Look Ma, I’m a pioneer!

 

I recently found this article in the Tyee about unschooling. It continually amazes me what lies just beneath the surface of things we just take for granted in our society.

I mean, everybody knows that babies have to sleep in cribs, right? And yet when you dig just a little bit into it and learn the history of crib sleeping you realize it’s a bit of an abberation. It bears little relation to the conditions under which human beings developed and adapted over hundreds of thousands of years. But because “that’s just the way it’s done” we don’t even think to ask questions. Yet when we do, it starts to seem obvious that it’s weird to put a newborn baby to sleep in a separate environment from any other living, breathing adult (I mean, just consider where it’s been sleeping for the last few months?). While I get that cribs work for some folks and some babies do fine in them it now seems like such a bizarre arrangement.

I think the same can be said of school. How many people who send their children to public school actually know the history of the institution? Why does nobody ask basic questions such as: is age-segregation an appropriate social environment for the normal, social development of young humans?Or, why do we place so much emphasis on standardized tests and grades when virtually NOBODY asks that of any professional or hired hand (did you ask your doctor what her grades were? did you ask your mechanic how well he scored on his mechanics school exam?).

In terms of success, in business or any professional endeavour, nobody asks you what your scores are – they base their evaluation on one thing: performance. A stock brokerage could care less if one of their brokers failed every subject in school if he consistently outperforms his colleagues and reaps profits for his bosses. Pro athletes need to play their game well. Artists need to move their audience. Inventors need to make products people want and can use. 

I’m not the sort of person to be on the fringes of things. I am a pretty laid back sort of person and I rarely questioned societal norms before I had children. I just consider myself amazingly lucky to have stumbled upon a community of people who do so and who could show me what happens when you start to ask questions. 

When I read stuff like that article in the Tyee it makes me feel that a hundred years from now we may well have abolished the current education system (or greatly modified it) and people just may look back on us unschooling types as being the pioneers of change in this regard. Most of the time our little family is just living our lives and learning as we go along, but every now and then I feel like we are on the cusp of something very new and very exciting.

I know that not everybody has the time, the desire, or the resources to unschool but, at least here in Vancouver, we are fortunate to have a wide variety of alternative schools, many of whom have questioned the way things have been done for so long, and who strive to do it a bit differently. 

For once in my life I seem to have caught on to something before it was widely established. Who’d've thought?

Infinity and Beyond

Here is how the concept of infinity is being learned by Daughter:

A few months ago, while getting ready for bedtime stories, Daughter asked me out of the blue “What’s the highest number of all?”. I explained how there is no highest number, as you can add 1 to anything to get a bigger number. The next day we went over number places, and the idea that you can always add another zero to the end of a number, on and on forever. I told her this forever was called infinity.

Last night we were watching an episode of The Tick, and there was an “infinity ball” hurtling through space. Daughter noticed that it was “an 8 lying down” and we told her that was the symbol for infinity. Now she is noticing the symbol around, like on my digital camera (in focus mode). 

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Yesterday evening we headed out to the back yard to play ball. Daughter and I got distracted by some ants crawling in the grass. Our lawn is neither watered (other than rain) nor treated so it’s a mixture of part grass, part moss, and a few interesting plants thrown in like clover. We saw some plants that had what appeared to be seed pods. We opened one and it had tiny pearl-like seeds lined up inside, just like our sugar snap peas in the garden. We opened another and noticed the seeds were more opaque and darker in colour. We then plucked a bunch of seed pods and Daughter wished to sort them (she’s into sorting things) while we discussed our theories as to why the seeds varied in colour and opacity. 

 

 

Later we went back to look for more seed pods and saw some fascinating stuff. First, we saw some ants swarming over a stink bug. The bug had a large hole in the side of its carapace and you could see that most of the inside was hollow. However, its legs and antennae were moving! Just occasionally but definite movement. We moved the stink bug to a swing seat to get a closer look:

We also saw an ant carrying a large wing – looked like a flying ant wing or other such insect. And we saw an ant carrying a dead ant. They appeared to be the same species (judging by size and colour) and we wondered if this was the Undertaker of his colony, charged with taking the dead guys outside! Ants are really fascinating creatures. 

It’s amazing what worlds you can discover in a small patch of backyard lawn!

It’s OK to be Smart

My mother gave Daughter some “Brain Quest” cards for her birthday. Daughter loves this sort of thing; she has been reading the questions out to us and letting us know whether we got the answers right. In the process she is remembering the answers herself, asking a few questions, and therefore learning a great deal. 

