A Complex, but Robust, Balance

A little over a week ago, I was waiting during P's gymnastics class and sitting next to a parent I know and his daughter, who's in third or fourth grade. She was working on a school assignment, and he was clearly anxious for her to make as much progress as possible during her sister's gymnastics class. He was pushing hard, and when she resisted (she seemed tired and not interested in the assignment), he moved on to belittling statements and questions. I was feeling really awkward, since I don't know this family well enough to have a good defusing intervention ready. I was glad when a relative of his came along, saw the stress, and talked to him long enough to give his daughter a break. But during that interaction, a funny thing was happening. I had an unschooler's voice in my head with an answer to every word out of his mouth. A lot of the answers had to do with this assignment being too involved for its purpose. She was supposed to draw several pictures representing events in a chapter book she'd read, then write several sentences about each picture. And he was having her do a rough draft, in preparation for a more perfected final draft later. This project, taking hours of her life, would probably have an audience of one -- a teacher, probably bored with grading 25 similar assignments. This girl was tired and in no way primed to be doing creative work, especially on a project not of her own choosing. Oh my gosh, I could go on and on.

But the other thing happening was that I could hear myself, a year ago (before I started thinking about unschooling our kids) and in some cases more recently, saying many things similar to what this dad was saying. It was painful to hear, both that way and in the moment for the daughter's sake. But it helped me see how far my thinking had come on what was useful for learning. It made me intensely glad I wasn't having to flog my own kids through long, involved school assignments in which they had no interest -- this seems like the surest way to produce adults with no interest in reading, writing, creativity, or whatever is being forced. And for the first time, I felt a deep sense that we were on the right path. I was high for days, and it was hard to tell anyone, since most of the non-parents I know wouldn't get it, and most of the parents with kids in school would feel bad. I finally got to tell it a week later at an unschooling park day, where it made no splash -- these parents already know this stuff -- but it felt good. I feel I'm finally starting to find my balance and stride as an unschooling mom. And as the rest of this entry will reflect, it's a balance with a million little parts, like a huge Alexander Calder mobile. It looks like it shouldn't work sometimes, but it's actually quite sturdy, and the whole picture created is so beautiful.

Today I read a John Taylor Gatto essay, "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher," in which Gatto enumerates the soul-crushing, conformity-enforcing lessons of school that make it an efficient way of producing interchangeable parts of a permanent underclass. The essay built on the feelings of that gymnastics-class episode, and added the feeling that my evolving beliefs about how learning happens have ruined me as a future classroom teacher in any conventionally structured school. This is probably fine. But if I'm looking at going back into education (I taught public and private school for a few years here and there), I'll be interested to read more about Gatto's free school, and whether what he does there reflects a very different vision of school.

In other school-related thoughts, I read something this week on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning) about how kids in school often learn to bluff their way through, appearing as though they know more than they really do -- and that this translates into being reluctant to ask questions. This resonates with my own experience of school (though I also sat near the front and asked lots of questions by the time I got to grad school, having decided there was something I wanted from school other than looking good to my instructors), and it totally fits with my observation that P has become more willing to ask questions -- about all kinds of things -- the longer she's been away from school. I love that she asks questions, and it shows; I'm sure that helps. Now the value in bluffing by avoiding questions is gone, unless she's so engrossed in something (a good story, say) that she doesn't want to interrupt it with a question and answer. When I listen to the rhythms as UnschoolerDad reads to P from the Song of the Lioness series, which they are both enjoying and have almost finished, I hear lots of pauses for questions about unfamiliar words or about why the story is unfolding the way it is.

These last two weeks have been curiously lean on notes to add to this blog, and yet I have the feeling that learning is happening at a terrific pace. It's an odd feeling, probably rooted partly in the fact that both kids have sources of information beyond my direct knowledge and control, including books, videos and games they're experiencing without me right by their sides. Sometimes that learning surfaces, as when P spotted the title of a sci-fi novel I'd just picked out from the library (Galileo's Dream) and asked about it -- it turned out that the PBS Kids show Martha Speaks (note: this link makes noise!) had included a segment on Galileo, from the apocryphal point of view of his dog, who'd inadvertently inspired some of his discoveries about physics. We talked a little on the walk from the library back to the car about Galileo's contributions to science, and also his heresy trial, and we talked about how the Galilean moons (the biggest four moons of Jupiter) were all eventually named for people Zeus (aka Jupiter) had abducted or otherwise misappropriated -- we looked them up later at home to find the story of each. Unlike P's knowledge about Galileo, some of what the kids are learning may never become obvious to me. Still, though, there's been a lot of learning I could observe and participate in.

