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The difference between me and Joyce Fetteroll
Once someone threw a rant, on Unschooling Discussion (another group that was on yahoo) and said that unschooling was hedonism gone berserk. ? Part of Joyce's response: ? You've created an image that will be hard for us to replace by what really ______________________ ? There was more, by Joyce, and all logical and analytical.? Joyce's whole unschooling/parenting site is logical and analytical.?? ? To that same rant, some of one of my responses: ? You really don't know what you're talking about. _________________________ I like to think that lots of people have benefited from bouncing between my "What!?" and Joyce's "Surely..." over the years. :-) ? I came across those things looking for a current and workable link to go with a page (not a new page, but all the links to yahoogroups need to be changed, as I come to them).? Because on my unschooling/parenting/wheelbarrow/recipe/whatever site, I saved the whole thing about someone accusing us of being hedonists. :-)? And now it has a link that works. Sandra ? |
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Making progress
I've created a new page of eight-year-old parts. :-) If you find any typos, glitches or bad links, please let me know. It's not what I had planned to do tonight, but it seemed important.?? I hope the very-quietness of this group is because people are busy, and not that you're all sorry we ever moved away from yahoogroups. :-) Responses can be good!? (Good responses are the best. :-) ) ? Sandra |
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An interesting Q&A page
There is a rich but obscure page with nine good questions and my advance-answers, before a visit to speak to a group in Kuranda, in Queensland.? Unschoolers in Cairns had organized it, so I named it that before I knew "Kuranda."? :-) I think it's a good read, and has lots of links, so if you or someone you know is new to unschooling, or just feel like seeing if you could guess my answers or something, here it is!? Have fun. :-) ? |
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Additions to pages on Seeing, Etiquette and NVC
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Problems with "Nonviolent Communication" (NVC), for Unschooling
A couple of additions and link repairs on my page explaining why NVC isn't good for unschooling
?
On Sep 29, 2020, at 7:02 PM, Sandra Dodd <Sandra@...> wrote:
?If you have a NYT subscription, you can read this there, but I've brought the text to share.??
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html
I thought it was pretty good.? Someone else was irritated by it the first time she read it and maybe less the second time.??
Probably an editor named it, and not the author, but I don't know. The title is a quote from the article.
?
¡®When You Get Into Unschooling, It¡¯s Almost Like a Religion¡¯
The movement might help us deal with the problems posed by remote learning.
By?
?Contributing Opinion Writer
- Sept. 25, 2020
??Tiersa McQueen vividly remembers the morning she woke up and found her four children teaching themselves geometry. She discovered them standing at the whiteboard, measuring angles and studying shapes they had traced.
¡°They wanted to know what the shapes were, so they looked them up, wrote down the names, then started going down the rabbit hole of online information,¡± she told me.
The McQueens are unschoolers. The children ¡ª a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old and 9-year-old twins ¡ª learn at home, but with far more flexibility than traditional home-schooling families. Their parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades. Instead they do their best to follow the children¡¯s natural curiosity, their impulse to drop what bores them and investigate whatever captivates them, engaging in ¡°self-directed education¡± at their own pace.
During this long season of involuntary at-home learning, what parent hasn¡¯t dreamed of moments like Ms. McQueen¡¯s morning discovery? As parents struggle to keep up with their own jobs while kids work through packets of worksheets and iPad apps in the next room, it is tempting to hope for a silver lining: the emancipation of children¡¯s impulses to explore the world independently, to find ways to answer their own questions.
Unschoolers, who have long occupied an obscure corner of the home-schooling community, have suddenly become intriguing, less like alien life-forms and more like your cool neighbor who managed to stay relaxed through the monthslong shortages of toilet paper and child care. Unschooling is a pedagogy premised on letting your kid sleep in, read whatever they like (or not) and learn math (or not) through baking, elaborate Lego creations or wandering the internet rather than working through a textbook.
