This kitchen will be the death of us
There’s nothing like a major remodeling job to illuminate the cracks and fissures in every day life. All those petty little annoyances are made bigger by our to-be-dismantled cupboards and the haphazard conversations with contractors. But it will be grand when it’s done. Well, grand being relative because our little house really doesn’t aspire to true grandiosity.
More on unschooling because I am thinking about it.
Most of my close friends are either public schooling or (in the case of a few) using a curriculum and regular lessons at home. We all used to want to homeschool when our children were smaller and it’s ironic to think that now I — one of the least passionate about homeschooling — will be the only one of our original group who is still homeschooling as of next year. But you know, life happens and so most of them have kids in school.
It’s a little lonely out here.
I do have one good friend — my original La Leche League leader — who is unschooling but I don’t get to see her that much. Our kids are also the wrong age although she has a baby close to Madison’s age so when they’re older, maybe we’ll end up seeing more of each other. She is a different kind of unschooler than I am. She is much more involved (in a good way) with her children’s learning and then, too, she doesn’t have a job like I do so her life more easily centers around her kids.
Oh wait, what I wanted to write was more about how I’m realizing that I might need to build a new community to meet my schooling needs. Not Noah’s because his are met just by showing up at various events; he’s been easy. But my needs are more complicated.
I am actually not all that angst-y about how we do our homeschooling. I have my moments but they’re nothing too serious and so I’ve been on the local unschooling list but haven’t made it to any of their meetings or potlucks. I think I’d feel out of place there anyway. I’m not sure why this is or if I should do anything about it.
My school-at-home friends seem to struggle more than I do and I think that this is because the way they are schooling makes them more focused on visible accomplishments. I have no value judgment about this — if those things matter to you then they matter to you. If you’re working through a curriculum that expects your child to master certain skills in a certain order, then of course you’re going to have an investment in their skill mastery. That’s fine. I get that. I sometimes yearn for more structure so I could see recordable progress and I’m somebody who doesn’t really value that kind of learning so if I was someone who does, I can imagine how much more compelling my child’s measurable accomplishments would be.
Does that make sense?
Anytime I start thinking, “Hey, Noah isn’t doing this and doesn’t know that,” which happens occasionally when one particular school-at-home friend starts bragging on her kid (I’m not bashing here — her kid is braggable), I remind myself that I need to be looking only at Noah and what he’s doing and I am doing this only from the perspective of the educational values that we’ve embraced in our family. It helps keep me sane.
So back to that comment that unschooling works for every child. It can’t unless it works for every parent. Unschooling is not the default choice; it’s not more “natural” than other kinds of schooling although sometimes really committed unschoolers will argue that it is. But the thing is, unschooling doesn’t work if you believe that part of living is climbing across the concrete accomplishments encouraged by more traditional forms of schooling, whether that be at home or in a building. What I mean is that ultimately your life is a series of experiences, right? And the sum of those experiences? I personally think that getting an A on a test is essentially meaningless in a very broad sense. I don’t think that tests are a true measure of knowledge, I don’t value the kinds of learning that are measured by tests, I don’t think that a grade on a single test says anything about the individual who earned it. But another person might really value those things that lead up to an A on a test. They might really value the experience of that kind of learning. It’s not just the A, standing alone starkly on a report card; it’s everything leading up to the A. For someone who wants their child to have that experience, unschooling would be a terrible terrible choice.
Now we can argue ’til the cows come home about whether or not those studious experiences mean anything and what they mean and if the work to get an A and the A itself has any worth and it wouldn’t matter what either of us said because there is no unassailable truth about education.
Dawn do you have to give Noah any kind of standardized test or prove to your district you are educatiing him? Just curious, we would have to here.
I agree with you on the testing thing. Some people are good test takers but retain little knowledge beyond that. Our 7th graders had quizzes this year on Africa, they have never had anything like that. Some of them really got into it and loved the feedback, others could not have cared less.
Even the most regimented educational systems are really so very arbitrary. When I look back over my own education, which was fabulous–but entirely by accident–I realize how at any stage something could have gone an entirely different way and I could have ended up somebody else.
Partly this is because my interests are so wide-ranging that I can imagine many different outcomes.
But all of my education decisions were made by factors outside my (or my parents’) control or else in ways that were seemingly petty or arbitrary at the time.
So I guess if unschooling is marked by a sort bouncing around from interest-to-interest on the part of the child then it’s no more arbitrary than school would be. And who’s to say what arbitrary bounce is better–the one that puts a Baptist kid in Catholic school because the local first grade PS burned down a month before the fall semester or the one that sends a six year-old to the library for every book on lizards that was ever written?
Life is long, the world is big, there are infinite things to know. It’s all kind of unschooling, when it comes right down to it.
I had a really long comment full of all my wisdom (you’ll just have to believe me ;-)), but then my battery went dead on mylaptop and I lost it all.
So now I’ll just give a really lame, I agree. We’ve been unschoolers, we’ve had curriculum, we’ve muddled along and so far everyone seems fine. And the only reason we swing back and forth between these various things is because of me and my own needs.
On a completely unrelated note,I have a friend who has password protection on her blog only for certain entries.
I think you said it best - “there is no unassailable truth about education.”
I’m glad you are able to educate Noah in the way that works best for you. I am glad your neighbors are able to educate their kids in the way that works best for them. Etc, etc, on and anon.
The journey of being at home with the kids has been an interesting one. I marvel at how far I have come. From school at home, to eclectic, to unschooling, to child led. Now it is just so much a part of our lives that it doesn’t really have a name. (But that is only in the now.)
The best thing we do for both kids and the stay at home adult is organize and attend a weekly park day. There is a central one that has a playground where we meet when the weather is warm and it also has a heated shelter with indoor picnic tables and flush toilets for winter. (I use the term organize very loosely here. It means that I make sure that news of it is in the calendar of events each month and other than that I leave it alone.)
PS. have you read Inside Transracial Adoption? If so what did you think of it?