What Did You Learn Today At School?

Home schooling offers up a lot of unique educational experiences. We can cozy up in the living room and read a book together, or we can meet with other families to learn as a group. When you are alone with your children, you can laugh at the strange ideas and games they invent. When you join other families, you risk offending them with your children’s oddities. Take, for example, the Phileas Fogg Geography Club. For about four years now we have been gathering with several other families to learn about different regions of the world. One of the moms will give a quick “tour” through the region, and then each child will present a country’s interesting geographic and cultural facts. We share foods from our countries, and then head home having enjoyed a meal and learned some interesting facts about our world. After lunch, the kids run outside to play for a while, and the moms enjoy a quiet moment of visiting with other adults. It all seems very benign, until the children enter the scene. Today the boys auctioned off the girls. It has come up several times that in some African cultures, men will pay a girl’s parents for the right to marry her. The boys decided this was an interesting fact to pick up on, and developed a “game” of auctioning off the girls. #1, the self-proclaimed auctioneer, came inside to inform one of the mothers that her daughter’s price was now up to five goats. Thankfully the mother played along and said she would prefer something different than a goat as she didn’t have a need for five goats. Another girl wandered in and said she had only sold for one chicken. I started to tell her that she needed to work on selling herself, but caught myself in time. I think I said she needed to improve on her self-promotion. When we left, #2 told me that he had bought R. for five goats and twenty chickens. I asked why G. only sold for a single chicken and R.’s price was so high. Well, that was obvious. G.’s brother didn’t want to buy her, and that left A.P. without any competition for the bidding. “So, how much did N. go for,” I queried. The reply, “Who would want to buy her? She’s too young to be able to take care of you.” So in Geography today we learned that demand is limited by desire of the market. I learned that girls aren’t worth anything until they can take care of you. And I learned that my sons will spend my animals (money) without asking first. I also learned that my friends are just as odd as we are.