Unschool | this woman's work

Comparisons

Apr 192010

We went to a bar mitzvah on Saturday, (which was lovely) and I thought again about how religious school is really the only activity my kids have done on a regular basis where they’re so age segregated. Most of the classes and workshops they’ve taken (especially Noah who has taken away more than Madison being seven years older) are more loosely grouped by age (for kids, say, 7 to 10) or are grouped by ability. In homeschooling, kids tend to play across age groups a lot more.

I think this is great. I think it makes more sense for kids to be grouped by ability or general development because then it’s easier not to see someone as behind or as ahead. Everyone just is what they are. Noah has had friends who are way ahead in some things and way behind on other things and from what he tells me, they tend to see each other’s gifts and appreciate them while making way for their challenges. So he has one friend who is an amazingly skilled artist and craft person, who can glance at a shirt and design a pattern for it and create it from scratch, but who doesn’t read well. The kids all admire and acknowledge her fantastic creations and they help her with the games they play that might be harder for her. They don’t think of her as ahead or as behind; they think of her in terms of her abilities first and foremost. I hope that makes sense, what I’m saying here.

But that’s not the part I’m talking about. The part I’m talking about is that I can’t make comparisons between my kids and their same-aged peers because I don’t have a large group of same-aged peers to compare them, too. Which is a little weird. Nice, but weird. It’s only when I see them in religious school or in sports activities (where ages are more regimented) that I see them as part of a “grade.” Like Madison in kindergarten and Noah in seventh grade. In the sports, it’s not really an issue but I definitely notice the absence of understanding them this way when I see them at religious school.

Not that I can make comparisons then either because religious school isn’t much like school. I mean, I know that Noah does well on his tests and I guess I could find out how the other kids did on theirs (if I cared) but it still wouldn’t be a comparison because all the other kids are doing religious school on top of regular school and homework and extracurricular activities so if Noah is doing better than them, it might say more about his wide-open schedule. So I take his performance (and Madison’s performance) as a measure of this 2.5 hours every week that they have religious school and that’s it. It’s just so isolated.

Sometimes I wish I could compare them because I am still too caught up in arbitrary measures of “good” and “bad” and “better.” And then I’m glad that I can’t. Sometimes I would like to know if Madison is busier than her peers (I think she is) but really all I need to know is if Madison is successful in her own sphere and she is and that ought to be enough.

It’s hard to explain how much unschooling means unlatching yourself from prescribed expectations. For example, what if Madison is busier than her peers? What does this mean for her right now? If she were in school, I’m sure it would be an issue. She can keep herself still and focused and careful for 2.5 hours in religious school but I know if she were in school full-time that she’d be getting busted for chattering and wriggling and wanting to see what her neighbor is doing. And that would be a real issue and we would need to deal with it. But if you take her out of school, there is no issue. So even though I wonder if she’s busier than her peers, it also doesn’t matter. It only matters that her busyness doesn’t preclude her happy functioning here in her unschooling home.

Anyway, not being able to compare my kids to other kids but only to themselves and their own developmental timetable is a plus for me but I’ll admit that when we get their report cards* from religious school, I eat up the teacher comments.

* Noah was appalled that Madison got a report card. He said, “But it’s KINDERGARTEN!” He thought they should have a free year or two. And for the record, the report cards always say that my kids are bright and enthusiastic. Noah’s usually say that he’s funny and Madison’s said that she was very compassionate. They also both get kudos for class participation, which is no surprise with Madison but surprised us with Noah because for his first couple of years, he was a wallflower.

Homeschool take two

Homeschooling 16 Responses »

Apr 162010

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!

Being home is being happy

Homeschooling 10 Responses »

Mar 252010

My on-site job ended early and so I’m back home doing laundry and feeling grateful for it. The on-site work was interesting and fine and all but there wasn’t as much for me to do as they originally thought and I spent a lot of time thumbing through style guidelines and being bored. As a workaholic, I do not enjoy sitting at a desk and doing nothing although I did get some research done for a big article due next week. I just felt guilty the whole time I was doing it so mostly I read Lost recaps and waited for work to come my way.

There’s some interesting discussion about the unbearable whiteness of being in the unschooling community. See, there are lots of wonderful everyday unschoolers and fortunately they are the ones who make up my real life community but there are also some hard-core zealots who make up the institutional community of unschooling. Now to me the fact that there are people who try to act as gatekeepers to a movement that is essentially about shucking off institutional expectations and values is hilarious in its hypocrisy but there you go. There are certainly self-identified Experts who enjoy sitting around and drawing lines in the sand about who is a Real Unschooler and who isn’t. And these people, as zealots often will, dominate the discussion and do a whole lot to make people feel lousy about their choices and defensive about their values. Kristen has called them out here and she’s getting some twitter anger back at her.

(It’s a lot like the hard core Attachment Parenting types who get all hysterical if someone casually mentions that they left their baby in the baby swing so they could take a shower. What do you think they make mesh slings for, people?!? Do you not CARE about your child’s MENTAL HEALTH??? So boring. So mean. So not helpful.)

Debating is all well and good and I’m all for respectful debate but it’s the gatekeeping that gets to me and the disinterest in self-reflection. People who have all the answers tend to have lousy answers, I think. This goes for any movement including adoption reform.

