Reading odyssey

Though Holly wasn't reading, her vocabulary was sophisticated and she was fascinated by the history of and connectedness of words. When she did start to read, she had no reason to use easy books. She was still eleven when she did her first real reading, a Judy Blume novel. She read two of those, and moved on to Stephen King's novella The Body.

When she had only been reading a couple of months, we were sitting down to watch "The Twilight Zone,” Holly reached over to move the Tank Girl comic books she had been reading. One was called "The Odyssey." Then the DVD menu came up, and one of the episodes was "The Odyssey of Flight 33." She commented on it, and I said "You saw the word 'odyssey' twice in an hour? Cool!"

She said, "I saw the word 'odyssey' twice in one minute!"
. . . .Reading will happen, and if it takes longer for your children than you think it will, keep them happy and distracted in the meantime. As their experience and vocabulary grow, their reading will be that much more effortless the day they're fully equipped to understand the written word.

SandraDodd.com/r/threereaders
photo by Sandra Dodd (click it)
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Learning by looking, doing, exploring

Meredith Novak wrote:

It's good to know that it's not necessary to totally understand everything you read (or listen to) the first time through. I think that's one of the misconceptions people get from school's "read it and answer the questions" format. It's okay to skim through something the first time and just get a general idea, then, if you're still interested, go back and read for more detail later - maybe after reading or hearing something else, first, that clarifies those details.

But that's learning in the sense of "taking in information" - and learning is more than that. Learning also comes from doing things, exploring objects and processes, places and ideas. Much as I like storing up facts like a magpie, I do most of my learning by taking things apart and putting them back together. If I have a question, I'm as likely to look for person to show me what I need as I am to look for a book. I *can* figure things out from books, but often I can learn the same thing more effectively by watching someone else.

—Meredith

SandraDodd.com/awareness
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Enemies and monsters

Once I commented on one from a list of "truths" on a correspondent's blog:

This is not at all true. It has been claimed for years, but it’s nonsense.

18. Television turns you into a hypnotic state where the viewer switches off completely and is drawn into the world of the idiot box (well, that’s why it’s called that – an idiot box) for it doesn’t enable a two-way communication. Not even a silent one because you go numb.

If that were true, how much worse would books be? Plays?

I have collected accounts for twenty years of the learning that comes from television and video. People like to have enemies and monsters, sometimes, and “Screentime” is an easy boogey-man. SandraDodd.com/screentime/

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The blogger had already changed her mind about it before I commented, after having discovered my site, she said. I believe her. The post was a few years old when I objected.

SandraDodd.com/clarity
photo by Sara McGrath

If mathematics is easy for a person...

Disclaimers: Unschooling doesn't ensure mathematical ability.

I wrote this before Marty got a degree in economics. They were 18 or older before taking any classes, and only needed to pay for the books.

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My kids all caught up with formal math in a semester or two of community college. Marty did up to calculus. Kirby only took one class but makes use of math all the time in his work and play, and is good with money and loans and banking and all that practical life stuff.

Holly took three classes, I think. Maybe two. Liked it; it wasn't difficult. There were people in class with her bemoaning the difficulty, and they had been in school for twelve years or more, taking math classes.

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That was written in 2014. Their paid employment and their hobbies, since then, have involved some or all of logistics, statistics, financial accounting, coding/programming, inventory and cash handling. What they learned in class was the notation used to communicate mathematical ideas "on paper" in our culture.

Some of their facility might have been inherited genetically from their mathish dad. That's fair, too.

SandraDodd.com/math/schoolmath
photo by Shawn Smythe Haunschild

The urge to control

If the "control force" is great with you, maybe use it to control your own clutter or organize your papers or rearrange your books or clothing. File your photos and negatives. Scan some stuff. Don't turn that awful control beam on people you love.

SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Visions of input

There was a time when the only way for a kid to get information from outside his home and neighborhood was books. (Think Abraham Lincoln, log cabin in the woods far from centers of learning.) Now books tend to be outdated, and google.com is better for information. If Abraham Lincoln had had full-color DVDs of the sights of other countries, of people speaking in their native accents and languages, and of history, he would have shoved those books aside and watched those videos.

When someone thinks books are the one crucial step to any further learning, then books and school have crippled that person's ability to think expansively, and to see what's unfolding in front of them in the real world.

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That was written in 2010. I would like to upgrade my imagined young-Abe-Lincoln to streaming services.

