What the next 10 years will bring

Recently, my husband and I were watching the biopic "Jobs" about Steve Jobs' early life. It was an amazing reminder and realization that things have changed so rapidly in the last ten years that we cannot even possibly conceive what the next ten years will bring. Fourteen years ago, there were no i-devices, no such thing as an iPod except in a concept lab. Fast forward to 2014 and everyone has a smartphone and holds more computing power in their pockets than we had in my entire college computer lab.

All of this fast-paced, quick changing innovation creates an indeterminate future for our kids. When I was a kid, my friends wanted to be firemen, policemen, doctors and teachers. The boldest and bravest wanted to be astronauts. While we certainly still have a need for those positions and people now, the job has changed significantly, even in traditional careers. Doctors need to skype in to a consult and do surgery with a robot. Teachers need to be on the cusp of technology to even answer student questions, let alone flip a classroom or blog for parents. Technology has changed fire science, police profiling and everything in between.

When my son says he wants to man a mission to Mars, this isn't an adorable childhood dream anymore. This is the reality of the next twenty years. As an academic homeschooler, how do I prepare him for a future where a mission to Mars is a distinct possibility? How do I give him the resources he needs to be able to not only dream it, but to make it happen?

I certainly don't have all the answers, nor do I know if I'm even on the right path. I'm fairly certain that just like any other kid, twenty years from now, he'll blame me for all the things I didn't teach him! But I still work on it all the time, considering what I need to do and how to provide the resources to give him all the opportunities possible for a future that I cannot even predict.

What I know for certain is that he'll need higher levels of math and science and earlier on, than we traditionally teach in US schools. He'll need to be able to work on a team, to create individually and present to a group, to take criticism as a guide for improvement not as a critique. If he can dream big and persevere to make those dreams come true, he will have all the tools he needs to make fantastic contributions to a world that doesn't even exist yet.