To anyone who wonders what we do,

Regarding school, we do absolutely nothing. By letting the kids do whatever, the hope is that they will live a life of engagement rather than boredom. By letting them learn what they are interested in, the hope is that they will embrace learning rather than eschew it. By letting them memorize what is important to them, the hope is that they will strengthen their memory rather than destroy it by an endless series of memorizing and forgetting (read testing). By not joining the meritocracy, the hope is that they will pursue things because they are interested in them rather than to get praise or acceptance.

Watch people, watch yourself, you will notice when their mind or yours closes to information, almost reflexively. It’s sad, and I think it’s caused by being forced to learn. Am I right? No one knows, but we do the best that we can with the thoughts and views that we have.

What is this “doing nothing about school” called? By some it’s called unschooling, by others it’s called by neglect. By me, it’s called nothing (or just living) because I don’t like to define things by what they are not.

What does that look like on an academic level? It looks like they are behind in the three r’s but ahead in general knowledge, vocab, and rhetorical skills. Does this worry me? No. I know anecdotally and from reading case studies that kids who learn to read later (9 to 10) than the norm (6 to 7) have stronger comprehension skills and read at an adult level faster than those who are forced to read too soon.

Do my kids have problems? Hell yeah. Are they caused by the lack of school? No. They are caused (imho) by my short temper and too many days spent hiding in their bedroom while their adults scream at each other. That said, all adults give their kids some emotional scars, and the important thing is that we speak honestly about those issues and pursue growth in all of those areas.

What about college? I wouldn’t push my kids toward college, but if they become interested in going, it is not difficult to learn whichever skills are necessary to obtain that goal when we get close to it, and places like Harvard eat this shit up.

What about work? There seems to be a popular idea that kids must be bored at school so that they learn to be bored at work. I have no interest in raising cogs. Please, refer to the life of engagement. If that means being a ski bum, so be it. An artist who works retail on the side, so be it. A capitalist, so be it. The important thing is that they pursue something that interests them rather than get trapped in a box because they are so mentally used to being trapped in a box that they just stay in the cycle.

What’s your role? My role is to play games with them, answer their questions, show them how to find info when they want it, create a stimulating environment. It means noticing when a kid is watching tv because they’re bored and helping them to find a better use of their time but it also means noticing when they are watching tv because they need to zone out or because they are truly interested in the show and giving them space to do that. It means listening to them recount the most boring summaries of the book they’re listening to or the movie they’ve just watched because I see those summaries and the construction of the accompanying analysis as valuable rhetorical and pre-writing skills. It also means modeling engagement which is difficult for me.

I was thinking for the 30th year in a row that my New Year’s resolution should be to be more organized, but I’m shifting that. My goal is to stop procrastinating. I procrastinate a lot because I don’t dig on many of the tasks I have to do to keep a house a float (laundry, cleaning, menu planning-eww). I’m trying to embrace those tasks as things I want to do because I want to live in a reasonably clean and organized house where everyone is fed. Procrastination is the least engaged thing that one can do and it creates bad vibes. Instead, I want to do those things as necessary, and just be more. Just be. Be more engaged.

In the category of engagement, I started the New Year watching this great documentary about Tony Kushner's adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children starring Meryl Streep. The documentary was fabulous, super exciting, and when I fill my mind with things like that, it give me something to ruminate on while I fold the laundry, cook the food, and clean the endless deluge of debris.  

I’m really excited about the next year. The littlest one is turning five in a couple weeks, and there is so much more we can do and learn now that they are all over five rather than all under five. We changed our diet a few months ago, and I see more clearly than I have ever seen before.

I see particularly the value of being positive, of responding to people positively (I’m going to devote an entire post to this soon). When people express dismay about what we are doing or not doing here, I want to acknowledge what they are saying is coming from a place of concern and try to explain what we are doing, what we’re trying to accomplish. That’s all that I can do. So farewell procrastination and hello positive communication.

Talking to Children Who Don't Care

In the aftermath of great public tragedy, we are drawing our children closer, debating whether or not now is the appropriate time to talk about gun control, wondering what it would be like to be in that circle of tragedy, giving thanks for our lives, our children's lives, feeling guilty for petty complaints but having them none the less. Our conversations as we react to tragedy are many, but the conversation that strikes me the most is the one about how to talk to our children about tragedy

I realize that thinking about how to talk to my children is a privilege, a privilege that as of yesterday, too many parents will never get again, and by exercising this privilege, I'm hope I'm not undermining or diminishing their losses in any way.