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SandraDodd.com/bookworship
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Texas, when DVDs were abundant

What leads to learning

Mary Ellen / nellebelle wrote:

The girls and I did a *unit study* on the Olympics. I use the term loosely, because I didn't sit down and plan units or require reports on what they learned. Basically, we watched and watched and watched Olympics coverage, bought the official program in order to follow events more easily, got library books about Michelle Kwan and other Olympic stars present and past, and recorded some of our favorite events for repeat viewing. We even got the Olympic soundtrack CD. While watching, all sorts of tidbits came up for discussion. Where our favorite athletes were from had us frequently grabbing the globe or an atlas. How were events scored, why did some countries have many participants and others only a few, what is a sport, sportsmanship, and much more. Some nice unplanned things occurred at the same time. Pat was working with some people from Spain, and a couple of them came to visit. They came to dinner at our house and spent the evening watching and discussing Olympics with us. This was the night that Ice Dancing was on, and we had a spirited discussion on whether this should qualify as a sport, or not. It was exciting for all of us to have a foreign person associated with the international sports industry spend time with us. That it happened during the world's most popular sports competition was really cool. . . . . It never ceases to amaze me how doing one thing can lead to learning about something else.

—Mary Ellen

Part of something longer, SandraDodd.com/t/cheesy
photo by Cathy Koetsier, on a visit to Cambridge

The value of input

When someone wrote, "We don't value TV, we live our values by not having one," I responded:

I value input, information and learning. I've seen immeasurable learning in my kids and others from things they have seen in movies, on TV, in online videos, heard on the radio, read in magazines, picked up in conversations with others, heard in public presentations or from tour guides or from books. To eliminate some part of that input out of fear would have made my children's world smaller.

SandraDodd.com/connections/
photo by Karen James

Candy, TV, books and broccoli

Jo Isaac wrote:

While Kai and I were watching Inside Out yesterday, they had a part where broccoli is in the 'disgust' part of Riley's emotions. Kai loves broccoli - it's one of his favourite foods and the first thing he eats if it's on a plate. He said that parents make broccoli disgusting in kids heads because they force them (the kids) to eat it.

In the same way we can make broccoli seem 'disgusting' by forcing it down our kids throats, we can make TV seem more 'attractive' by setting it up as a limited resource with apparently magical powers of 'distraction'.

By giving broccoli the same status as candy, and TV the same status as books and board games, children are free to make the choices that are best for them, and learn the way they learn best.

—Jo Isaac
(original, on facebook)

SandraDodd.com/joisaac
photo by Sarah S.

This "thing"

A mom in 1995:

Do you use books at all, Sandra?

SandraDodd:

What do you mean "use books"?

That mom:

As in curriculum, textbooks, etc.

SandraDodd:

I use books like crazy—we need to look at what you mean by "use."

. . . .
SandraDodd:

A lot of the problem with discussing all this is philosophical—the definitions of "learn" and "know" and things like that.

If we talk about what we "do" and "use" and "are" instead of what's happening in and with our children we dance around the "thing" without seeing the "thing" (and the next philosophical problem is: what is this "thing"?)

SandraDodd.com/chats/definitions
photo by Colleen Prieto

P.S. In the days of text chats, there would be ten or twenty people in the chat, rolling over each other. I wasn't saying I used a lot of texbooks; I was still responding to her first question. Reading chats is a bit different, but for those who didn't get to be in any, there was overlap and lag and confusion, and they were fun, too.

It's not about power

Once upon a time, a newer but enthusiastic unschooler came to a discussion explaining the "we" (all of us) should agree that unschooling was about power—power over oneself, and the power to decide what to learn and when (and more dramatic power-based rhetoric).

Some of my response is below, and near the photo credit is a link to the full post.

We don't talk about power here much, but we have given our children a life of choices. It's not "power," it's rational thinking, considering all sorts of factors and preferences. They don't need power over themselves. They need to BE themselves.
SandraDodd.com/being

"The power to decide what to learn" makes a pretzel of the straight line between experience and knowing.

My children don't "decide what to learn, how to learn, and when to learn it." They learn all the time. They learn from dreams, from eating, from walking, from singing, from conversations, from watching plants grow and storms roll. They learn from movies, books, websites, and asking questions.

Power over oneself, unschooling and "politics"
photo by Amy Milstein

So logically...