This approach is unlikely to work for most families. Even some who believe wholeheartedly in the idea of unschooling struggle with it in practice. But unschoolers¡¯ choice to take on that struggle should compel the rest of us to face big questions about motivation, coercion and the purpose of education during this unusual school year and beyond.
It¡¯s easy to assume that teaching children at home requires economic privilege, a stay-at-home-parent who can afford to focus full time on education. In our new, quarantined Gilded Age, wealthy families are hiring private tutors just like their Victorian forebears. Yet unschooling families are economically diverse. When the psychologists??and??published a 2013??of about 230 unschooling families, they found ¡°a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.¡±
?¡°There¡¯s a narrative that makes people feel, if they don¡¯t have resources, they can¡¯t do it, and that¡¯s not true,¡± Ms. McQueen told me. ¡°I¡¯m doing it, and I¡¯m not affluent.¡± She works 8 to 5 at the headquarters of a retail chain in Bradenton, Fla. Her husband works two jobs, nights and weekends, at a convenience store and a grocery store.
Fear of school shootings and concern over ¡°the racial bias in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline,¡± as well as many schools¡¯ stunted curriculum in Black history, drove the McQueens to begin their experiment with at-home learning in 2015, she said: ¡°We wanted to educate our children based on what we value, versus what the school was teaching them.¡±
?Ms. McQueen also wants to preserve her kids from the kind of traditional education that, she says, sapped her own self-assurance. ¡°If you¡¯re taking orders all the time, your confidence is based on what someone else says, not what you say. That¡¯s one of the main reasons I decided I could do this. I didn¡¯t want them to turn out like me,¡± she said. ¡°It has taken me a lot of unlearning to trust myself.¡±
Covid-19 has thrown families back on their own resources, and many parents and children have had to learn to trust themselves.
¡°The pandemic has tremendously increased my visibility, and people¡¯s interest in self-directed education,¡± Akilah Richards, a?, author and unschooling mother of two in the Atlanta area, told me. ¡°Now you¡¯re at home, you¡¯re wanting your kid to do the thing you wanted to believe they were doing in school: being super attentive to their lessons because they¡¯re motivated, and not because someone was lording over them. But now you can¡¯t get them to finish their packet because you have work too, so what does it look like for young people to feel a sense of connection to what they¡¯re supposed to learn?¡±
Education reformers have been asking that question since at least the 19th century. When the German educator Friedrich Froebel invented kindergarten in the 1830s, he stressed the educational value of games and free play.?Progressive reformers like Maria Montessori and John Dewey pushed for a more ¡°child centered¡± approach to education that stressed experience and experimentation over rote memorization. African-American activists assailed mainstream schools for belittling students of color. In 1933, the historian Carter Woodson??the ¡°crusade¡± against inferior Black schools and textbooks full of white supremacist propaganda ¡°much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.¡±
By the 1960s, progressives¡¯ insights had become (and largely remain) mainstream. But a new generation of activists denounced traditional schools as ¡°prisons¡± whose origins lay in capitalists¡¯ desire for educated and obedient workers, and whose tyrannies demanded a new civil rights revolution.
Local Black and Indigenous communities organized independent ethnocentric schools. Other reformers, inspired by humanistic psychology¡¯s rosy vision of every person¡¯s capacity for free will and self-actualization, called for loosely supervised ¡°free schools¡± and even the abolition of schools altogether. (They often sidestepped the overwhelming social necessity of public schools to not only educate, but also provide child care and healthy food for millions of children.)
In 1968 the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire warned in his book ¡°Pedagogy of the Oppressed¡± that ¡°education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.¡±
?A few years later his friend Ivan Illich, a philosopher and Catholic priest, argued in ¡°Deschooling Society¡± that real learning happens casually, through personal relationships; compulsory schooling has become a purveyor of false consciousness, ¡°the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.¡±
Unschoolers have long complained that mainstream education turns students into serfs of capitalist exploitation (although it¡¯s worth noting that ¡°Pedagogy of the Oppressed¡± is not a fringe text; Freire is??read in schools of education today). Recently the unschoolers¡¯ critique has intersected with more pro-capitalist voices coming out of Silicon Valley.