You ask, how do we talk to our kids about tragedy, and I wonder, do our kids care?

My kids don't care.

Yesterday, for my kids, is not the day they tried to understand great tragedy. It's not the night they went to bed worried about the world. If they remember yesterday, they will remember it as the day they finally found out about Gangam style or the day they beat Bowser or the day they learned about Jamestown.

They don't understand.

Maybe it's because they're too young, maybe they need to be eleven or sixteen instead of nine and seven and four. Maybe it's because they lack sensitivity, maybe I ruined their sensitivity by being too macabre or reading too much original Grimm or losing my temper too often. Maybe they would care more if I had watched the news and cried all day instead of watching the news for 20 minutes, carrying a heavy heart, and reading some articles after they went to bed. Or maybe developmentally, they are just not at a point where they have a lot of empathy yet.

Some children care. Some children, I'm sure, care very deeply, and the parents of those children probably need to discuss how to talk to their children, but to put it quite bluntly, my kids don't care.

We had conversations.

How did he get in the school?
He just walked in.
Was he going to see his mother?
No, he was going there to kill people.
But it matters, like if he said he was going to go sing the kids a song, he could hide the gun in his guitar case, and then, papapapappppppppp. Otherwise, he'd need to use a pistol. What kind of gun did he use?
I'm not sure, something powerful.

(Note, that conversation was before I learned what had happened to the shooter's mother)

Conversations like these are why I typically avoid discussions of tragedy with my children. Eventually, however, these things come up--the Holocaust came up during dinner with a friend, 9/11 came up when we were researching the world's tallest buildings--but I avoid these conversations because my children lack the ability to understand the severity, the seriousness of these events. When child soldiers come up, they ask to move to Burma. They think it sounds cool. They're not equipped to know any better.

I try to remember my reactions to the news as a child. I remember Ollie North and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid--all of which happened when I was older than my children are--but the only crime involving a child that I remember is the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling. Although I was twelve when he was kidnapped, I'm not sure that I cared that much. I cared in the reverential way we were supposed to care, I worried about strangers in the way we were supposed to worry about strangers, but did it really hit me emotionally, no. Did I really wonder how he felt, how his mother felt, was I capable of empathy, not really.

Like myself as a child, my children get, to a certain degree, the seriousness of tragedy, but they don't get it. They don't feel it. They don't wonder how those involved felt.

They cannot be empathetic yet (at times, yes, they can but not like an adult and not consistently), but lack of empathy is only one of the reasons I avoid these topics. I avoid them more because I don't want their minds and memories and souls to normalize these events.

Yesterday's news was not heavy on their minds. It didn't come out in their play. It didn't come up while they were falling asleep when their concerns and dreams often float to the surface of their mind.

If they remember the tragedy of yesterday at all, they will probably remember it as just another massacre in a string of massacres, a string of tragedies that are just normal in this country.

Connecticut, Oregon, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, Aurora..  that's at least five since this summer. I'm not sure whether or not they actually know about all of these massacres, but they've heard about enough of them.

They've heard about enough of them that they probably think it's commonplace, enough that if I'm not here to remind them to be reverent, that they will just forget, that it won't matter, that they won't care.

So the question for me is not how do we speak to children about tragedy, but how do we raise children in a place where tragedy feels so commonplace?

I read once that if children learned about endangered species before they were allowed to fall in love with nature that they would become apathetic to the idea, that they would assume there was nothing they could do about possible extinction. If on the other hand they were kept from this fact until they were about nine, they would be more inspired to pursue change.

I'm not sure if that's true, bu the jig is up, they've heard about extinction and terrorism and genocide and child soldiers and grade school killings.  

And I don't know how to balance the knowing with the lack of caring.

Many people yesterday said it was a day to grieve rather than politicize, others said it was a tragedy not to talk about gun control.  I don't have the answers about which conversations are appropriate and when, but it's always important to talk about change. Maybe if we talked about change enough after Aurora, we could have prevented Connecticut, maybe we couldn't have.

It's a complicated conversation--gun control, mental health, food additives--there is no easy solution or we would have found it already, but it's critical to talk about change, and that is what I want for my children.
I want them to pursue meaningful conversations about change. I don't care if they agree with me--there's more than one answer, more than two sides to this debate.

I just want them to care enough to talk about it.

Now, they are glib about tragedy because they are young, but I worry that as they develop empathy that they will continue to be glib about tragedy because it's so seemingly common.

