I was reading this old post on Wired For Noise and thinking about all the stress that outing myself as a homeschooler has been giving me lately. I suppose it’s hard because M is right at the age when he would be heading off to kindergarten soon, so I seem to be constantly having to answer the question about whether he will be gong to school next year. And I’m too much of an idealist (or maybe just a bitch?) to pussyfoot around the topic. So I always proclaim that we’ve decided to homeschool, and that M and J won’t ever be attending school. I guess it’s become a sort of test. Depending on their reaction, I decide whether they are likely to continue to be friends with me in the future. If they give me a look that says I’m some kind of freak, I know I won’t be seeing them much more.
On the one hand, this sort of thing is just practical stuff - I likely won’t be making as many contacts with people in the public school realm as time goes on and we move around more in the homeschooling circles. But on the other hand, I see that I’ve been kind of wrong. I was talking over the issue at our new unschooling support group a few weeks ago, and I’ve begun to see that maybe I need to give people more time to deal with my oddities than I’ve been doing so far. I’ve been struggling with how to deal, for instance, with old friends or family that have chosen a way of life that diverges from mine. I’ve been expecting them to be totally supportive of my choices right from the get-go. But I’m beginning to realize that maybe I just need to give other people more time. After all, our family has been making a slow progression towards unschooling for 4 years, and it took me a lot of research and soul-searching to be fully comfortable with my choice. Would it be so hard for me to give other people in my life a little time to get used to the idea that we are, more and more, becoming a not-very-mainstream family? My hope is that if I give people outside our immediate family a little more time that some of the friendships and connections can be salvaged.
Unschooling isn’t all about the kids - it’s about us too. Our attitudes and perceptions and, what’s become very apparent to me, our own desire and capacity for learning. One of my main supporting points for being an unschooler was that I taught myself everything I know for my work. I realized that I wanted to learn something and followed my desire. I also have memories of enjoying learning in school until it became drudgery. I like learning, and it seemingly was dulled out of me for years. Now I find that I’m learning stuff all the time so I thought it would be cool to keep track of things I’ve learned in the past week. Here goes:
- Ancient Egyptian kids had a ponytail above one ear with a shaved head.
- Tadpoles grow REALLY fast, like a millimeter a day. (We got some toad eggs from our neighbors pond and put them in an aquarium)
- The poor polar bear at the Bronx Zoo looks super, super bored. He needs a helluva lot more space than a few hundred square feet, like a few hundred miles.
- Ducks are smart - ours have been heading into their house at sundown.
- If a diaphragm develops an ‘odd film’ on it after a year of steady use, it’s probably going to fail at contraception. (Thanks to a friend’s unexpected tale of pregnancy)
It’s strange to think of myself as being unschooled, but it seems to be true. It was part of an interesting dual existence - part-time schooling and part-time unschooling. I didn’t even think of it as unschooling until an astute parent pointed it out at our local unschooler’s support group. I think it accounts (on some level) for my general disregard for authority and groupthink. Read more »
I’ve had no time to blog lately. We’ve been incredibly busy, which is nice. Spring seems finally to be just around the corner. Being so busy has helped give me more confidence homeschooling wise. I know - they are learning things even when they don’t seem to be doing anything. But still, seeing us all doing stuff gives me more tangible proof that we are all learning. It helps me feel productive. The boredom of winter was really getting on my nerves. Most of my interests entail being outside - nature, gardening, hiking, etc. For weeks at a time, it just wasn’t possible for me to spend much time outside. Since J is only 22 months and likes to rip off her gloves, I just couldn’t keep her outside in freezing weather for long periods of time.
Here are some of things that we’ve been doing lately:
- Yoga. M and I have been taking a parent-child yoga class through our library and it has been great! In preparation, I took a book out of our library called, Children’s Book of Yoga, by Thia Luby. It is really geared to connecting our bodies to the natural world, and M loved looking at it and doing some of the poses with me at home.
- Playing in the mud. The washing machine is still running. Enough said.
- Drawing in our family nature notebook. Arp hasn’t actually contributed to it yet, but M and I have both been drawing a lot, especially in the last week. While it was cold, I was drawing some of the things we’ve found outside while sitting at the dining-room table. It was just too cold outside to hold a pencil very long without gloves on. But in the last week I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawing outside. I’ve made it my business to document the return of Spring.
- Shopping for the ducks and endlessly planning their house. House building day is scheduled for the 18th, and the ducks around the 27th. I feel like I’m waiting for labor to begin. Was that a contraction?! (See, if I was really a dork, I would have said “conquacktion”. But I didn’t. See?)
- Reading up on weird waterfowl illnesses and trying to figure out if I have the guts to suture a duck on my own, or perform my own post-mortem. I’m pretty much viewing this project as halfway between livestock and pet. The question is, how much money am I willing to spend if my ducks get sick? (Obviously I would never leave an animal to suffer.) I’m not sure I know the answer to this yet since this is our first endeavor in a farm-ish sort of project. Time will tell.
M spontaneously wrote the letters “W” and “N” yesterday. I suppose this should further convince me of the efficacy of unschooling. I don’t know why I’m so amazed. I guess part of me just didn’t believe that it would be possible for a child to learn to write and/or read without a lot of formal lessons on the subject. Now, we have done some work on letter awareness. Lots of signing of the alphabet song, letter puzzles, and discussions every so often on the sound that a particular letter makes. He’s also been writing his own name for about 6 months now. But I sort of thought that he really only knew a handful of the letters, and I didn’t think he could write any of them other than the ones in his name and a few others.
So yesterday, we were heading out to a birthday party and he insisted on writing the name of the birthday-boy on the gift-tag. As I told him each letter, I started to ask him if he wanted me to write it down so he could copy it. Before I even finished saying it, he was writing the letter “W”, a letter that I was sure he didn’t know yet. But he did know it, with no formal teaching from me! And in the next instant he surprised me again by knowing the letter “N” too. I’m sure this story is old hat to all the unschoolers out there. But for me it’s one of the first examples of something - that most people assume has be taught in school - being learned independently. Best of all, he wants to write letters without being told to do it, and without worksheets with smiley faces. This stuff is amazing to witness.
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