School ¡°came close to really beating any curiosity out of me,¡± Steve Jobs once said. Seth Godin, an entrepreneurship guru and best-selling author, wrote in his 2012??on education, ¡°Stop Stealing Dreams¡±: ¡°Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory workers?¡±
These education critics may disagree about the sins and virtues of modern market capitalism, but they seem to share a theory of freedom reminiscent of Rousseau¡¯s radical ideas. Unschooling assumes that humans become free by throwing off society¡¯s conventions and immediately enacting that freedom; passion comes first, and competence will follow.
Children ¡°ought to leap, to run, to shout, whenever they will. All their movements are necessities of nature, which is endeavoring to strengthen itself,¡± Rousseau wrote in ¡°,¡± his 1762 treatise on education. This stands in contrast to the message of most world religions and tiger moms everywhere: that we gain freedom and nurture passion by learning self-mastery and complex skills, and that means submitting to a long, difficult time of discipline and direction outside ourselves.
¡°When you get into unschooling, it¡¯s almost like a religion,¡± Amanda Enclade, a mother of three who has unschooled her two younger children, told me. ¡°You have to be determined and have faith.¡±
In this faith, a child¡¯s motivation to learn is an instinct to be unleashed, rather than a virtue whose development requires some mixture of coercion, oversight and artificial rewards. ¡°It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call ¡®motivation,¡¯¡± John Holt, an unschooling pioneer, wrote in his 1967 book ¡°How Children Learn.¡± ¡°A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.¡±
When Ms. Richards, the Atlanta podcaster, began unschooling with her family, she realized ¡°that human nature is that of a little scientist,¡± she said. But scientists don¡¯t usually drift along, following their impulses, abandoning experiments when they become boring. How does an unschooled child learn to stick with the hard stuff, the boring stuff? Unschoolers¡¯ faith in free choice can seem like an extreme version of the consumerist impulse that has crept into education, in which the student is no scientist, but a customer who is always right.
¡°When I came into this world, I thought that when you remove restrictions, the paraphernalia of school and coercion, then kids¡¯ curiosity and self-direction would naturally bloom,¡± Blake Boles, the??of ¡°Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?,¡± told me. ¡°That¡¯s not what happens. There are plenty of motivational challenges. They struggle like other kids, and I think that¡¯s OK. I say when you choose to unschool, you¡¯re choosing to take on this heightened sense of freedom and responsibilities that most people don¡¯t choose until they¡¯re 18 or 22. It¡¯s the same struggle, just happening earlier.¡±
We can¡¯t pretend that mainstream schools have solved the motivation problem, even as many teachers try to combine the advantages of schoolroom structure with respect for children¡¯s urge to explore. This problem is all the more pressing at a time when social isolation forces students to rely on apps and social media.
The same technology that makes learning at home accessible, that seems to make so much education free, also ensnares our brains with its glowing screens, relentless pings, likes and other dopamine hits. We need to have a serious conversation about how children can learn to become technology¡¯s masters and not its servants. Unschoolers can be leaders in this ¡ª because, by throwing off social norms and pushing faith in a child¡¯s freedom to an extreme, they nudge the rest of us to confront our own assumptions and blind spots.
Parents don¡¯t have to be utopian revolutionaries to take small cues from unschoolers, tips to turn bare pandemic survival into something closer to flourishing. Covid-19 has forced families to face ¡°the other pandemic that was happening before Covid,¡± Ms. Richards said. ¡°That¡¯s not understanding how to be in real relationships intergenerationally, adults and children. Now we¡¯re forced to say, if I¡¯m at home with my kids and partner, maybe we don¡¯t always even like each other, but we have to figure out how to be together and be productive.¡±
Ms. McQueen, the unschooling mom in Florida, pointed out that with no tests or grades, ¡°you have to have a deeper relationship, and observe your children that much more. That¡¯s how you get to know what they¡¯re thinking and learning, that they¡¯re progressing ¡ª by having those conversations.¡±
In this sense, 2020 is not a lost year. It¡¯s a chance for parents and children to watch and listen to one another, to turn the weekday scramble into an occasion to experiment and think about what it takes to make a free human being ¡ª one whose freedom comes from truly knowing something about the world, and about herself.
