Rocks and Nerds

One interesting aspect of homeschooling for our family was the people we met as we looked for resources to learn more about our interests. When my son developed an interest in fossils and rocks, we discovered there were actually clubs for rock lovers. But they call themselves by more sophisticated names, usually having geological society in there somewhere. We found a group and went to their meetings and discovered the members to be extremely welcoming of a mom and two elementary age kids.

See, it didn't matter how old we were, how much knowledge we had of the topic, etc. What mattered is that we had a common interest. We had a great time with these people, learning all about the science of rocks.

One of the members took quite a liking to us and I guess sort of decided he would be our mentor. He even took our whole family on a special, private field trip to collect rocks and fossils. He had been granted special permission to go inside a local quarry and invited us to come along. He showed us how to find crystals and fossils, how to extract them from the adjoining rock and explained the details of each rock, fossil and crystal we found.

In short, he was our teacher for the day. But none of us thought we were in school.

We were having so much fun and my husband was too, but he still thought it was kind of strange, that we were all so interested in rocks. While we were taking a lunch break, my husband kind of offhandedly joked, "Gosh I hope we don't turn our kids into nerds."

And that's when our new-found friend really went off. He reminded us that this was just our old way of thinking that we learned in school, that if you were interested in scientific ideas and such, then you were generally called names like "nerd" and teased a lot. I could tell by the way he relayed this information, that he suffered through this himself.

He taught John and I a lot that day, and it wasn't all just about the science of rocks.