On a car ride somewhere, UnschoolerDad was saying something about Sputnik, and T asked what a satellite is. We talked a little about natural and human-made satellites, and about how some satellites send pictures of the earth from above. In a short internet search for information about satellites, I ran across a photo of an infrared astronomical satellite whose data I had crunched a bit during a summer astronomy internship in college! Later, the kids and I used Google Maps' satellite view to look at a lake nearby where we've played, at our house, and at the houses of some family and friends. We followed our walking routes on streets on the map, from our house to places nearby that we knew, using what we knew about each place to find exactly the right houses -- a beautiful way to relate maps to reality. Then, at T's request, we followed the railroad tracks from where we usually see them to the southeast until we found a train. That took a while! T has continued asking where things are on maps -- he now has Colorado located on the huge world map that was a gift from grandparents this year, and several times a week he asks what something on that map or some other map is. P has asked fewer questions about geography so far (though as I edit this post, she is poring over maps and asking me questions about places she sees on them), but she follows along, and sometimes she and T make up adventures in which they sail or fly between distant points on the world map, following tortured routes. I think I'd like to find some maps at different scales showing where we live, from the city level to the region, so we can trace our travels together on a finer scale than a world map provides.

While we were mousing around Google Maps, we were also building a matchbox-like container from cardboard to be a dresser drawer for a doll (this involved drawing patterns on graph paper and estimating how much extra size the outer layer would need -- we estimated a little tight, but P adapted the technology to make many doll-size treasure chests and wastebaskets with lever-action lids, which T gleefully filled with tiny bits and bobs) and letting white glue dry on the pad of my finger so the kids could see the fingerprint after it was peeled off. They liked seeing the stages of drying and feeling the roughness of the fingerprint-impression. This mixed-up day was one of the best in my memory for following the kids' desires where they led.

Last night we spent the evening at the library, as P read the last third of a chapter book she really wanted to finish that was due that day, and T played with the puzzles and looked at board books in the kids' area. I got more time than usual to browse the kids' books for interesting stuff, and came up with three books I thought would catch P's interest. They were all quite successful; P was engaged, making links to prior knowledge and taking in new information, even pointing out inconsistencies between text and illustrations that were relevant to the stories.

• Giants in the Land is about the giant pine trees that used to grow in New England, and how they were harvested to make masts for the British navy. At the end of the story, 1775 brought the end to the shipping of American mast trees to England; this meshed with Revolutionary War on Wednesday, a Magic Tree House book P recently read on her own.
• Shibumi and the Kitemaker is a wonderful view of the class disparity in an imaginary feudal society similar to imperial Japan, and how the emperor's daughter decided to change the squalor and suffering in the city surrounding her walled garden. P and I talked briefly while reading it, about how feudal society was structured, and how there is still class disparity and concentration of wealth under capitalist systems. 
• Songs from the Loom: A Navajo Girl Learns to Weave gave a culturally-grounded view of some of my favorite crafts, spinning and weaving. It included some of the Navajo stories related to weaving and described the processes at a perfect level for P to absorb (though I, as a weaver, wanted more detail about how the loom worked -- but that's information I can find!). It also included a brief history of the Navajos' being expelled from and later regaining the rights to their ancestral lands in the Four Corners region, with associated information on Navajo-U.S. relations and tribal governance. In several more years, P may have a chance to go on a yearly trip to tribal lands in this region with youth and adults from our church. I hope that some grounding in Navajo and Hopi culture will make that a welcome and rich experience for her. [Note Oct. 15: just noticed and corrected some sloppy editing in this paragraph. Sorry about that!]

