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Millenium or No Millenium, That is the Question

© Joan Archer

Recently our local newspaper has printed several letters, both from those who have scientific proof that 2000 is not the beginning of the new millenium, just the last of the last millenium, and from those who believe because the year begins with a "2" that means it is the new millenium, and here we go into the next century.

Whichever way you believe, it is obviously the beginning of a new year, one that will take us in many directions. I believe homeschooling in the next year as well as the next millenium (whenever it decides to show up!) will continue to increase, due to the sheer numbers of students to be taught. I believe sooner or later, we will do away with the public school building entirely, keeping it only as a home base for the educational system while kids are taught nearly exclusively in their own homes via the home computer. Of course, there will still be those parents who desire the more "posh" atmosphere of the private school, but these will become more and more exclusive as the years progress. People will learn to do more home based things, and the family will return into being the core of the home and the community. Okay, so much for Mrs. Nostradamus. Let's explore what my students will be working on for this New Year celebration.

We will be making a Time Capsule for our yard. We will encase some collectibles in a non-biodegradable tube to be dug up at a much later date. I am thinking a newspaper from January 1, 2000 among photos of our family and our home as it looks today would be good items to include in the tube.

I think it would also be nice to include some letters from my sons about what they think the future will be like. I also like to make these letters for my files, and ask the boys to write what they would like to be doing ten years from today, and keep those in my files to be opened in ten years. This is a sort of "time capsule", and I wait impatiently to see if their predictions about themselves and their world actually come to pass.

A good class project would be to make a list of items that the students feel would be significant reminders of this year. We have gotten some lively discussions about what is significant and what is not, and some of those suggestions illustrate that children really are thinking about the world as a whole picture. It can really reveal their poetic, philosophical, serious and comical sides and provide a real picture of what makes your particular kid "tick".

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