Back to the discussion, the lack of diversity among unschoolers isn’t that surprising and I don’t even know if it’s problematic unless you’re whole life centers around other unschoolers. Which to me seems like an anathema to the whole unschooling ideal, since I feel a vital part of my kids unschooling epxerience is getting out into the great big wide world. And the great big wide world is NOT other unschoolers. The great big wide world is everybody else, too. Personally as a family we get our social needs met by participating in a whole lot of communities, which can be tiring and also make a person feel a bit like Jack of all Trades, Master of None but I can’t expect one group of people to be All People to me and so I have to head out there and find other folks. I also very much WANT my kids to hang with kids who go to regular old brick and mortar school because they are their peers, too, and I want them to know about the mainstream experience even if I don’t want them going to school. Some of our most very favorite people are parents whose kids take tests and do homework and have to sit at desks all day. And even though our educational values may not jive, there’s a whole lot more we have to offer each other.

The hardcore unschoolers have a lot in common with the folks I wrote about way back when in this article on non-coercive parenting right here. Some of them (certainly not all) are fundamentalists and fundamentalists of any stripe are dangerous people.

Anyway.

Listing

Adoption, Writing 7 Responses »

Feb 092010

Get it? Like listing to the side the way one might if she is very tired? And a list post? (The pun is the lowest form of humor.)

Another comment on my guest post: Pennie told me later that one of the things she said to Madison on the phone call is that she understood how sharing is hard because sometimes she has a hard time sharing Madison with me. Madison told me that this made her feel better. It’s very important for her to know that Pennie misses her as much as she misses Pennie. Back in the day, Madison would occasionally goad Pennie by flaunting her (Madison’s) relationship with me. I don’t think Pennie knew that she was doing this but I did. It was hard for me to figure out how to handle it (this was when she was two-ish?) but my gut told me to encourage their relationship more overtly to both of them and you know what? That’s what needed to happen. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to post a little overview of Madison’s development around her relationship with Pennie. Or I might forget and end up writing a post about breakfast cereals. I don’t know.
Noah is at Kalahari for the unschoolers conference this week. We couldn’t go because of work and stuff. I strongly considered driving up there yesterday to see John Taylor Gatto speak but couldn’t for a million and one bureaucratic reasons. Am I bitter? Yes, a touch.
We miss Noah. At least Brett and I do. Madison says she does but she’s already decided that she will sit at his place at the dinner table and last night she slept in his bed saying, “I think I’ll be Noah tonight.” Lately she won’t sleep in her OWN bed so we let her even though Noah will kill us when he gets back. She snuggled in and said, “It smells like Noah.” “What does Noah smell like?” I asked her. “Fried chicken,” she replied. I think she’s lying because to me Noah’s room smells like the dog since Peanut pretty much lives in there with him.
I finally subscribed to Poets & Writer‘s magazine after looking at the web site longingly for months. It’s only ten bucks a year and it’s not very practical (unlike the ASJA newsletter, which is so practical that it’s nearly depressing although incredibly useful so I highly recommend it without irony). Sometimes I need to remember that I am also a Writer and not just a communications expert with a business card.
Speaking of business cards, I just ordered some new ones. I’m attaching one below. They are very plain but that’s what I was going for. By the way in case my orange banner up there has not made it clear, I would like everyone to hire me.

Actually my kids are pretty civilized

Homeschooling 10 Responses »

Aug 312009

Maryanne (in the comment to the post previous) said:

In reading a little about homeschooling, I’ve gotten the (probably skewed) impression that most homeschoolers are Christian Fundamentalists, which you are not. Do you have to deal with these people and materials in the homeschooling world or are you totally on your own and make up your curriculum? You say your kids are “wild animals”. What if you had a kid who was not interested in books or learning at all?

Yes, lots of homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians and there is indeed a large fundamentalist community here in Columbus. I don’t really have to deal with their beliefs although my kids are sometimes in classes or activities with children who are being homeschooled for religious reasons because those activities aren’t centered around religion. But Noah’s had some fundamentalist Christian friends and acquaintances and I just see that as a good opportunity to talk about belief systems.

It’s easy to avoid the resources created for families with a Christian worldview because there is so much out there for secular homeschoolers. I hear this is more difficult for folks in other communities but here in Central Ohio, our homeschool peers tend to reflect our values and those whose values are different, they still tend to complement ours (i.e., there aren’t a ton of Reform Jews but we get along nicely with our UU friends).

Also, we don’t use a curriculum other than math.

I don’t know what I’d do if I had a kid who wasn’t interested in “books or learning at all” because it looks like I don’t have one of those kids. I still can’t tell if Madison will be a reader with the passion (and insatiable hunger) that Noah has but she does like books and she’s got a wide-ranging, questioning mind. I’ve heard tell of kids who don’t want to learn but I have yet to meet one although I do know that there are kids in our group who drift in and out of concentrated academic-type work.

We tend to be moderate in our kid-control. We’re more strict than other unschoolers who don’t limit screen time or much of anything else but we’re a far cry from school-at-home folks, too, who replicate the classroom experience. Meeting my kids’ emotional and educational needs is an on-going process of checking in, making plans, backing off and checking in again. What they need one month isn’t what they need another and what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other.

Als0, if I had a kid who wasn’t interested in reading (because every kid is interested in learning although what they want to learn might not be what’s on someone else’s list), it’d be an even bigger reason not to send him/her to school and instead keep them home to find other ways to teach them. At least for me. Because I’m a homeschooler.

Julia said:

I have spoken to many homeschoolers…and not all are like you – the ones who think that it’s all about what is right for a family…kind of like the breastfeeding and work at home/stay at home war. Why is that?

My take? People can be jerks and those jerky people include homeschoolers. I’ve certainly been confronted by random folks in the grocery store, at the synagogue, on my kids’ sports team, etc. who want to weigh in on my educational choices ‘cuz jerkiness abounds however we choose to educate our kids. Although it’s been my experience (and this is a gross generalization and your mileage may vary, etc. etc.) that the most evangelical people tend to be either 1) the least secure (and so the most defensive) or 2) the most close-minded and who wants to hang with THAT anyway however they’re schooling?