___________________end______________
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html
If you have a NYT subscription, you can read this there, but I've brought the text to share.??
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html
I thought it was pretty good.? Someone else was irritated by it the first time she read it and maybe less the second time.??
Probably an editor named it, and not the author, but I don't know. The title is a quote from the article.
?
The movement might help us deal with the problems posed by remote learning.
By?
Contributing Opinion Writer
Tiersa McQueen vividly remembers the morning she woke up and found her four children teaching themselves geometry. She discovered them standing at the whiteboard, measuring angles and studying shapes they had traced.
¡°They wanted to know what the shapes were, so they looked them up, wrote down the names, then started going down the rabbit hole of online information,¡± she told me.
The McQueens are unschoolers. The children ¡ª a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old and 9-year-old twins ¡ª learn at home, but with far more flexibility than traditional home-schooling families. Their parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades. Instead they do their best to follow the children¡¯s natural curiosity, their impulse to drop what bores them and investigate whatever captivates them, engaging in ¡°self-directed education¡± at their own pace.
During this long season of involuntary at-home learning, what parent hasn¡¯t dreamed of moments like Ms. McQueen¡¯s morning discovery? As parents struggle to keep up with their own jobs while kids work through packets of worksheets and iPad apps in the next room, it is tempting to hope for a silver lining: the emancipation of children¡¯s impulses to explore the world independently, to find ways to answer their own questions.
Unschoolers, who have long occupied an obscure corner of the home-schooling community, have suddenly become intriguing, less like alien life-forms and more like your cool neighbor who managed to stay relaxed through the monthslong shortages of toilet paper and child care. Unschooling is a pedagogy premised on letting your kid sleep in, read whatever they like (or not) and learn math (or not) through baking, elaborate Lego creations or wandering the internet rather than working through a textbook.
This approach is unlikely to work for most families. Even some who believe wholeheartedly in the idea of unschooling struggle with it in practice. But unschoolers¡¯ choice to take on that struggle should compel the rest of us to face big questions about motivation, coercion and the purpose of education during this unusual school year and beyond.
It¡¯s easy to assume that teaching children at home requires economic privilege, a stay-at-home-parent who can afford to focus full time on education. In our new, quarantined Gilded Age, wealthy families are hiring private tutors just like their Victorian forebears. Yet unschooling families are economically diverse. When the psychologists??and??published a 2013??of about 230 unschooling families, they found ¡°a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.¡±
¡°There¡¯s a narrative that makes people feel, if they don¡¯t have resources, they can¡¯t do it, and that¡¯s not true,¡± Ms. McQueen told me. ¡°I¡¯m doing it, and I¡¯m not affluent.¡± She works 8 to 5 at the headquarters of a retail chain in Bradenton, Fla. Her husband works two jobs, nights and weekends, at a convenience store and a grocery store.
Fear of school shootings and concern over ¡°the racial bias in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline,¡± as well as many schools¡¯ stunted curriculum in Black history, drove the McQueens to begin their experiment with at-home learning in 2015, she said: ¡°We wanted to educate our children based on what we value, versus what the school was teaching them.¡±
Ms. McQueen also wants to preserve her kids from the kind of traditional education that, she says, sapped her own self-assurance. ¡°If you¡¯re taking orders all the time, your confidence is based on what someone else says, not what you say. That¡¯s one of the main reasons I decided I could do this. I didn¡¯t want them to turn out like me,¡± she said. ¡°It has taken me a lot of unlearning to trust myself.¡±
Covid-19 has thrown families back on their own resources, and many parents and children have had to learn to trust themselves.
