a glimpse into my journey toward unschooling

Sunday afternoon a young friend of the family asked me how Henry learns.  In what environment do we "have classes"?  What subjects does he study, and when?  Who teaches him?  These questions used to make me feel sweaty and afraid.  Of course children who attend fairly traditional schools will want to know what goes on in a different type of classroom, i.e. the classroom of life.  Why should I let these kinds of questions bother me?

I've come to see that it's not the question at all, but my personal feelings about breaking with "tradition."  Going into homeschooling--pondering it and such--I felt like a tourist looking on.  I didn't feel its terrain "belonged" to me.

Now I see that as a false perception--not just on my own part, but on anyone's.  Learning is not a foreign land.  It "belongs" to all of us.  Whether we or our children learn in "traditional" classrooms, or in the car on the way to the traditional classroom, we are all learners, all the time.

There's a simple truth, but it's profounder than I can wrap my head around.  Each one of us is responsible for his or her learning.  Parents are responsible for holding the space in which their children learn, and that can mean choosing to send their children to a school.  It can also mean choosing to educate them in other ways.

I now see that my job is not to educate Henry.  Neither is doing so Joel's job.  Together we have experienced that Henry learns what he wants to and is ready to learn.  We, or I'll just speak for myself, I love, repeat:  LOVE facilitating Henry's learning when he is ready to know more about something.  It is a joy to feel and witness his readiness to claim skills and explore subject areas--conventional and otherwise.

It sounds cliche to me at this point, but I can't argue with something so true it has become an aphorism:  life is for learning.  All of life is for learning.  I'm delighted to be a learner now, and delighted to watch my husband, our children, our parents, our neighbors, our wider circle of friends, continue to be learners.

Now.  I guess I was going to say something about unschooling.  I've read some John Holt and liked him.  There are websites.  Dayna Martin, a self-styled unschooling expert, has been my greatest teacher.  While I used to think, Wow!  Have you got the nerve to put yourself out there like that!  I now see her as a caring friend.  That woman has inspired me to let go of fear and enjoy life.  Check her and her resources out.  She has a powerful way of addressing the perceptions that can stand in the way of our living with the kind of joy and purpose most of us (all of us, no?) really want to claim.

She has helped me tremendously in my mothering journey.  That's for sure.  A six on the enneagram, I've got fear d.o.w.n.  What I've needed to work on is trust.  Ah, yes.  I've known that, but giving myself permission to trust rather than be afraid in a culture where parenting and educating are simply fraught with fear-based habits, behaviors, assumptions...why, THAT is another matter.

Be well, dear readers.  I cherish this space for checking in with you and myself.  Also love reading your blogs, whether I subscribe to you or have just "met" you.

It's about passion, and some other things

Just a while ago we returned from a Kansas Day celebration with others in our home school co-op. Kansas isn't my home state, but I'm learning more about it than I ever knew about Missouri, because Kansans are proud people. I like that about them. They know their state insect and state tree, and they really, truly celebrate their identity. Real Kansas Day is January 29, but we've had snow and severely cold weather these last few weeks, along with a couple almost-70-degree days, so we met today instead of two weeks ago.

The thing I loved most about this morning was meeting a local member of an organization called "The Brotherhood of Mountain Men," or something like that. He said there are only 400 members of this nationwide organization. Just back from a camping get-together in Oklahoma, where he awoke to snow and three degrees above zero (F) air, this guy smelled like another place in time. He brought his beaver musk for us to smell (can't remember what it was called, but, in sight and scent it was like delicately fermented ground-up organ meat). He brought buffalo-bladder-and-buckskin storage bags, knives, rifles, pistols, buffalo hides, buffalo hair socks, deerskin and wool cold-weather slippers, a porcupine-quill-embellished pipe holder, parfleches, and a host of other things, all so very appealing to the kinesthetic learner in me--especially the smell parts. It's really something to be in a room with someone who, along with his things, has an odor. Yes, an odor. Not a bad odor, but an outdoors odor.

This kind of thing just excites me no end. Whether the discipline be computer circuit-bending or historical re-enacting or knitting (and the accompanying carding and spinning) or something in the fields of science or math or literature...I don't care. Show me your passion (and your reverence for life), and I will love what you do and who you are, even if I didn't first think I would like you or agree with you.