Taking to them wasn't difficult because tragedy doesn't bother them yet, and I can only hope that one day it will.

I can only hope that when they learn about violence or unrest, they will want to act differently, to make a change no matter how small. I can only hope that they won't take violence for granted and forget to care, that they won't become infected by it.

The Worst Summer Ever

I swear I only write in this blog when my mood is low. My positive energy is wrapped up in other things.

Actually, I was in a fabulous mood yesterday, but due to the understandably glum mood over the forest fire, I didn't feel like I could announce that I had just stuck my soul-mate flag in some woman and was totally feeling fabulous.

The kids, however, are not feeling fabulous. This is the worst summer ever. They waited all year for summer, and then, what...  all the neighborhood kids went to camp (which we know is just a less guilty way of saying summer daycare.) This fact has boy two in tears for at least fifteen minutes at least once a day. They are not sated by the idea of organized play dates because that is just not the same as rolling out of bed, ringing doorbells, and playing cops and robbers in the street with a big band of neighbors.

Although many kids are gone, the neighborhood is not totally empty. There's the nice fat kid who lives with the adult with the face tattoos. There's the other nice kid who is staying at the house that I've frequently seen cops wearing white gloves search. But as lovely as those kids are, they aren't being that nice so alas, here are the kids watching TV, bored while all of our favorite bits of the mountains burn down, and the town is covered in a blanket of smoke.

What I've Learned from Unschooling

Recently, an unschooling list that I'm on passed around the question "what have your children learned without school or curriculum?". I never answered the question, but I spent some time thinking about it, and this is a partial look at what I came up with....

Just so you know where we are coming from, we embrace a pretty standard version of unschooling (unscripted, child led, non-coercive learning), and recently we've started radically unschooling a lot of things (namely media which I'll write about in a separate post.)

So, what have the kids learned while unschooling...  Sometimes, it seems like the only thing they've learned is how to give themselves erections while watching cartoons, and they haven't learned a few very important things like how to read or how to mix me drinks. Most of the things that they have learned are things that fall into the life lessons category. The scholastic things fall mainly into the categories of natural science, math, history, literature, geography, and rhetoric.

They have learned (and I can not be sure if this is related to unschooling or is just a function of their personalities) how to pay close attention to things happening around them, and they know how to apply these observations. For instance, as I was bubbling through trying to explain rear wheel drive to boy two, boy one cut me off and explained it perfectly. Apparently, he had noticed rear wheel drive in action while watching semis and while noticing how his bicycle worked.

However, I wold like to focus on what I've learned.

The first thing is that our life is not necessarily going to look like what I thought it was going to look like. I didn't choose unschooling because I thought it was the best method. I choose it rather because it was the method that appealed to our particular personalities the best. However, at the same time, I was in love with the Well Trained Mind so I really thought that our days would like like a combination of that and the activity pictures in a natural toy catalog. In the morning the kids would ask me to teach them Latin, then we would talk about world history (in an orderly fashion), then they would paint pictures, and finally, they would have a gentle jousting session with some organic wooden swords while donning silk capes.

Clearly, I was high when I had that vision because that's just not even remotely close to anything that would ever happen here. However, just because our life doesn't fit into that particular box doesn't make it any less amazing, productive, or useful. (I can't go into how an average day looks here, but you can friend me on FB if you're curious, and you'll quickly get the gist.

The second thing I learned was not to disparage my kids interests because they can be the gateway to a lot of learning even if it doesn't look that way at first. Take for instance, boy one's two favorite things: money and Pokemon. I have let both of those interests annoy me at certain points (because he's obviously supposed to be painting or having gentle silk wrapped sword fights), but when I take a step back, I can actually see how much he has learned from both of those topics.

Money....  thanks to hours spent counting it, he has perfected his ability to multiply quickly by sums of 5, 10, and 25. Thanks to saving allowance, he has perfected his ability to add, subtract, and mentally track expenditures and goals. While talking about his obsession, we've covered the following concepts: employees, owners, investors, interest, mortgages, rent, lobbyists, taxes, profits, revenues, business expenses and more.

Pokemon...  hours with this game have added to his social skills (attributing social skills to Pokemon might be questionable, however, as he spends hours every week playing this game with kids who say things like "What song should I play, your choice?" to their opponent even though they are wearing headphones), how to amuse himself for hours on end (playing the game against himself or sorting cards), how to organize and keep track of 480 different cards, how to memorize things (each card has one to two different attacks on it), how to think logically, how to think ahead and plan an attack. The game is also math heavy. Within a minute or two last night, he dealt with 20 X 5 and the concept of 30n with the possibility that there is a fifty percent chance that n may =0.

