Why Core?
“What is the core of what we are offering families?” I asked myself on a run shortly after the board meeting. We had been batting around different ideas, surveyed our families, had extended conversations on the board, and our only recent accomplishment was to decide that none of the options on the table were resonating with the mission and vision we had been beginning to articulate.
What we did keep coming back to was the idea of love — loving our families and children, God and neighbor, our subject matter and joys and challenges of homeschooling. Love was at the core. And that’s when it occurred to me that the word “core” is from the Latin word cor, meaning “heart.”
So the core of our “why” as an organization is love, and that manifests itself in our approach to education: around the table, metaphorically but also pretty literally. Whether we are discussing great literature, plotting a great event in history, proving an algebraic theorem, or balancing a chemical equation, we approach it as in interactive, engaging activity that we partake in together. We don’t deliver the lessons from the front of the room as students take notes, rather, we sit at the table with them, coming alongside them for the love of learning.
And that imagery of the table worked its way into the logo: the “o” in Core is a table with chairs around it, highlighting how central this approach is for us.
And one final point about choosing “Core” — we focus on the full-year core subjects: English, history, mathematics, and science. These tend to be the ones that families need the most help with to cover in their homeschool curriculum, so they are at the heart of what we offer.