¡°The pandemic has tremendously increased my visibility, and people¡¯s interest in self-directed education,¡± Akilah Richards, a?, author and unschooling mother of two in the Atlanta area, told me. ¡°Now you¡¯re at home, you¡¯re wanting your kid to do the thing you wanted to believe they were doing in school: being super attentive to their lessons because they¡¯re motivated, and not because someone was lording over them. But now you can¡¯t get them to finish their packet because you have work too, so what does it look like for young people to feel a sense of connection to what they¡¯re supposed to learn?¡±
Education reformers have been asking that question since at least the 19th century. When the German educator Friedrich Froebel invented kindergarten in the 1830s, he stressed the educational value of games and free play.?Progressive reformers like Maria Montessori and John Dewey pushed for a more ¡°child centered¡± approach to education that stressed experience and experimentation over rote memorization. African-American activists assailed mainstream schools for belittling students of color. In 1933, the historian Carter Woodson??the ¡°crusade¡± against inferior Black schools and textbooks full of white supremacist propaganda ¡°much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.¡±
By the 1960s, progressives¡¯ insights had become (and largely remain) mainstream. But a new generation of activists denounced traditional schools as ¡°prisons¡± whose origins lay in capitalists¡¯ desire for educated and obedient workers, and whose tyrannies demanded a new civil rights revolution.
Local Black and Indigenous communities organized independent ethnocentric schools. Other reformers, inspired by humanistic psychology¡¯s rosy vision of every person¡¯s capacity for free will and self-actualization, called for loosely supervised ¡°free schools¡± and even the abolition of schools altogether. (They often sidestepped the overwhelming social necessity of public schools to not only educate, but also provide child care and healthy food for millions of children.)
In 1968 the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire warned in his book ¡°Pedagogy of the Oppressed¡± that ¡°education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.¡±
A few years later his friend Ivan Illich, a philosopher and Catholic priest, argued in ¡°Deschooling Society¡± that real learning happens casually, through personal relationships; compulsory schooling has become a purveyor of false consciousness, ¡°the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.¡±
Unschoolers have long complained that mainstream education turns students into serfs of capitalist exploitation (although it¡¯s worth noting that ¡°Pedagogy of the Oppressed¡± is not a fringe text; Freire is??read in schools of education today). Recently the unschoolers¡¯ critique has intersected with more pro-capitalist voices coming out of Silicon Valley.
School ¡°came close to really beating any curiosity out of me,¡± Steve Jobs once said. Seth Godin, an entrepreneurship guru and best-selling author, wrote in his 2012??on education, ¡°Stop Stealing Dreams¡±: ¡°Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory workers?¡±
These education critics may disagree about the sins and virtues of modern market capitalism, but they seem to share a theory of freedom reminiscent of Rousseau¡¯s radical ideas. Unschooling assumes that humans become free by throwing off society¡¯s conventions and immediately enacting that freedom; passion comes first, and competence will follow.
Children ¡°ought to leap, to run, to shout, whenever they will. All their movements are necessities of nature, which is endeavoring to strengthen itself,¡± Rousseau wrote in ¡°,¡± his 1762 treatise on education. This stands in contrast to the message of most world religions and tiger moms everywhere: that we gain freedom and nurture passion by learning self-mastery and complex skills, and that means submitting to a long, difficult time of discipline and direction outside ourselves.
¡°When you get into unschooling, it¡¯s almost like a religion,¡± Amanda Enclade, a mother of three who has unschooled her two younger children, told me. ¡°You have to be determined and have faith.¡±
In this faith, a child¡¯s motivation to learn is an instinct to be unleashed, rather than a virtue whose development requires some mixture of coercion, oversight and artificial rewards. ¡°It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call ¡®motivation,¡¯¡± John Holt, an unschooling pioneer, wrote in his 1967 book ¡°How Children Learn.¡± ¡°A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.¡±
When Ms. Richards, the Atlanta podcaster, began unschooling with her family, she realized ¡°that human nature is that of a little scientist,¡± she said. But scientists don¡¯t usually drift along, following their impulses, abandoning experiments when they become boring. How does an unschooled child learn to stick with the hard stuff, the boring stuff? Unschoolers¡¯ faith in free choice can seem like an extreme version of the consumerist impulse that has crept into education, in which the student is no scientist, but a customer who is always right.