I really feel grateful for this type of learning, because it's not just for Henry the homeschooler, it's for me too. Learning is a lifetime process and I love to learn. I love to learn!

twelfth night

Here it is, the end of the Christmas season. I have photos and stories I would like to share but there's not time for that right now. I am feeling a delightful fullness at eleven p.m. What a long, full day it has been, but satisfying. The lights and ornaments on our beautiful tree keep me company as I reflect on the day. It began, atypically, at 6:30 a.m. I woke, dressed (with lots of layers), drove across town to order and pay for our milk and eggs, drove back, woke Henry at a little after 7:00, watched a bit of Curious George with him, ate part of my homemade yogurt, homemade granola and crunchy apple breakfast, zipped out the door at 7:30 for a three mile walk--yippee!, came back, got ready for our dear neighbor to come over and play with Henry, watched the boys play as I tried to get a few things done around the house. Had a mid-morning sweet potato, red pickled cabbage, pickle, broccoli snack, took them out on an errand, came back home, ate grass-fed t-bone steak and sweet potato and more broccoli an pickle for lunch, hurried, hurried, hurried out the door to get Henry to the nature center in time for our class. Enjoyed the class conducted around the theme of "Duck, Goose or Swan?" that included a jeopardy-style contest between parents and children--so much fun and challenging to my limited powers of observation, enjoyed a slow ride (with apple, nuts and chocolate chips) to the doctor's office as my I-wish midwife and for-real doula drove Henry and her boy to art club, savored the doctor's words to "keep it boring," (that's just soothing to me because he seems to think my having a vbac is so profoundly uninteresting...which is just what I was hoping for in a doctor), sat down and visited with my friend/doula (yippee again), had delicious gelato with the boys and the doula friend at a nearby cafe, hurried home, let Henry off at the front door, zipped to Hesston, where I pretended to lead the retirement community's men's chorus, stopped by to see my parents in their new apartment, drove back home, stopping by on the way to pick up our milk and eggs, groused and yelled when I walked in the door about the table not being cleared of lunch dishes and socks being on the floor (what good that did, I really don't know; think it was useless, unwelcome complaining), watched a little of a special on the advent of Buddhism on PBS, helped Henry get ready for bead, talked with his two Webkins and watched him draw in his diary, began to read chapter 21 of Little House on the Prairie, went to the bathroom while Joel read on, kissed Henry good night, came to the kitchen to make something to eat...more sweet potato, this time festooned with some cilantro, green onion, some chunks of elderly avocado, plenty of salt and butter, some more pieces of t-bone steak, finished off with the last piece of Sara's Christmas baklava. Now it is time for bed. Whew! Thank you, God. Thank you, life.

an emerging perspective on education

Our word educate comes from the Greek word "to give," if memory is serving me correctly. In education we are introduced to vantage points from which to view the world. I hope for Henry's life windows to be broad enough to capture many, many different views.Play is the primary work of childhood. Responsibility is important, but identity (and initiative) emerge from play. I am so grateful for memories of my mother saying something to the effect of, "I will do this work right now. Your job is to play." My friend Jen's family of origin said it well on the walls of the home where they once lived: "The days that make us happy make us wise."

Whether or not he values these things now, I hope for Henry's life to be full of the real deal: real flowers, homemade food, things made and repaired by human hands belonging to people he loves.

_______

Learning happens all the time. I want to give our days together enough structure to hold us in, but enough freedom to allow all three (and then four) of us to do what we need and want to do.

I try the intentional "lesson" on occasion, but we seem to be rearing a boy who prefers learning through his own initiative. Perhaps he would thrive in a classroom setting where the learning goals are set out for him. Perhaps he would not. What I know is that I love, love, love it when he spells out words for me and asks me what they are. Yesterday's finds from an Arby's animal identification kit: s-w-i-f-t-f-o-x, m-o-u-n-t-a-i-n-g-o-a-t and skunk ("...but I already knew that one," he told me). I love learning things together, like the fact that most birds in the world are "passerine" (I think), but the hornbill (which we will be studying at the homeschool co-op this week) is non-passerine, meaning it doesn't sing a song and its young are (probably ...maybe?) precocial (don't need feeding from parents) as opposed to altricial, which means needing feeding...

I want to acquire some Waldorf main lesson books for drawing, but right now we are content doing daily journal entries in the little green diary with a lock on it that he requested when we went to buy school supplies.

I am beginning to feel a little more happily placed as a "home-schooling mom" even though that label still makes me bristle a bit if I stop to consider the assumptions about me it may cause others to form.

