The Spaces Between

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

     -Marge Piercy, from "The Seven of Pentacles"

Today as I began cooking dinner, I needed to double a recipe for cooking millet. I just started talking out loud about it to P, who was hanging out nearby. "I want to make a double recipe of millet. One recipe calls for three-quarters of a cup."

     I didn't really expect her to try the math, but she did: "Then you need six quarters!"

     So I asked, "How many cups is six quarters of a cup?" She said she didn't know. So I asked, "If you had six quarters, how many dollars would that be?"

     She came back pretty quickly, "One dollar and fifty cents!" Before I could ask what that would mean for the recipe, she called out, "So you need one and a half cups!" I couldn't have been more pleased.    

     As I was jotting notes for this blog entry, I said to her, "I remember you learning something interesting today, but I can't remember what it was. Do you remember?"

     She responded, "I used money math to double your recipe!" 

Good stuff.

A few days ago, I signed on the the effort to finish the casual video game UnschoolerDad is developing for smart phones. His original producer had to leave the project for health reasons, and he hasn't found someone ready to step into her shoes yet. I've been developing specifications for sound effects. Tonight the kids wanted to see how the game is coming, so I played some levels in the test build I have on my computer, and they watched. I noticed issues with the game, so I started an email to UnschoolerDad detailing these possible bugs for when he's ready to address them. P followed along, reading some of what I typed. She asked why I was writing, and I explained that Daddy would want to know about these problems we were seeing, since he was the one who would fix them, and that I needed to describe them with good details so he would know just what I was talking about. She helped me watch certain details in the game so we could describe their behavior better. Once in a while she'd ask the meaning of a word or abbreviation I used in the bug reports. It was nice to see her interest and curiosity, and she got to see something I suspect not many kids see: one of the way-behind-the-scenes parts of developing a piece of software. And next time we do this, she'll get even more, since tonight UnschoolerDad taught me how I can fix some of the issues I'd noticed, right in the Lua code files where they originate. So she'll get to see not just QA tasks -- the entry-level grunt work of game development -- but a bit of programming as well.

P took a bath this afternoon while T took a nap. This is significant because she usually puts up a fight. Today she started to get that surly look on her face, and I explained that I know she likes to have company during her bath, and that T's nap would be my only chance to stay with her today, since UnschoolerDad would be out after work this evening. Usually this would just be the beginning of a longer argument or the prelude to my forcing the issue. But today, she said she'd come when she finished the story she was listening to on tape. Yesss! I noticed this as a theme today -- I let her finish things, or get to a good stopping point, before insisting that she switch gears to something else. And given that bit of extra slack, she cooperated. (I'd feel more like cooperating with someone else, too, if they let me choose when to stop my current activity first!) During dinner she was downright solicitous. It feels like she's starting to notice and respond to my efforts to be more of a partner to her and less of a mule driver. It sounds awful to say it that way, but it's how I often felt while enforcing school-related schedules and routines.

The relaxation in our pace the last few days has been delicious. I would have a hard time stating with a straight face that we were having four contact hours of learning time, which is the requirement for home schoolers in our state, 172 days per year. But the schools are on spring break right now, and we have all spring and summer to get in the hours remaining in this school year's requirement. This period, right after leaving school, is what unschoolers often call "deschooling." It's a time to leave behind the trappings of school as much as possible. A time to avoid tight schedules and anything that's structured as a class or looks like school, unless the child really wants to go to it. A time to take a vacation, whether away or right at home. Some unschooling parents state, as a rough guideline, that it will take about a month of deschooling for every year a young person has spent in school, before they're ready to engage actively in driving their own learning processes and get the best that unschooling has to offer.

I already see P jumping on some opportunities for learning, and, creature of the educational system that I am, I relax. Her leaps remind me once again that learning is inescapable -- it happens all the time, on purpose, by accident, in the interstices of life as much as at the pinnacles of peak experiences. And to that I say, Amen.