Deb Lewis wrote:

Does TV create violence, really? Maybe guns create violence. Knives. Baseball bats. Hammers. Axes, shovels, saws? Rope? Dynamite? Sharp sticks, rocks? Maybe it's language causes violence because most killers spoke. Maybe it's books. Clothing? Day time night time wind rain snow trees birds frogs.



For lots of kids, even the bad guys on TV are nicer than the real life crazy people they live and go to school with.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/violence
photo by Tara Joe Farrell
The page also has this quote:

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"

—Dick Cavett

Compassion for passions

Kelly Lovejoy, on the thoughts that help parents to deschool:

What are your passions? HOW did you learn to do those things? In a classroom?

Two of my passions as a child were dogs and horses. Dogs and horses are NOT taught in any grade, middle, or high school *I* know of. But I wanted to learn everything I could about them. My parents gave me dogs and horses. They bought me books and paid for me to take riding lessons and dog obedience classes. They paid for dog and horse shows and equipment. My passion threw me into reading every book I could find (there were no videos back then—nor "Animal Planet").

By twelve I could identify every breed of dog and horse that I had ever seen or read about and tell you how it was developed, where, why, and by whom. I spent every weekend and every afternoon at a dog show/horse show/event/trial or just hanging around the stable or kennel. I asked thousands of questions and "got my hands dirty." Many of my friends were adults with the same passions. Training, breeding, grooming, showing, husbandry—all of these things I learned because I was consumed by them!

But, of course, dogs and horses are NOT school subjects—and are completely unimportant in the school world. What if I had waited for a teacher to come along and say, "Today we are learning all about dog and horses"? Not only would I have waited all my life, the teacher would only have given me a "taste" of the subject!

OH! And you *can't* make a living with dogs and horses—right?

Stage one is often referred to as DEschooling. It's the period of time we need to give ourselves in order to "step away from the box" of school and school-think. Ask yourself why and how you learned your passion: whether it was music, cooking, flying, gardening, or long-distance running. Or even more "academic-like" passions, like Shakespeare, chemistry, World War II, or a foreign language. When you are comfortable with how learning happens by indulging in passions and making connections in your learning, you are quickly heading towards stage two.

—Kelly Lovejoy

from "Stages of Unschooling"
SandraDodd.com/kellylovejoy/stages
photo by Cathy Koetsier

Climbing mountains and baking pies

In response to someone saying her child would rather take the easy route than try something tough, Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

It's human nature to avoid what we feel is a waste of time, energy and resources.
It's also human nature to pour energy into what we find fascinating.

If someone is made to climb a mountain, they'll find the easiest path, and perhaps even cheat.

If someone desires to climb a mountain, they may even make it more difficult—challenging—for themselves if the route doesn't light their fire.

If it were human nature to go the easy route, I wouldn't be sitting here writing out a response! No one would write a novel. No one would climb Mt. Everest. No one would bake a cherry pie from scratch. No one would have kids.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/pressure
Photo by Sandra Dodd, of Holly Dodd riding a steam train restored and largely operated by volunteers. The easy route would have been for them to stay home and read books and watch movies about trains.

Books, directly deposited

Deb Lewis wrote:

Listening to audio books is a wonderful way for kids to experience great stories beyond what they'd be able to read on their own. (And beyond what their moms have voice for!)

SandraDodd.com/limits/listening
photo by Sandra Dodd

Who reads how

Written when my kids were teens:

Kirby reads like a lawyer. He can skim a rules book or instructions for a game, and explain simply and clearly to others. If he forgets a detail, he'll be able to find it easily.

Marty likes humor and history.

Holly's main reading is on the internet, but she likes name books, and other non-fiction and trivia. One thing she doesn't use the internet for is definitions and spellings. She likes my old full-size American Heritage Dictionary, and will sprint upstairs to look something up on the slightest excuse.

Three Readers—SandraDodd.com/threereaders
(It's all one paragraph in the original.)
photo by Sara McGrath

Learning what's important

In 1997, someone asked how unschooling moms stayed patient.

Other moms have told me they think I'm patient. It makes me feel guilty because I have the internal list of all the times I've blown it, but a few things have helped me.