Glory be!

icu nurok

I can't get this silly They Might Be Giants song out of my head. We have been listening to it a lot lately, partly because Henry is enjoying the album more now that he is beginning to do a little (more) reading and sounding out. What a curious thing it is (to a five-year-old and a 37-yr-old) that letters can mean or at least sound like words. Here are the lyrics to the song I'm thinking of along with a translation link.

urnx
urnx, ni, imnx
ictv
ictv, nicu
icu, icu, nurok
urnx
urnx, ni, iw
icatv, icadvd, nicu
icu, icu, nurok
icu, icu, nurok

the anchors of life

What a wonderful day it has been: an opportunity to run, play and learn with Wichita independent homeschoolers and dear friends, a first-time visit to City Arts, a ride home with Aunt Libby, whose assemblage birthday gift to Aunt Becky makes me smile whenever I think of it.Here's another thing that makes me smile: two figurines in dialogue on my wardrobe. An annunciation, perhaps. Or maybe just a conversation. Two aspects of myself, both gifts from friends.
And, at the end of the day, tea with Joel...well, sort of. He's watching SCTV and I am blogging. But we're almost together in the same room, sipping tea.The teabag tag says, "Love, compassion and kindness are the anchors of life." I have received all three of these things today, along with a lot of joy. May these be your anchors.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Conrad Stawski was a humanities teacher I took a wonderful summer class from when I was fifteen. Wow, that was an amazing class. Called "Picasso, Andy Warhol, How did we get here?" or something like that, it shaped me in a deep, deep way. So rewarding to be able to give that kind of attention to something so "grownup" when I was that age. I hope for those same experiences for Henry. There's something about the humanities that just gets my synapses firing. Better than any drug I think I could try! So, the quote above is one of the things Mr. Stawski started the class out with. Wikipedia translates it two ways. "In matters of taste there is no dispute." Or, more commonly rendered, "There's no accounting for taste."

That said, here's a movie I really like. Interesting that YouTube classifies it as horror, as I didn't really think I liked that genre. It picks up on some of the things I really love: remnants of the past, dusty things, china teacups, children playing with real life things (but not if they draw more than a tiny amount of blood), magical surrealism. If you haven't already seen Jan Svankmajer's Alice, I hope this clip provides an exciting introduction. We're borrowing the movie longterm from one of our friends (I think we've had it for five years now), so you're welcome to borrow it from us...I think!

A treasure from homeschooling land

Our friends Leeala, Fallon and Story Blithe came to visit this evening. (We missed you, Doug, if you're reading this). I have learned much from Leeala and Doug and admire the way they're parenting and homeschooling their two daughters. A visit with Leeala is a treat because she is so generous with me, always bringing new books and ideas my way. Tonight she brought us Peter in Blueberry Land, a new book for Henry. I love the mice pulling the berry wagon on the cover of this classic (not to me, but I guess to many people) book by Elsa Beskow.

How do I put this? When Leeala gives me these things I feel like I'm communing with another world, one that I would like to enter (namely, homeschooling), but feel somewhat barred from. I suppose it is mostly an inner barrier I am facing. As I (along with Joel) deliberate about how to do this, I'm having a hard time letting go of the worry that all this time spent with Joel and me (mostly me) might expose me to be a nagging, worrying, clingy mother who won't let her son cut loose and grow. Oh, and that opens up a whole 'nother ball of worries. Am I keeping him from learning to be polite and obedient like "other children"? Am I / are we allowing him to dabble too much, keeping him from developing the gifts of self-discipline and self-restraint? Will I mess him up by keeping him, an only child, from playing with others for so much of the day?

By no means do I think any of these questions merit an automatic and unequivocal, "yes." But this is the stuff I'm wrestling with. That and the fact Henry has told us he'd like to go to public school with his friends. We value his opinion, but I can see that there could be a great gift for him in learning at home while maintaining a host of "outside" relationships--with neighborhood friends, family, other homeschoolers in Wichita and Newton, and mentors who are older than he.

I pray for wisdom in all of this. I am planning to request a conversation with the principal (or someone) from our elementary school. I'm pretty clear that I, personally, would like to give homeschooling a try. And I think I speak pretty accurately when I say that Joel is open to giving it a try. But what if Henry just isn't "into" it. I think the idea of giving homeschooling a dry run has some merits, but that's kind of hard to do (a) before you're officially of kindergarten age and already in a marvelous preschool program or (b) when all other kids are enjoying summer break. Giving it a test drive this fall could, I believe, provide us with some real momentum. But I'm afraid. Afraid of Henry (possibly) resisting it every step of the way, or resenting us/me for asking him to do this instead of going to "real school." I guess it all just leaves me in a position of wanting and needing to pray about it and let it continue to unfold.

I know life will be worth living either way, or in some hybridized form of the two (that last option being--I think--fairly typical of the way our family tends to live and move in the world). That gives me peace. All shall be well, any which way... ultimately.