responding to personal and pandemic change, your students must reinvent their occupations and professions perhaps three or four times during their lifetimes.
• The world has gotten smaller, faster, more complex, more contentious, and more dangerous.
• Therefore, your students’ lifelong abilities to communicate, collaborate, solve problems, resolve conflicts, and meet ever-changing challenges—will be the enduring coin of their lives.