Visions and knowledge

I didn't know how much children could learn without reading, until I immersed myself in unschooling and my children's lives.

As their reading ability unfolded and grew, I learned things I never knew as a teacher, and that I wouldn't have learned as an unschooling mom had they happened to have read “early.” Reading isn't a prerequisite for learning. Maps can be read without knowing many words. Movies, music, museums and TV can fill a person with visions, knowledge, experiences and connections regardless of whether the person reads. Animals respond to people the same way whether the person can read or not. People can draw and paint whether they can read or not. Non-readers can recite poetry, act in plays, learn lyrics, rhyme, play with words, and talk about any topic in the world at length.

SandraDodd.com/unexpected
photo by Holly Dodd, from inside an auto-rickshaw
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Seeing Everything

If you learn to see everything instead of just school things, unschooling will start working for you.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp (click image for close-up and fun details)

Hidden secret rooms and magic doors

When I move thru your site, I feel like a child in a candy store, or like I'm in a fantastic meandering castle with hidden secret rooms and magic doors to new realities.

I didn't keep the name of the person who wrote that, but I love the images.
SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Julie D

Feel full

If you dwell in the empty half of your glass, life will feel empty. If you dwell in the full half of your glass, life will feel full.

—Joyce Fetteroll

Abundance
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Impermanence

In New Mexico there's a kind of cool tradition, of having an old pickup in the back yard. We had this one.


Bonus points if it runs; this one usually did.

If it's turquoise? Jackpot. This one was.

Now, though, it's off to be used by an auto-shop class at Dulce Jr./Sr. High School. It was always a truck passed between Keith and his friend Bob, who was best man at our wedding.

Marty is getting married next month. His best man wasn't born yet when that truck was made. Neither of them went to school, as kids. The bride did. She was a cheerleader at Bernalillo High School.

My kids used to be together all the time, every day, feeling crowded, sometimes. Now they don't see each other for weeks or months.


Things change. Even in the best of peaceful circumstances, things change. Keep your balance, find gratitude and abundance, and accept changes gracefully when you can.

Images from the winter before Kirby moved away.
photos by Sandra Dodd

Where are you headed?

When you come to an intersection, how do you decide which way to go? It helps, before operating a motor vehicle with all its attendant expenses and inherent dangers, to know where you want to go. When you DO have a destination, then each intersection has some wrong ways, and some better and worse ways. It's the same with unschooling. If that's where you're headed, there are some wrong ways you can avoid simply by being mindful of your intent.

Mindfulness in Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd

Playing with dolls

Holly was here today. She's 22 years old now. In this photo, she was 14 or so.

Today she was trying out a new basket, for the possibility of being a babydoll bed. She has a babydoll collection. She was carrying one of her favorites around while we were talking, and asked me seriously why, when she has had it out in public, people have reacted so oddly. The only acceptable answer seemed to be that she was taking a class of some sort, and needed to carry a baby doll. Otherwise, they didn't know how to respond.

I gave her some possible responses to use ("I really like it" or "He feels almost like a real baby" or something conversational), but the real answer was that there is often pressure on kids to stop playing with certain things at certain ages. Baby dolls, maybe by the time girls are eight or so. Boys even sooner (if they were allowed to play with a doll at all).

Holly grew up without much pressure to conform to arbitary age rules. I'm glad.

SandraDodd.com/playing
photo by Sandra Dodd

Something old. . . something blue

Something old, something new,
something borrowed, something blue."

—traditional English saying about what brides should wear

"And all of this is true because it rhymes."

—Vitruvius, in The Lego Movie

Look for beauty, truth and humor. Connect the dots!

SandraDodd.com/connections
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Holly likes green chile

Green chile is a New Mexico staple. Ten or twelve years ago, I wrote this, in a discussion about reading:

We've used this "someday you will" or "you just don't yet" about all kinds of things, from reading to caring about the opposite sex to foods. Holly doesn't like green chile yet. She figures she will ("When my taste buds die" she jokes), because her brothers didn't used to and now they do. Kirby lately started liking mushrooms. Marty still doesn't like spinach yet, but we haven't branded him "a spinach hater," and I don't think anyone should consider a child "a non-reader," just one who "doesn't read yet."

