I was just writing this on our local homeschool support list (well, unschool support list) — it’s a whole new world unschooling Madison.
Noah was and is an extremely independent unschooler. The surest way to ruin anything for him was to try to lead him — he is a kid who wants to find his own way and will let us know if he needs our help. Even casually offering help might be enough to make him shut down and in some ways this has made him easy to homeschool because he just wanted us to let him be and so we let him be. When Brett has wanted him to do something more structured, they work it out by making sure Noah has the bulk of the responsibility. So with math, which is the one piece where Brett doesn’t feel good about letting go (I’m more laid back than he is about it — we make a nice team), he gives Noah a loose set of goals and then leaves it to Noah to meet them.
Madison is different. Madison LOVES input. She loves being led. She loves activity. This makes her easier to homeschool in a totally different way because anything you come up with, she will get excited about. I tell you, it’s a nice change to share a project idea and not be met with a stony glare. But I’m grateful that Madison didn’t come first because if she had, I would have pushed her because she is pushable. She is trainable. She is all about parental approval and we could have turned her into a little achievement monster pretty darn easily.
But Noah came first and cemented my theories that were just theories. Like I SAID I didn’t want to raise over-achievers but then why was I pushing Noah academically when he was a preschooler? I’ll tell you why — because I was just SAYING that; I didn’t mean it. As a formerly gifted child whose self worth was wrapped up in having adults make a fuss over me, I had a lot of deschooling to do myself. When I first thought about homeschooling, I had visions of those wacky homeschoolers who prove all the schooled kids wrong by achieving all the the traditional goals untraditionally. (See this book here.) I really needed to have a kid who would say NO to me. I needed a kid who refused to buy into the nonsense I was still buying into and who would remind me that children are not trained monkeys.
Noah rejected all the tricks of the theoretically not schooling homeschoolers. He didn’t want to trace alphabet letters on sandpaper or make letter collages. He did not want me to point to each word as I read out loud to him (he’d shove my hand off the page). He was uninterested in all the Ruth Beechick activities and so I gave up — not on him, mind you. I gave up on making him do things my way. I thought long and I thought hard and I thought either I had to walk my pontificating talk or I may as well send the kid to school.
Noah, so far, is thriving. He’s smart (ask anyone), he’s confident and he’s happy. He’s at the top of his religious school class and he reads a book a day. And he does this in spite of having a mother who still cares way too much out the outcome of the IQ test she took when she was 10.
I’ll admit that I have to TELL myself not to push Madison because like I said, she is pushable. I could probably turn her into a trick pony with very little effort because she has an amazing memory and some serious smarts but with Noah as my proof, I’m trusting in a continued course of benign neglect.
I’ll admit though, it is awfully nice to have a kid who will let you pull out a book about gardening after you’ve been digging in the garden together. (Even that much interference was an anathema to my boy.) And having a children who clearly learn differently is going to keep things interesting, that’s for sure!
We’re trying to rearrange my work space.
Ok. So. There are lots of things for the kids to do down here while I work — that’s the point, really. And Madison tends to do a lot and she tends to make a mess and on the last clean-up I realized she was doing things that perhaps I don’t want her to do. Like getting the playdough out and using it to make art even though playdough is expressly forbidden in the basement. And using glue to put together toys dismantled for the purpose of putting them together with glue. And unsorting all the carefully sorted toys to use them in new, interesting, against-the-instruction ways. (sigh)