The biggest was Adult Children of Alcoholics, an al-Anon group. I went to meetings for four years and learned a lot of calming and encouraging things. One of those is to remember what I wanted and needed as a child. Then I try to give those things to my children. I don't mean toys or books. I mean listening, and smiling, and joking, and letting them climb on stuff even if it made me nervous, and not making such strictly-to-the-minute rules like "be back at 5:45 or else" and other arbitrary control-junk. One of the quotes/sayings from that learning-time is "How Important Is It?" and thinking that little mantra can help a ton all by itself. If we waste our energy and our relationship with our children on how they wear their socks and where they keep their toothbrush between times, there's nothing left for important things. I try to save it for important things, and I try not to be the defining judge of what's important. There are things the kids consider very important, and I force myself (at first, until I calm myself and remind myself to give) to pay attention to their stuff too. No "That's nice dear" while I ignore them. When it happens, occasionally, that I've done that, I feel bad and I sometimes go back and say, "Tell me again about that game. I'm sorry. I wasn't really listening."

Next biggest influence was La Leche League. There I learned that children have within them what they need to know, and that the parent and child are a team, not adversaries. It reinforced the idea that if you are loving and gentle and patient that children want to do what you ask them to do, and that they will come to weaning, potty training, separation from mom, and all those milestones without stress and without fear if you don't scare them or stress them! Seems kind of obvious, but our culture has 1,000 roadblocks.


From having studied meditation and Eastern religion, I learned the value of breathing. I think what it does is dissipate adrenaline. I remember in the 1960's and early 1970's it was Big News that yogis could *actually* slow their heart rates at will! WELL duh. People had been doing it in church (those who cared to actually "be still and know") for hundreds of years, but nobody thought to wire up contemplative Christians.

When people (parents or kids) are agitated and are thinking for a moment that something has to happen JUST THIS WAY and RIGHT NOW, breathing helps. Deep breathing, slow, and full-as-possible exhalation. This is, in Western terms, "count to ten." Calm down and let the adrenaline go. Some people have biochemistry that's not easy to control, and some people count too fast.

SandraDodd.com/parentingpeacefully
(read aloud as an intro, in the recording at the bottom of the page)

photo by Sandra Dodd of the neighbor's tree seen through an inch-thick piece of ice from a bucket of water on a cold day
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Dodd-house Unschooling, 1994

What is below was written in 1994. I wanted to make it easier for other families to understand and try unschooling, and have been doing that ever since.

Our daily plans are nebulous, and although we might schedule a trip to the zoo or a papier-mâché day (something that takes a clean table and a lot of setup and no big interruptions), we don't have something scheduled on most days, and we don't "educationalize" trips to zoos and museums and such. We just go, and what we read or see is discussed, but not in a scheduled, checklist way.

There are several ways that I get ideas and resources. I have e-mail friends. I have a few local friends who homeschool but the homeschool scene is too structured for my tastes. I'm a member of the state organization and I get some good ideas from their newsletters. When I was beginning to homeschool, I got reassurance from a friend who has four older children. Her philosophy is that as long as they know things by the time they go on dates or get married, it doesn't matter how soon or in what order they learn them. Family Fun Magazine has some good ideas and I have some books on arts and science projects. Nothing has helped as much as reading Growing Without Schooling.



SandraDodd.com/pinkcrayons

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Update, 25 years later:

Earlier this week, Keith and I were at the old house (the house we were in when kids were young) watching Ivan (Marty's baby, who's 16 months old). I commented on the brick floor I had put in the entryway, and said I don't know how I had the energy to do that, but I liked the pattern, and it was still in good shape.

The friend mentioned above is Carol Rice (with the four kids and the good advice). Just recently, for a few months, she and Kirby were both working at Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless—she as a permanent employee, and Kirby as a contract IT guy.

Everything else

A mom once expressed excitement about strewing books. I wrote and said strewing books wasn't the best way to strew. She asked "What else is there to strew?"

I wrote:
         "Everything else."
And then I listed a few dozen things, which are saved at the link below.

My kids have been interested in books and documentaries, but if I only "counted" that, or thought those were more valuable than the other connections, unschooling would fizzle.

SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd
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The real problem

Years before we had children, I was telling my young husband-to-be that in school the only math I liked were the "word problems." He said those are the only real math problems in text books. That was the real math. The numbers sitting already in equations and formations were the solutions to unstated problems, with only the arithmetical calculations left to be done.

I remember that moment vividly. I was in my late 20's and hearing for the first time what "mathematics" meant. I had asked my teachers all through school "What is this for?" and "How is this used?" and they rarely had an answer beyond "Just do it," or "It will be on the test."

SandraDodd.com/math/unerzogen
photo by Sandra Dodd