In my previous post I wrote about P wanting to set up in the driveway and sell stuff. One Saturday morning recently, she decided she wanted to set up a free face-painting booth in the driveway. We were in good shape to hang out, so she did. I showed her how to clean the face crayons with alcohol between faces to prevent passing germs; she made a sign and gathered her materials, and then she went out to sit. I took a book out to her to pass the time on our oh-so-out-of-the-way street, though mostly she looked around at squirrels and such so she wouldn't get too absorbed in her book (her phrasing! I love this kid!) and miss a person going by. T went out to sit with her after a while. As no one continued to come by, they got interested in crushing rocks to powder with harder rocks, and drawing on the driveway with rocks, to see what kinds of colors they could get. After a couple of hours and zero potential customers, P decided to close up shop. She'd had a good time, and she hasn't yet asked again to set up a garage sale. It felt good to me to support what she wanted to do without trying to reshape it too much (but after being her ally by telling her what information I could about what it might take to succeed). And the little geology lesson was an unexpected bonus. We tried mixing the rock powders with water and found the resulting paints unsatisfactory. We may try making milk paints or oil paints from crushed rock at some point.

Other recent highlights:

• P spotted an articulated bus and tried to point it out, but she ended up saying "crenellated" instead. I said "articulated" so she could remember the word she wanted, but then it led to a discussion of medieval fortifications, with photos on the Web when we got home. In an unusual moment, P said of crenellated, "Thanks for teaching me that word, mama!"
• P asked for some big paper to put up on the wall so she could write down word families to show T. She misspelled some of them, but she let me write the correct spelling of one word per family so she could correct them all. It was fun brainstorming words in each family and noting some homonyms (e.g., code doesn't belong in the family with toad and road.)
• T continues to ask lots of questions about what sounds letters make, what words say, how to spell words, and how to write letters. I gave him a composition book with big triple lines for writing. He can't use the lines very well yet, but he likes it when I take story dictation from him and write it down, and sometimes he asks me to guide his fingers to write a letter. Today as we settled down for a nap together, I was reading a novel, and T asked me to read it out loud to him. He seemed to enjoy it even though I was pretty sure he didn't understand much of it. At a couple of points he pointed with his finger, following along as if pointing at what I was reading, though he was on the opposite page. I took his cue and pointed where I was actually reading. He asked about the page numbers and how to say them (e.g., 63 is sixty-three), and also about how to pronounce combinations of letters he could see on the page. He also loves Super Why (noisy link), a PBS Kids series about letters, spelling, and reading.
• Both kids are enjoying watching Word Girl on Amazon video. Recently P watched several episodes while I folded laundry and watched with her. After some episodes we'd check and reinforce the meanings of the words emphasized. Some of these check-ins also led to discussions of civics concepts like candidates and elections (one episode included a student council election and a local election for District Attorney) or literary contexts like a school Shakespeare play.
• Both kids are also enjoying Sid the Science Kid (another noisy link), which we find on Netflix. It's very schooly, but they find the information interesting, and some of it (the importance of brushing teeth and balanced nutrition, for example) is helpful in the family.
• UnschoolerDad found the Toontastic app for iPad, and P has been making some of her own cartoons with it. It prompts for different parts of the story arc and provides music choices authors can pair with their cartoon scenes. It's fun to see the kids becoming multi-literate in different computer platforms -- touch-screen tablets, laptops, iOS, Windows, Android -- I get the feeling they'll be more comfortable than I am with a lot of technology before long.
• P and I did the experiment of filling a bowl to the brim with ice and water, and then watching the water level as the ice melted. It stayed the same -- water really expands a lot when it freezes. We'll see more of that in our environment as winter comes; yesterday I winterized the swamp cooler, and P asked why, so I talked about water pipes bursting or the swamp cooler reservoir cracking if we leave water in them during freezing weather.
• P and I found about four different ways to think about the question, "How many cups are in six quarter cups?" (we've done this before, but we found more ways this time) as I was cooking some quinoa recently. She's doing these little math-storms with me much more willingly than she used to, with almost no anxiety. It's good to see.

And then there's daydreaming. P recently said she'd like to have a whole room full of cool stuff she could use to learn. With a gate on it to keep T out. T has mastered baby gates, so that's not going to happen, but I sympathize with the desire to have more stuff -- electrical parts, microscopes, Cuisenaire rods (whether they use them for math or not, these were great fun for me as a kid for their catapult-building potential, and I still think of short distances in centimeters easily because of them), more kinds of building toys, and whatever else we can think of. It's fun to daydream of what we can do when we have an income again. Until then, there are bargains, libraries, free museums, and many possibilities afforded by our existing possessions. T's current favorite is a hand-cranked popcorn popper with conical gears on top for turning the stirring rod. Good stuff.