SandraDodd.com/r/encouragement
photo by Sandra Dodd

Generate joy

When you learn to give, it starts to flow, and the others around you are soft and giving and a family can generate a lot of joy!


Focus, Hobbies, Obsessions, transcript of a chat
photo by Sandra Dodd, of the same clouds reflected twice
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Lasting happiness

"Fun is serious. Fun is important, especially for kids. Don't underrate fun. People who are not happy as children seldom find easy or lasting happiness as adults."

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Susan Burke
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The past, the future, and the right now

I love history, and I like to think about the future, but it's important to bring yourself back, very often to the very now.

Schuyler Waynforth wrote: "It helps a lot to try for better moments not days. Don't judge a day by one upset, judge it as a bad moment and move forward. A little bit better each moment. A little bit more aware."

SandraDodd.com/moment
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Doozy Dodd

This is what unschooling, though, has done for Holly. She is not a student. She is Holly. She is not a fourth grader. She is Holly Dodd. She has been since birth, and she will be until or unless she decides to go by another name, but that will be her decision. The world is hers in a way that the world has never been mine, not even now as an adult. Sometimes I see myself as a messy amalgamation of experiences, certificates, test scores and labels, just come lately into the real world.

I see my children living full, real lives today, right now. I don't see them as students in preparation for life, who after a number of years and lessons might be considered "completed" or "graduated." It was a long way to come, and I never even had to move. I just had to look at what I considered to be real.



That was written in early 2002,
when Holly was ten years old.
At twenty-one years old, she goes by Doozy.

SandraDodd.com/fullofyourself
photo ("Holly Dodge") by Sandra Dodd
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Hold on to something

Instead of requiring that my kids had to hold my hand in a parking lot, I would park near a cart and put some kids in right away, or tell them to hold on to the cart (a.k.a. "help me push", so a kid can be between me and the cart). And they didn't have to hold a hand. There weren't enough hands. I'd say "Hold on to something," and it might be my jacket, or the strap of the sling, or the backpack, or something.

I've seen other people's children run away from them in parking lots, and the parents yell and threaten. At that moment, going back to the mom seems the most dangerous option.

Make yourself your child's safest place in the world, and many of your old concerns will just disappear.

The Big Book of Unschooling, page 67 (71 of newer edition)
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Some kind of learning

"Learning happens all the time. The brain never stops working and it is not possible to divide time up into 'learning periods' versus 'non-learning periods.' Everything that goes on around a person, everything they hear, see, touch, smell, and taste, results in learning of some kind."

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/pam/principles
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Decisions

Think about what you think you "have to" do. Choose to do something good, for sensible reasons.

SandraDodd.com/decisions
photo by Sandra Dodd

Something old, something new

If you don't have other plans, here's an idea:

Do something new and different today. Something surprising, maybe.

Also, today, do something familiar and comfortable and soothing.

If that feels good, consider doing it every day.

SandraDodd.com/nest
The photo is a link to the report of a day in 2009.
photo by Sandra Dodd
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I'm glad...

Sometimes when my kids were little I would express a positive thought aloud.

"I'm glad we can afford to go out to lunch sometimes," or "I'm glad we have a car and enough gasoline to go to the mountains!" Or "I'm glad our cats are nice."

And don't do it to train them. Do it because it's true. It will be uplifting, in that moment to kind of put a blessing on it.


from the January 2013 chat on gratitude

photo by Sandra Dodd of a car in Lyon, France, 2012
Here's the other side of it:

Roses and music

If your child is having a slow week or month or year, don't worry. If your child is having a zippy brilliant period of life where everything's coming up roses and the backswell of music seems always to accompany his glorious exploits, don't expect that to last day in and day out for sixty years. It won't. It can't. It shouldn't. People need to recuperate from stunning performances.

Life is lumpy; let it be.

page 73 (or 80) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a truck at a silo in West Texas, 2011
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The same and the safe

My favorite "new rule" has always been that learning comes first. Given choices between doing one thing or another, I try to go toward the thing that's newest for my kids, and most intriguing. "New and different" outranks "We do it all the time, same place same way." But there are comfort-activities, and to be rid of all of them would be as limiting as to only do routine, same, safe things. So we find a balance. Or we tweak the same and the safe, changing it enough to make it especially memorable from time to time.

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Holly Dodd