Enjoy part 2 of Gabriel Morse‘s game series!
Despite my love-hate relationship with games, I do have to admit that they provide great examples for dealing with bigger issues. Just think – if we didn’t have Monopoly, we could so much more easily blame the rich and elite for being exclusively greedy. I mean, who can forget how badly things went after the last Thanksgiving all-nighter huddled over the game board? How about when you had to ban the kids from copying Uncle Joe’s irritating and insincere mockery of the word, “Sorry!” while they purposely cause you trouble? Don’t even get me started on lessons learned from Scrabble or Dominoes.
Sad to say, games and their hilariously evil effect on society are here to stay – just like Despicable Me movies. Calm down. Calm down. I’m joking… Kind of. I mean, what decent, educationally-minded homeschooling parent actually admits to watching that stuff with their kids and grandkids, right? Right. Learning is serious business, and we don’t have time for games, jokes or low brow humor. I mean, really! You’re in my classroom now and you can take this as a stern look and a sharp, wagging finger. Or is it a sharp look, and a stern, wagging finger?
Learning with Games
Ok. Now that we have that settled, what I’m not joking about is how games can teach us something that is not necessarily as easy to quantify and bullet point like something in English Grammar or Mathematics. Again, you might wonder how this relates to 
homeschooling, and I’m so glad you asked.
Learning involves so much more than what our American educational culture makes it out to be. I’ve said before, I am not anti-education. Rather, I am pro-learning, and sad to say those two things are not always the same. Recently, I lived through an example of that myself. I just changed careers and have been starting all over again with long hours in both the classroom and on-the-job training. I sat for endless hours in the same classroom and participated in on-the-job training requirements next to a number of different individuals, many of whom held college degrees. Most of them passed the exams simply because they could retain or memorize what was expected of us.
That does not mean everyone took things seriously or proved their actual competence. I could hear the entire time how some of them merely focused on the benefits, pay rate and official job title. They knew the right words and how to pass a test, but they didn’t seem to care about the true purpose of what they were learning. It was just a game to them. Trust me, when I say that there are certain professions where you really want professionals working on your behalf and not jokers.
Learning with Humor
Talking about games and jokers brings me round-robin to how this impacts your child-student. Getting a good education isn’t a game, but you do want you and your child to approach learning with humor. It’s a whole lot easier when you can laugh at and enjoy yourself rather than be frustrated and angry. Personally, I wish now that I’d had the maturity to laugh at myself, at the time. Not only from my own life lessons, but those of my children as well.
There was the year we struggled with teaching one of our sons to read until we started reading an illustrated copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped to him and allowed him to wear a pirate outfit and a sword every day.
One child didn’t understand fractions until we spent an entire afternoon with a bunch of canning jars full of hamburger, potatoes, green beans, carrots and corn, asking, “Now if dinner takes a whole of six jars, and two of them are potatoes, what part of dinner is potatoes?” Trust me when I say the answer was “Mashed potatoes”, not “one-third.”
Then there was the time both my wife and I struggled to get our children interested in biology or chemistry until magically our neighbor, a police officer, helped them. It took a while for us to discover the reason they learned to enjoy it, and why we had no fish left in our pond… His skill was in making things go Kaboom! even under water.
Since then, I’ve learned to laugh a little more about those “learning moments”, but I sometimes worry that in my frustration, I actually passed some lessons on to them that weren’t on the syllabus. That’s my mistake, but it doesn’t have to be yours. As I’ve always said, both teaching and learning take effort, and what you put into it is a reflection of what you end up with. So what is it that you want your children to end up with? That they remember their education with fear, frustration, impatience or anger; or as something better?
Taking a New Approach
You see, through two careers I’ve managed to avoid math like the plague. I’ve even gifted the bookkeeping and bills to my wife. (Honey, you are absolutely the best bookkeeper ever, and I owe you a lot for all of that extra work.) Why did I do all of that? It isn’t only because it keeps us out of financial trouble. It’s also because when I see math, I remember numerous bad things happening that shouldn’t have been part of a child’s education. When my children see math, they remember the fun they had learning it and they now use it to create amazing food, design furniture, or build houses and highways. I do it grudgingly because I learned to hate it and all the misery that came with it, and they learned because they enjoyed and understood its purpose. That didn’t happen because the textbook changed, but the approach did.
I’m not saying to turn your classroom into a three-ring circus with midget cars and tumbling clowns. Far from it. Giving your children the best education possible is very serious business, but there are ways and then there are “waaaays”. (And yes, you can add that word to your growing dictionary. In my book, it’s a descriptive noun as well as an action verb which denotes “something far better than the standard method currently
being employed.”) The point is that allowing my son to wear a pirate vest, head scarf, and a plastic sword to leverage the adventure of learning to read did not wreak havoc on the classroom.
In fact, a mixture of tying his appearance and imagination, and me taking turns reading Kidnapped out loud using different voices helped incentivize some of our other children to learn to read as well. This provided the momentum to begin short question and answer sessions which turned into short, written, bullet points which expanded into full book reports. Yes, the process took longer. Yet staying strictly with the textbook would have gained us the usual rewording of the flyleaf book description and author biography many students do rather than what we actually gained with passionate, descriptive, and fun-to-read book reports.
I don’t know. It just seems like there are the textbook methods and then there are waaays. It can’t all be fun and games, but maybe it’s worth a shot for a few frustrated parent/teachers to find the sense of humor they lost back when they went to school.
More About the Author:
Gabriel is a former homeschooled missionary kid and homeschooling father who adores his wife, children, and grandchildren. He is currently rebuilding a 130-year-old homestead, writing a historical fiction book on character for young people, and mentoring young men. He is a former U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondent, Army National Guard Photographer, and U.S. Army Deputy Public Affairs representative and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication. He lived in Central America during Junior High and served on military short and long-term assignments across the U.S. and in half a dozen countries, including Iraq during his military career. Besides his deep faith and his family, his passion is writing and developing young men into capable steward leaders. You can find Gabriel on Instagram here.
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