The cards came with some printed material, and all over them is the slogan “It’s OK to be Smart”. Daughter started saying this alot and so I asked her what she thought it meant. She didn’t know, so I tried to explain that, in school, kids who enjoy learning are often teased for it. I said that alot of kids don’t like having to go to school and making fun of those who do is one way of coping with those feelings. 

I really hated that I had to have that conversation with her at all. 

The idea that we need to Market the belief that “learning is Fun!” or “it’s cool to be an A student” is, I think, an indication of what is so wrong about the way we have institutionalized learning. The social dynamics of age-segregation has fueled the sort of bullying that promotes persecution of those deemed “different” (and being “square” is one of those differences). The “mass production” nature of school, combined with a lack of resources (money and people), means that learning programs must attempt to be “one size fits all” leaving many children to fall through the cracks simply because they don’t learn in that particular fashion. The emotional consequences of being a kid who doesn’t understand, is falling behind, and who can’t succeed even despite their best efforts get played out in the “smart kids are nerds” attitude. In other words, the marketing campaign that seeks to convince kids that “It’s OK to be Smart” is just a reflection of how we have failed our children. 

The other thing that really irked me about having to explain this slogan is that I have deliberately avoided the word “smart” since my daughter was born. And certainly over the last several years as she has shown herself to be a precocious reader and learner, I have wished to avoid putting labels on her. Up until now, I doubt my daughter gave much thought to what she knows compared to the average 3 or 4 year old, or what she enjoys doing (like workbooks and quiz cards) and what that says about her in society’s eyes (“you must be smart!”). 

I grew up with the burden of “you must be smart” and it has always made me uncomfortable. As a child I couldn’t see it and often dealt with self-doubt that I was not living up to this label. I also learned to associate the notion of self-value with intelligence; something I’ve worked hard as an adult to shake off. These days being called “smart” doesn’t bother me; I consider it a collective misunderstanding and try to clarify: Everybody is smart in their own way, and academic smarts are just one form of intelligence. I lack political smarts, certain social situations give me challenge, and I’ve never been athletic. I just pursued what I loved, science, and it led me to my doctoral degree. Not because I was “smart”, but because it interested me so much. Anybody who shared my love of science and had the basic support mechanisms in place could have done what I did.

Meanwhile, Daughter goes along quizzing and learning and enjoying her game, still blissfully unaware of the heavy emphasis our society puts on Learning as something somehow separate from just Living.

Getting back into shape

I was a runner through most of the nineties. I didn’t run races or enter competitions; I ran for fitness, usually less than 5k. I stopped running in 2000 when my increasingly busy schedule and poor weather (I moved to the midwest where winters are rough) made it difficult to keep up with it. There is nothing more torturous than heading out for a run after missing a few sessions! So I switched to power walking and did that right up until I had children. 

Lately I’ve been wanting to start up a fitness regime again. I turned 40 this year and I can feel it in the stiffness of my muscles and my lack of endurance. With Husband at home now I decided to start doing some regular exercising. I went for a power walk last week, and was surprised to feel the urge to run. Yesterday I found a Learn To Run 10K training program, very similar to the one I embarked on so many years ago. Today was my first session! I was up at 6:45 and it was a glorious summer morning. I’m hoping that, by the time summer is over, I’ll have established enough of a habit to continue through the shorter days. 

And hey, I might just finally shed that extra 12 lbs I’ve been carrying around for a while!

Big Changes

Two weeks ago my husband got laid off. It was not bad news. He had been increasingly unhappy at his job and was planning on quitting in another six months, anyways. The severance package has made up for arriving at this point earlier than expected. But the really exciting news regards his new job.

He will be working for a small engineering company owned by a decent, honest person he has had the pleasure of getting to know over the last several months. Much of the work will be done from home, with occasional site visits as needed. The hours will be flexible and very much dependent on whatever current project he’s working on. With my consulting business picking up these days it is not really necessary for him to bill the standard forty hours per week, and so we have arrived at the place we’d dreamed of getting to, having no idea that it would come this soon. 

Basically, we are now dual stay-home parents. I will be working out of the home occasionally, mostly at home. He will be with the children when I’m working, and vice versa. The freedom this brings to our life is huge. We’ll be able to travel alot more often than before. Our summer camping schedule will likely include several mid-week trips to lovely campgrounds that are typically full on the weekends. We’ll be able to do things as a family during the week and avoid the busy weekends.