¡°When I came into this world, I thought that when you remove restrictions, the paraphernalia of school and coercion, then kids¡¯ curiosity and self-direction would naturally bloom,¡± Blake Boles, the??of ¡°Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?,¡± told me. ¡°That¡¯s not what happens. There are plenty of motivational challenges. They struggle like other kids, and I think that¡¯s OK. I say when you choose to unschool, you¡¯re choosing to take on this heightened sense of freedom and responsibilities that most people don¡¯t choose until they¡¯re 18 or 22. It¡¯s the same struggle, just happening earlier.¡±
We can¡¯t pretend that mainstream schools have solved the motivation problem, even as many teachers try to combine the advantages of schoolroom structure with respect for children¡¯s urge to explore. This problem is all the more pressing at a time when social isolation forces students to rely on apps and social media.
The same technology that makes learning at home accessible, that seems to make so much education free, also ensnares our brains with its glowing screens, relentless pings, likes and other dopamine hits. We need to have a serious conversation about how children can learn to become technology¡¯s masters and not its servants. Unschoolers can be leaders in this ¡ª because, by throwing off social norms and pushing faith in a child¡¯s freedom to an extreme, they nudge the rest of us to confront our own assumptions and blind spots.
Parents don¡¯t have to be utopian revolutionaries to take small cues from unschoolers, tips to turn bare pandemic survival into something closer to flourishing. Covid-19 has forced families to face ¡°the other pandemic that was happening before Covid,¡± Ms. Richards said. ¡°That¡¯s not understanding how to be in real relationships intergenerationally, adults and children. Now we¡¯re forced to say, if I¡¯m at home with my kids and partner, maybe we don¡¯t always even like each other, but we have to figure out how to be together and be productive.¡±
Ms. McQueen, the unschooling mom in Florida, pointed out that with no tests or grades, ¡°you have to have a deeper relationship, and observe your children that much more. That¡¯s how you get to know what they¡¯re thinking and learning, that they¡¯re progressing ¡ª by having those conversations.¡±
In this sense, 2020 is not a lost year. It¡¯s a chance for parents and children to watch and listen to one another, to turn the weekday scramble into an occasion to experiment and think about what it takes to make a free human being ¡ª one whose freedom comes from truly knowing something about the world, and about herself.
___________________end______________
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html
That's not the name... it's Living Joyfully.? Still...
Once in a while I want to remind people to subscribe to this e-mail, which is always richly full and fun.
_____________________
?
Happy Sunday!
It's been a (happily) busy September and I haven't managed to send out a note yet! I'm looking forward to connecting with you more regularly again.?
If circumstances have changed and you're no longer interested in exploring unschooling with me, you're welcome to?. And there's always an unsubscribe link at the bottom of my emails. Being here is always a choice!
And as always, I hope there's a helpful nugget or two in here to nourish you on your unschooling journey.
Let's explore!
~ sharing unschooling stories and insights ~
It's been a wonderful month on podcast and I hope you have the opportunity to check out the new episodes, whether through audio, video, or text!
EU241: Exploring Race, Racism, and Diversity in Unschooling with Erika Davis-Pitre
I rebroadcasted Erika's 2017 episode,?, earlier this year and she graciously offered to return and answer listener questions. The result is this amazing episode with so many actionable steps and layers to peel back for all of us on this unschooling journey as we explore the roles we can play to address systemic racism and biases.
Here's one of the many powerful insights Erika shares in response to a question about "teaching" our unschooling kids about anti-racism:
If you¡¯re finding yourself having to teach something, it means you¡¯re not living it. Your living it is the example that teaches. If you have to pull it out and put it in its own special category, that¡¯s where your work is, figuring out ¡®Why isn¡¯t that my life?¡¯
She takes each question and, in true unschooling fashion, explores the deeper questions that lie beneath.