It's not a perfect science, and of course, there are days where I'm sure that none of us had learned a damn thing  (as opposed to public school where kids are learning something every second--that's sarcasm), but I can confidently say that most of the things they learn, they don't forget because they are truly interested in them, and they know how to apply them. They don't get locked into a system of binge, purge (aka test), and forget, and I generally think that's a good thing.




 


  

Be The Change You Wish to See

A long time ago, I realized I was the only person in the room comfortable with making dead kid jokes. Right now, I'm the only person in the room with three large and unexplained purple ink spots on her ass. However, I'd rather these unexplained inky ass spots to the time I thought the fat girl in the cubicle next to me was stinky and then realized that I had unexplained human crap on my shoe that I must have trod in at home.

You may remember about a year ago that I posted something about how I didn't have friends for the two years we lived in the suburbs and how I was just starting to make them. A year later, a have a healthy cache of friends and a larger group of friendly contacts, and I have noticed that I hear one sentiment over and over. Over and over, I hear, "you're the only one I've ever said that too" or "you're the only one I can talk to about that."

I'm not sure why this happens. It can't be because I'm nice because as covered previously, I am not. It can't be because I'm not judgmental because I am.  So it must happen because I am the one with purple ink on her ass and crap on her shoes.

I don't know if I can effect any meaningful large scale change in the world so I've decided that this is it...  I want to see a world where people can freely express their grief at accidentally buying a dildo that was a shade larger than their husband, where people can freely share their fantasies about accidentally running over their weird kid, where people can freely share their stories about getting knocked up by a Mexican twice their age, or whatever they current secret is.

So share, share freely because it's amusing....  (and possibly insightful or stress reducing or something that exists on a higher plain than amusement but amusement is good too).

Post-Odious-Spew

Because yesterday, I vomited a bunch of odious spew onto this blog, I thought I would say some nice things, and since I have been doing yoga, taking homeopathics for my crabbiness, and doing other peaceful shit, I reckon I can say some nice things.....

Boy two spent all of his $60 of birthday money on food (lunch at perkins, two cakes, brown sauce from the cupboard and some candy). This isn't a new thing because he frequently spends his money on sausages or other food stuffs. The remarkable thing is that he shared everything that he bought. Lunch at perkins included his lunch, boy three's lunch, a chai for me, and a $5 tip for the waitress, and the rest of the items were shared freely between his brother's. He's a sweet kid.

Boy one, although he can be the most annoying of the lot of them, is also the most consistently helpful, and he's smart which always goes a long way in my book....  Family Guy is pretty inappropriate for an 8 year old, but when he says things like "God was really mad in that episode. It was like Egypt, ya know the Moses story" and then proceeds to list the plagues, I can look the other way from the inappropriateness of the show, and it's kind of fun to hang out and watch it together because there are references that he gets that I don't, ones that I get that he doesn't ...

Boy three....  well the youngest always has the mother's blessing, but he woke me up too early so I've only had 4.5 hours of sleep, and he smells like poop so we'll just say something nice about him another day.

The man says that people with the "my kid's an honor student cheerleader basketball superstar boy scout prom queen with mid level management potential" or whatever bumper stickers are all wrong. He says if he had a bumper sticker, it would say, "My kids make me fucking laugh." And for once, the man and I agree.

I Hate My Kids

These boys are being totally odious (that's my new word...  OED says it means hateful or repulsive...  so thanks to the boy's who have warranted its constant use for today).

I just told boy one that I would pay him $1 to hang the clothes on the clothesline because I'm busy, and he's cash hungry. Then, boy two who shrinks away from most work decided to stop watching his documentary and get involved in the laundry. Laundry fight ensued which ended with boy two cutting my clothesline in half with his new multi-tool.

That being said, I hate working from home, and I hate that when the work is good and I feel compelled to stop everything and work because I get paid per word, and when the articles are such that my wage goes from an average of $15 an hour to $40 an hour, I gotta make hay and ignore. Really, couldn't they find something to do? I'm not picky....  just a few minutes ago, they were seeing if lighting vodka on fire in a pan of wax would create a fire that would melt the wax...  that seems more constructive than cutting the clothesline of a woman who doesn't have a fucking dryer.

Annoying little jerk faces they are.

Next week is spring break, I'm going to pray that our house is full of public school kids who will keep boredom and crabbiness at bay.

Venting done. I feel so much better.