Faith in the Process: Conversations and Continuity

Sometimes with this unschooly approach to learning, it feels like a huge assortment of stuff gets presented, or discussed, or looked at once or twice, but it's hard to tell what's sinking in. It reminds me of the anti-drug ad that shows a teen's face looking exactly the same before and after her parents talk to her about drugs. OK, P's not that opaque at 6. But still, sometimes it seems information goes in one ear and out the other.

And then it doesn't, and I see the links among bits of knowledge forming and getting used, and interest returning to related themes again and again, and my faith in this process of interest-driven learning returns.

A recent example: P has probably finished a sentence about a scientific or historical subject three times for me today, using knowledge I didn't know she had. How did she learn all this stuff? From Magic Tree House and, even more so, Magic School Bus chapter books. She has been rereading her moderately large collection at two books per day this week, which at first made me feel guilty for not finding her more good chapter books yet. But I'm noticing that the ones she's been rereading are providing a lot of the knowledge that gets mapped into other situations. So I will get her more (or put them on her birthday list for others), but I won't be in such a rush!

By the way, her reading skill is coming along beautifully. She wanted to read to me the other day from a Magic Tree House book about dinosaurs, and while she stumbled over Cretaceous and Pteranodon, her oral fluency with the more ordinary vocabulary was almost as good as mine -- which, I think can honestly say, is saying something! She's also getting much more accurate than she was a month ago at using punctuation clues to read dialogue with correct expression and intonation. I love watching her soar.

Saturday evening I took P to a friend's choral concert. On the way to the concert (a 45-minute drive), while waiting for it to begin (it was held in a Congregational church; we are Unitarian-Universalist), and on the way home, we talked about at least the following, and probably more that I don't remember:

• Some possible reasons cats may be linked with witches in popular lore (One of my guesses: cats have been considered good luck at births because they give birth with apparent ease compared to human mothers; female healers, who would have assisted with births and who were later painted as witches when men started trying to take over medicine, may thus, or for other similar reasons, become associated with cats. I don't know whether this is the case, but cats-birth and women healers-witches are definitely associations that have been drawn at various places and times.)
• Where it's safest to be in a lightning storm; lightning rods and how they can protect buildings and their occupants
• How people get red hair; recessive genes; children get half their genes from each parent
• Ways of ending up with a child without having it yourself (adoption, foster care)
• What it means to be gay or lesbian (the chorus had a large number of GLBT members, and the friends who invited us are a gay couple with a child who came to them through the foster-to-adoption process)
• Why there were bibles in the pew racks
• What the little round holes in the pew racks are for (individual communion cups, which led to the story of the Last Supper and how Christian churches of various stripes practice communion, and why some non-Christian churches, like ours, have communion as well)
• Other stuff in the pew racks: prayer request cards, envelopes for cash offerings... only the envelopes and the hymnals have close analogues at our church, so this was all fascinating stuff
• Speed limits: why they exist, why they are enforced, why people exceeding them slightly don't generally get ticketed
• Why infants ride in backward-facing car seats, why we don't all ride facing backwards

Today I showed P a photo one of my friends, who is a midwife, posted on Facebook, showing her tending to a newborn baby. P asked, "Did she bring a cat?" We talked about the likely answer (probably not, though she probably would have no problem with the family's cat being there for a home birth), but I loved the continuity of ideas, considering that I didn't even mention the word midwife in the earlier conversation. P remembered it because three years ago, when T was born, a nurse-midwife at the hospital was our main caregiver during pregnancy, labor and birth. Also today, P said something about blue jeans and then noted aloud that jeans is a homonym. I asked her other meaning she knew, and she talked about the genes that come from both parents to make a baby. Hooray!

Also this week, we listened to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes on tape. We've been talking a little about nuclear weapons and radiation in the context of the current nuclear troubles in Japan, so this was a natural extension. Sadako's leukemia also tied back to our recent conversations about cancer.

And today, we found our first letterbox! (Look here for a short description and lots of links about letterboxing.) We hiked about a mile round-trip on rocky trails near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before setting out, we visited the NCAR lobby, which has lots of displays, some of them interactive, about atmospheric science and the tools it uses. Along the way, we identified some plants (yucca, juniper) and talked about their defenses against getting eaten. On the way back, we stopped and read several signs on the NCAR weather trail about floods, droughts, fires (one of the sentences P finished for me was about fire suppression leading to more intense forest fires, whereas allowing fires to burn and just protecting structures can lead to healthier forests), lightning, and erosion. We examined the anemometers and wind vanes atop the NCAR roof and talked about what they measured and how, and whether any of those other things up there were lightning rods. We read signs about trails that were closed, some for revegetation and others to protect nesting raptors and breeding bats. We marveled at the view from the NCAR terrace, where we ate part of our picnic lunch. It was a beautiful hike and a rich learning experience, and the kids loved the "secret mission" feel of finding and re-hiding the letterbox. That the 1-mile hike took us an hour and a quarter may give you an idea of the walking:learning ratio.

I think letterboxing, pursued at a leisurely pace and with lots of side trips, is going to be a great way for us to get out and see new places and things. And P wants her 7th birthday party, which will happen next month, to be a letterboxing party. Now that's a party I can have fun helping prepare! We'll hide boxes with hand-carved stamps and logbooks around our yard and possibly in cooperative neighbors' yards. We'll help each guest create his or her own unique signature stamp. We'll prepare puzzle clues so each child can play a part in working out where to find the boxes. It's a win-win-win: we make a fancy treasure hunt with a low budget and a theme that may introduce other families to a cool new hobby, P and I will get to create puzzles together, and I'll get to practice my stamp carving!

Even more stuff: P and I watched the last of the Jim Henson: Storyteller Greek myth episodes, which was the story of Perseus and the Gorgon. I think the most interesting discussion we had about that was about Acrisius' attempt to prevent Perseus from killing him, as the Oracle predicted. He imprisoned Danae, and then after she bore Zeus's child anyway, he had mother and son locked in a treasure chest and thrown into the sea. They lived, and Acrisius was eventually killed in an accident, by a discus Perseus threw in a competition Acrisius attended, before the two could become reacquainted. The theme of fate being inevitable, of disaster avoided on one path returning by another (cf. Oedipus the King), is so clear here.

Oh, and never fear, T is learning too! He can talk about more things and show more of what he knows all the time. Today we found a Brain Quest deck of questions and answers for 3-4 year olds (T recently turned 3, but these were from when P was little), and he and I had fun going through it and seeing how much knowledge and cognitive skill he has picked up in his short and late-to-speak life. There's no shortage of candlepower there. But I write more about P -- partly because no school district yet has the right to ask me to account for T's learning, but they could do so for P -- and partly because P just talks so much more about, well, almost everything except helicopters, motorcycles, and construction machinery.