The Importance of Not Doing Something: Part I: The Resolution

Writing is hard sometimes. I mean, not right now. Right now, my keyboarding skills can barely keep up with my usual verbosity, and writing is like uninterrupted talking. That's blogging, I guess: Think something, try not to oversay it, mash it all out on the laptop keyboard, publish, and wait to see if it made sense to anyone but me. Easy.

But when the prompt is official and external, writing is like trying to do origami, using nothing but my elbows and big toes. The result is an excruciatingly clumsy facsimile of something other people seem able to do with ease, or fingers.

That's how it was when I had to write a teaching philosophy for one of the classes I took last year. Working on my Elementary Education degree, I was zooming through an assignment until I got to "What is your teaching philosophy?"

I could have done a better job if I had taken the 15 most frequently-used words in my courses thus far, put them on magnetic refrigerator poetry tiles, donned a blindfold, picked words off my fridge randomly, thrown them on the floor, removed my blindfold, and read them aloud. The first draft was something like, MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY IS MEANINGFUL SUPPORT STUDENT LEARNING ENGAGEMENT HUNDRED PERCENT PIAGET ACCURACY VERY LONG TIME.

Maybe not quite that bad, but none of it meant anything to me. And it was supposed to be why I do what I do for the foreseeable future of my career as an educator.

Hm, maybe I could do this thing better. I tried a trick I use sometimes, when hitting a writing block. I imagined the statement I wanted to write, in this case my teaching philosophy, as something that already existed, pre-defined. It didn't have to be a lofty goal. It could be what I've already been doing, or why I've already been doing it. The trick worked. All the jargon faded away and my real intentions stood there, clear as they always are.

My teaching philosophy is based on the assumption that the student is always my best partner in the endeavor to educate them.

Yes, it's basically "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em drink." in school form. You can compel, cajole, threaten, and bribe a child to sit, and hold a pencil and paper or book, but you can't make 'em think.  They have to be down wit it, to some degree. We go together, or not at all.

Many who tried our hand at huh?-schooling our own kids read John Holt at some point in our studies. (Or, unstudies, as the case may be.) He was no fan of school, insisting that the expectations imposed by a formal learning environment destroy a kid's natural tendency to be voracious learn-o-matics. Kind of a downer if you plan to work in public education, but a real punk rocker if you've declared your home a hands-on exploration zone of anything goes.

Holtism may have gotten a little out of hand, here at the BU, during the years the kids and critters were trashing the place. I mean "discovering knowledge."

My li'l "partners" in "education," were free range freight trains at times.

 But I guess that was kind of the point.

Pro Tip: If pseudo-feral un-raising kids in a backyard petting zoo is your idea of school, prepare to live in a world of undone housework and a bramble of untamed habits. Watch out, because behaviors that soothe, in absence of other obligations, can get out of hand. Like our raging case of invasive backyard bindweed.

You know if it's true if there's a garden metaphor for it.

Maybe we had to figure it out for ourselves to really get it, but all of that unfettered freedom taught us to love limits. Seeking balance actually makes us happier than seeking happiness, but balance is a moment-by-moment accomplishment. One year, thirty minute increments of screen time are exchanged for chores, followed by an afternoon of tree-climbing. Before you know it, it's a year later and you're taking all day to write a teaching philosophy while your tree-climber spends way too much of her morning in headphones, mouth-breathing over her Kitty Kats RPG.

After an informal formative assessment, I decided to propose a New Year's Resolution.

But, but, resolutions, man. Who cares? Live your best now now, man. You don't need some stupid white man's holiday, right? Do chickens wait for an arbitrary date on the calendar to start being better chickens, man? No, they just peck the calendar to pieces. Maybe eat some of it.

Be like chickens, man.

Okay, so what if saying, On ___ Day, I'll Stop Shoulding and Start Doing is just a human construct? Man? I do happen to be a human, and kind of a constructivst, I have discovered. If we build our own reason for doing, or not doing something, then we really might do or not do it.

In that spirit, four weeks ago, we began a concerted effort to limit everyone's screen time. It has been surprisingly popular among the alums, as was the idea that I Shall Be The Enforcer Of It. For now.

Since beginning, we have had a rough aim, accomplished through my rough act of putting everybody's cell phones in a shoe box and declaring how long the break will be each week.

And sure, I can keep doing that. But, as usual, I have ulterior motives, I mean "learning objectives." Pesky ole' John Holt won't let me rest at merely training them to do less phone-staring.

      A life worth living, and work worth doing: that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called 'a better education.' 
         -John Holt Instead of Education:Ways to Help People Do Things Better

We can toss the cell phones in a box, do origami with our fingers for a rainy Sunday afternoon, and blog about it later. But, by the power of Bloom's Taxonomy, how can I really make this engagement more meaningful? Holt help us, how can we all learn to do life better? And then blog about that? Stay tuned.