Here are the links for the episode:??|??|?
EU242: Deschooling with Nadia Joshua
Nadia and I have a delightful conversation as we dive into her family's move to unschooling and how they navigated moving to one income, her deschooling journey and exploring the need to go and do, her parenting journey and learning to honour both their daughters and their individual personalities, and lots more.
I imagine many of us can relate to how she described the beginning of her journey:
The first six months of homeschooling was just crazy. I signed up to every group going. The calendar was just chockablock. We would go to gym, we would go to the science center, we would go to home-ed groups and beach school, forest school¡ªevery kind of school. It was ¡®not school¡¯ school. After six months, I remember saying to Sy, ¡°I am exhausted.¡± And then I started hearing about deschooling and unschooling. And I'm like, 'Well, what's that?'¡±
It's common for parents to choose to take their kids out of school yet still feel compelled to "keep busy" and choose "learning environments" that look a lot like school. It's understandable because that's what we think learning looks like! It's also why deschooling is SO important and valuable for parents.
Here are the links for the episode:??|??|?
EU243: Parenting Shifts with Sarah Peshek
Sarah is an unschooling mom of three and she shares the details of her journey and her parenting shifts from control to connection. Her wonderful insights and experiences are so helpful in really pulling out why this lifestyle is so amazing! How unschooling encourages us to re-center around the person and parent we want to be, with deep, meaningful connections with our children and a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Here's just one of her great insights:
I had it in my head that when I gave up that control piece, I was going to lose power somehow or lose myself. And it was the opposite. Really, I gained my own true strength giving up that battling. I really found my own self and it had been hiding underneath all the noise and chaos before.
If you've grown up steeped in conventional thinking, the idea of finding true strength by giving up control can seem incredibly counter-intuitive. Yet, it's what countless unschooling parents have discovered for themselves. Each podcast guest that shares their unique story of this experience helps build trust for those starting out on the journey that this is possible. That these kinds of relationships with our children are within reach, while also bringing us closer to the strong, confident, and resilient person we want to be. All that is hiding beneath the noise and chaos.
Here are the links for the episode:??|??|?
Want to support the podcast?
Because of the generous support of my podcast patrons, I am able to continue producing new shows, including transcripts, each week?and?to keep the full 200+ episode archive freely available to anyone who¡¯s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of unschooling. To them I send a big, heartfelt thank you.?
If you'd like to support the show,?. And depending on your subscription tier, you'll get some lovely thank you gifts as well.
~ growing an online unschooling community ~
Our theme in the Network this month is 'Not Back to School,' and we've been exploring it through the lenses of choice and joy.
It's understandable¡ªand okay!¡ªto feel a bit off-kilter as the "back to school" messages ramp up around us. And it's not a "bad" thing to find ourselves questioning our choice to not send our kids to school. In fact, it's a great reminder that unschooling is a choice, and a wonderful opportunity to go back to our WHY and recommit to our choice.?Something?drew you to unschooling¡ªto exploring the world together, to cultivating strong relationships with your children, to parenting through connection instead of coercion. What was it? Is it still important to you?
And the lens of joy reminds us to connect with our kids! When?you begin to worry about something, notice that instinctive urge to pull back and disengage¡ªphysically and emotionally¡ªand use it as a clue to remember that you can instead choose to go back in, to connect?more, to engage?more, to seek out joy. That can really help to put the worry into context and it often loses much of its power.
As Anna reminded us, "Get out of your head and into the moment!" It does wonders for quieting the noise in our heads and seeing the unschooling in action right in front of us.?
If you'd like to connect, ask questions, and share stories with like-minded unschooling parents,?!
~ sharing in-depth unschooling ideas through books ~
If you're having back to school wobbles, reading my first book,?, can be a great way to remember your why and inspire you to dive back into the joy and fun of living and learning with your kids.
Even if you've already read it, you might want to go back to it! If it's been more than a few months, you're going to be in a new place on your journey and I bet you'll find yourself making new connections. Peeling back more layers and deepening your understanding of how unschooling works. My experience is that there's always more layers. ??