Just last week I was surfing some unschooling blogs and found a link to a website called The Growing Life. It’s all about living unconventionally, not doing the “school, work, marriage, children, big house, home theatre, two fancy cars, pay until you die” schtick and instead, blazing your own trail through life. It shares many philosophies with Simple Living: ask yourself what you would do if you only had six months left on Earth, and then make it a point to live a life where those things are made priorities NOW and not some obscure day in the future when you supposedly retire. 

And so when Husband decided to take this new job and we began to discuss what it would look like for us, it struck me that we had finally achieved our goal of getting everybody in the family off the conventional pathway (you know, the one that leaves so little time and money to do the things in life that really matter). The kids aren’t in school and we work flexible hours at home, taking turns caring for the children. What adventures we’ll get up to I don’t know yet. But it seemed a big enough occasion to prompt me to change the name of my blog (besides, it turns out “Life Without School” is already used by some well-established unschooling sites).

Finding my way back

Life has been busy lately and with the nice weather and travels my computer time seems more limited than before. I’ve just spent the morning with a cup of tea catching up on posts over at Wife Mom Maniac. Her words have motivated and inspired me, as she often does. 

Parenting used to be the central focus on my mind and in my life. I have been an active participant in online discussions on Natural Family Living and real-life mothering groups (attachment parenting, La Leche League) since I was pregnant with my first child. I associate with mothers who hold similar values and aspirations for their children. At times I used to joke that I’d forget what the mainstream was like, only to be shocked out of my sheltered life by seeing mothers at a playground yanking their children by the arms and scolding them. For the longest time Gentle Discipline came easily to me, though when my daughter turned three I experienced my first serious challenges. Keeping my community of support around me greatly aided me in weathering those developmental storms.

My children are older now and needing much less micromanagement. There is more time for me to pursue other interests such as reading and knitting, and more time for Husband and I. And there is more time to devote towards personal growth. Lately I’ve spent a lot of mental energy learning about Simple Living and exploring sustainability, frugality, and honing my homemaking skills. I’ve been inspired and motivated to make positive changes to our lifestyle and learned a few skills along the way. Accordingly, I visit more Simple Living sites than parenting sites these days. After catching up with WMM I’m thinking it’s time to get back to more parenting stuff. 

Being around like-minded mums has always been a source of inspiration for me. The more time I spend with gentle mothers, watching them guide their children through conflict rather than dragging them kicking and screaming, the more naturally and easily those techniques come to me. The more I read discussions about Gentle Discipline, or about Free Learning the more I find myself returning to a sense of inner peace, the feeling that I’ve come Home and that this is where I belong. 

It comes at a good time for me to rediscover that feeling because I believe I have veered off that track over the last few months. Husband has become more involved in parenting due to a realization on my part that I had been really shutting him out alot over the years, and as part of some hard work he and I are doing on strengthening our marriage after years of having babies and toddlers who demanded so much of our time. His style of parenting is very similar to my own and I am blessed that he shares my opinion on many subjects, but he has more of an authoritarian note to the way he handles things sometimes and I find it rubbing off on me in ways that don’t feel genuine (for me; he has his own way).

Recently we spent a week with my in-laws (MIL, SIL and husband with their 3 kids) who are very conservative, very behaviouralist in their beliefs about parenting, and liberally use punishment (time-outs, withdrawing privileges that may or may not be at all related to “the crime”) with their teenagers. I was teased in a manner that claimed to be good-natured but wore on me after a while (I’m not strict, I don’t discipline, I’m too soft, etc). All these things together mean that lately I have found myself resorting to using a more controlling tone and actions in my efforts to deal with unwanted behaviours. The voice in my head that spouts mainstream, societal beliefs regarding how children should be treated has been given more attention that it deserves. I have found myself dealing with my daughter in ways that would cause resentment in me should my spouse or someone else treat me that way (this is my litmus test for whether I’m reacting appropriately to a situation). Simply put, I am not parenting the way I want to, I am not staying true to my ideals. 

Reading WMM has brought me a taste of the way things were for the first several years of parenting in my household, and it has hit me today that the reason I’ve fallen off that path is because I have not been spending much time at all on it. Parenting the way I aspire to parent does not come naturally to me as it was not the way I was raised. I did find it fairly easy back when my daughter was very young and when I was immersed in communities (both online and IRL) that held the same values. Lately I haven’t been connecting with my mama friends much, and I’m not participating much in online discussions on the subject. I think this is a major reason why I have slipped away from the path I wish to follow. So I’m resolving today to apportion some of my time and energy in reconnecting with those values and the communities that hold those values, in an effort to be a better parent to my children.