The Garden Dirt: Getting Ready for the World

Did you know May is unschooling month?

While it may seem counterintuitive to dedicate something as restrictive as a month to the free-form hippie spin that is unschooling, there's a good reason to spend a little time talking about it. And that is because, almost nobody knows what exactly unschooling is. We who school in the unfashion find ourselves describing what unschooling isn't as often, if not more. Does an unschooled student use workbooks? Have to do things she doesn't want to do?  Tend to her personal hygiene? Consider the feelings of others? Or are the little drop-outs all feral id, abandoning promising projects to hone Minecraft skills, only taking a break to go swear at elderly people in public?

The answer, of course, is D) All of the above, except for swearing at old people in public. Because some things should be done only in private.

The term "unschooling" is so undefined that it becomes a blank screen onto which people project their best or worst assumptions. Most discussions on educational styles tend to describe their merits and faults, because these styles have been defined for many years, by the pedagogical . Unschooling is...un. It's hard to say what it is. Each of us is making it up as we go along.

And that's kind of the point.

This is where I usually insert a garden metaphor. For this family, unschooling is much like hardening off.

Wait, what?

Here, on this very blog, I have covered how to germinate seeds, but I haven't gotten to what to do with them before putting them outside.

In order to have your tender little sprouts all ready to grow in the big bright outdoors, they will need to be hardened off, or exposed to the sunlight in small, indirect doses, in order to acclimate them to full-time sunshine gradually. Otherwise, the sun's rays will bleach them white and kill them within an afternoon. Not that that ever happened to me or anything.

A good way to start is on cloudy days, or in the shade, letting about-to-be-transplants be uncovered for only a couple of hours at a time, for a couple of days. The rest of the time, they should be indoors, or under cover.

These barrel halves let light through to the salad seedlings hiding under them.

Increase their time in the sun in the days to come, and in about a week, the world won't be such a lethal place to the delicate plantlings. If you are successful at the art of knowing when to shelter them, and when to expose them, they will be as strong and healthy as they need to be for the rest of their days. They become tough and sure, strong from within and tempered from without.

This is where I usually insert a learning metaphor. I think hardening off needs to happen to people too, to help them grow in the world. Only, instead of UV radiation, we must learn to weather the opinions, criticism, and scrutiny of others. I feel we flourish when we find a small but adequate space in our mind, where our intuition calls the shots, and we come to care very little about what the people around us think of us.

 This can be accomplished in school too.

You see, I wouldn't be anythingschooling if I let the words and thoughts of those close to me influence me very much. Years ago, our decision to stray from conventional public school for everyone all the time solicited many an unsolicited opinion. Not feeling like slaying misconceptions about unschooling, I would say we had decided to home school a kid or two, and suddenly it was story time. Some of the people in my life felt the fact that they would choose differently for their family was relevant to what my family was doing. It really wasn't. I knew it and that was good enough. I thanked them for their advice and made my plans anyway.

Like most mothers, what I've taught my kids has largely been about treating others with respect. It's what we parents do: tell them to share, use their words, solve their problems, and treat others as they would like to be treated. All of that still stands. Nevertheless, along this little path, I've unlearned preoccupation with what others think about my decisions. Such concerns are unimportant, often inaccurate, and ultimately completely impossible to resolve.

 How can you please everyone? There are songs about how impossible that is.

The process of raising these people, whateverschooling we're using, has been a gradual process of finding what motivates and going with that. I have come to trust that thing inside that tells me what to do next, more completely than the notions of somebody who is not living my life. I have come to trust us to define these things for ourselves as we go along. So, even though George, working his way through a science workbook, looks very schooly, or Henry's clarineting literally happens at a school; unschoolings are afoot. Being an autodidact doesn't mean you can't elect to use resources at your disposal to learn things and have experiences of your choosing.

 Unschoolers can, and often do, choose to be taught.

My  self-led learners are also expected to practice delayed gratification and impulse control out the a. Ain't nothing school about that.That's just the natural result of living in a big messy house full of animals. Obligation, responsibility, and concern for others get a daily workout.

There is no shortage of reasons why you will not get what you want as soon as you want it in our home. So go outside and play.You've been HARDENED OFF!

 See? Our fence is just like the one on the BU background!

These Little Gem Lettuces are ready for the big time. All acclimated and everything, my once-sprouts are now standing on their own in the sun. The soil under them is a vast place for deep roots, the sun above shines intensely at times, the sky brings wind and rain; and they're ready for all of it. Those bright leaves know what's up. Inherently perfect (even when the bugs show up later this summer) this whole robust arrangement has had the right mix of tough love and tender care, and will tick through the clock of its life, inspiring many a photograph, I'm sure.

Kind of like these people I'm growing, except I won't eat them.
Probably.