Or, if you have friends who are choosing to start out on their unschooling journey rather than have their kids go back to school this year, consider sharing the book with them to help them get started.
Wishing you and your family a lovely week!
Take care,
Deschooling.... :-)? ?You can't wait, and you can't rush it.
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I've added this to :
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Deschooling is like changing gears.
Go slowly. Go deliberately.
Don't goof around. Don't stall.
How can both be true?
The clutch and the gas.
One of the things that has gone extra weird lately is money.? I'm going to ask you for some, and then talk you out of sending it.? Figure out where along that scale you feel most comfortable.
Some people can't work (sick, quarantined, social distancing doesn't work for their business), and some people pretty much have no choice but work, even overtime.? So the courteous thing to do is to check on relatives and friends and neighbors and (gently and politely) make sure they have enough food and supplies.
My life is the same, except for staying home unusually much.? I work on webpages and put out Just Add Light each night, for the next morning (with apologies to those who are used to getting it in the afternoon; that just happens; sorry).
Just Add Light and Stir was begun at the request of one person who wandered off and married a professional educator (a school administrator, perhaps) within a month.? The first post was September 2, 2010.? The tenth anniversary is just a couple or three days from now.??
Another anniversary, coming in October:? This group will have been at groups.io for one year, and the rent is due.? I think we thought this would be a fun party house, but yahoo mail isn't working as well as it used to, for some people, and e-mail isn't as much fun as it used to be, in general, perhaps.? And it's this irritating 2020 everywhere, too, and people's schedules and emotions are disrupted.? ?
I can afford to pay for the expenses involved in all of this.? Some of you have lots of children, or small children, or both, or teens who are testy and bored or need art supplies.? Put your money there, especially if your income is smaller or less regular than it was in better years.??
If you're an essential worker, or you own a thriving medical-supply company or something, and you've had the thought that it's sad if I help people every day AND pay for the sites and storage, and if it would make you feel better to send me a donation, I would gratefully accept.? I won't ask again until 2021, or ever, depending on this'n'that.
If you don't send money, I won't notice.? I have never kept a list of who has donated before or any such thing.? I count to one, one, one...
At the bottom of SandraDodd.com is a paypal link.? It quietly sits there all the time, and I'm only going to remind people until September 2.
Sorry for so many words to say "send me some money if you can afford to and you feel like it, and don't send me any if it would be the slightest hardship or if you don't have paypal or you quit reading my stuff years ago."??
Thanks,
Sandra
I like that blog.? I think everyone who reads any of my stuff should subscribe there, and use the randomizer sometimes.
The randomizer on my site had all the older pages.? This has the newer ones.? You'd think I could easily combine them, but.... not so easy.? ?There are 525 posts in this one, and two I'm still finishing up.? Most have three links.? Some are updates, not new pages.? So that's 1500+ links, and I am already old. :-)
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It's good to subscribe to, and good to play around with.? I like the photos and most (maybe all) lead to a Just Add Light and Stir post.
Sandra
This announcement just went out on?
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Tension, in the sense of balance, of the interplay of careful safety and wild exploration, of a solid anchoring:
Leveling up! If there are stages, and if there are layers (like an onion), there can be the hope and intention of reaching that next level.
A story of NOT Changing¡ªhow people can plan and prepare and provision themselves and not actually accomplish any unschooling
Second announcement, because now there are some photos with links.
The writing here is a few years old, but I never put it up when it was new.? (Sorry, Marta!)
Because lots of kids are more isolated than they used to be (physically) and are trying to maintain friendships by other means (online, one way or another), there are lots of ideas here that could be of use!
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Social SituationsHelping kids get along with others
On my three , the numbers should've come first. ?That's okay. ?They live here: ?
If anyone here has a graph about connections to share, or wants to make one, bring it! :-)
I hope you enjoy one or two of those above. ?(or below, if you're in e-mail, or.... ?previous)
Sandra
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Sandra Dodd