Real people

Even the nicest of words can be ruined if they're spoken in a condescending, treacly way. It's not bad for infants, and it's great for French poodles. It's that talking-to-a-French-poodle voice, and the thoughts that go with it, that should be avoided when parents are talking to their children.

Dan Vilter shared this story on the AlwaysLearning list in 2001:

At a park day, we were having a discussion about the usefulness of praise and sincerity. The unschoolers in the group were trying to point out the fallacy of over and insincere praise, and indirectly about treating your children as people first. After much talk getting nowhere, one of the other unschooling parents turned to me and in the French poodle voice started thanking me for all the things I had done for the group that day. Something like,"Oh Dan, thank you for bringing the stove for hot cocoa. You did such a good job setting it up and heating the water! You're so strong carrying that big jug of water all by yourself!" Everyone had a good laugh and the point was succinctly made.

—Dan Vilter

"Treating them as people first." That's it. See them as people, who hear you and are thinking, and treat that respectfully. In her book Whole Child/Whole Parent, Polly Berrien Berends, uses the term "Seeing Beings."

SandraDodd.com/tone
photo by Denaire Nixon

Real learning is bigger

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

The idea that learning to read is learning to sound out or recognize words, that learning to write is learning to draw the letters correctly, that learning math is learning to carry out algorithms by rote—such ridiculously low goals. As if that is what kids are capable of. Those are not real reading, writing, or math.

—Pam Sorooshian

What Teaching Can Never Be (chat transcript)
photo by Cátia Maciel

Thinking, clearly and confidently

Writing is thinking clearly. For unschoolers writing will be helped by a kid having the confidence that if someone asks him about a movie or the lyrics of a song, that person will listen to his report, and to his opinion, and if he's misheard the words or misunderstood the plot, that they will help him understand it.

a nice match for Untangling Ideas, but the quote is from Seeing Writing
photo by Jihong Tang

Words might kinda hurt you

Heather Booth wrote:

One of the things that helped when I started unschooling was becoming aware of the words I used. The clearer I became in my thoughts and the more aware of the impact of my words, the better I was at being an unschooling parent. I want to discuss with my group the power of words. "Read a little, try a little, wait a while, watch" and "Say yes more" are great phrases to get you going in the right direction but if you are still saying "have to" or "junk food " or "screen time" then you're stuck in negative thoughts.

—Heather Booth

Weed Away Words
photo by Sandra Dodd

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To any non-English speakers who don't get the title, we have an old saying that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." The post's name is in the rhythm of the end of that; it has scansion.

Fifteenth Anniversary!

Images and parts of the text are links.

First post, with some nice comments, from 2010:

This would need more candles now, but...



May the richness and riches of this trove of words and photos seep into your soul and give you sweet dreams and good ideas.

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With this, there are 5,343 posts. A few were deleted in the past for lacking longevity (announcements, temporary info). Some have been repeated for being especially good. They are labelled four ways, to keep it from being one big label/tag, so if you would like to see some "greatest hits," these are clickable, and are called

again (72 of those)

again! (147)

re-run (151)

repeat (136)

For today, then, if those are excluded, there are 4,837 non-repeated posts. Still around 5,000.

Most posts link to an unschooling page or two on my website. Most of those pages link back to this blog (from a little link in the upper right corner).

If you would like to help fund the maintenance of that site (from which most of the quotes come), there is a donation link at SandraDodd.com (which can also be accessed from this image on most of the unschooling pages:


The donation link is halfway down there. It's PayPal, debit or credit.

I can accept checks or Christmas cards to:

Sandra Dodd
8116 Princess Jeanne NE
Albuquerque NM 87110     USA

(If cool foreign money, save it there; consider photo request below!)

Also useful would be photos for the collection from which I try to pull a match for a text. Not all get used and some get used very late, but it's nice to have a variety. Send just a few you love, so I'm not overwhelmed, and tell me how to credit you (full name or truncated how). Those can go by messenger or by e-mail to Sandra@SandraDodd.com (and larger files are fine).

SandraDodd.com
tree art by Bo King
cake photo by Sandra Dodd
photos by many different people at the repeat/again links

P.S. I want the website to last a long time, so if I'm not able to collect funding assistance someday, maybe find Holly Dodd or Vlad Gurdiga and see if they need financial help keeping it going. It's a bit less than $20 a month these days; might go up as things might do. Thanks.

Helping one another grow

Of her birth family, Rippy wrote:

My family used to regularly travel to India to a Sikh ashram where we were encouraged to examine our thoughts and words. The philosophy there was that helping one another grow into more loving, mindful people is one of the greatest acts of service one can do.

—Rippy Dusseldorp Saran

Kinder and More Compassionate

Purely learning

Facebook Memories showed me that someone on another continent had quoted me, years ago:

Learning does not teach us, but from learning we learn.

I still haven't found her source, but in looking I found its "wordier" cousin posted here in 2011:

Mastering ideas about learning

As some of my articles are being translated (now into Japanese, French and Italian) I see how much of my writing and thinking is about language itself, and so some of these ideas won't translate. But sometimes, that fact is very good. Some of our confusion about teaching and students and study and learning, in English, has to do with the words we use, and if the problems don't exist in other languages, that's wonderful for them.

In Romance language (Italian, French, Spanish and so on) our "teacher" translates to something along the lines of "maestro," a word we have too in regards to music direction. And we have the English cognate "master" which is more currently left in "master of arts" and other college-degree titles. Once that meant a person was qualified to teach at the university level. That meaning is gone in the U.S., pretty much.

Considering the word family from which "maestro" comes (and not knowing all its connotations in other languages), the English verb "to master" means to learn. It means to become accomplished in the doing of something. Whether mastering horseback riding or blacksmithing or knowing and controlling one's own emotions, it's not something someone else does to you or for you.

So for any translators or bilinguals reading here, have sympathy for English speakers who can't get to natural learning without disentangling all the graspy words and ideas about teaching and education and their implications that learning is passive and teaching must be done to a person.

SandraDodd.com/wordswordsother
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Dangerous thoughts

The words of Pam Sorooshian:

People should shush the tapes in their heads and think for themselves. Be brave.

The VERY first thing that really shook me up in listening to unschoolers was at a talk Sandra gave—she said it was okay to think dangerous thoughts. I decided to try it.

I've been thinking, "What if....." ever since. I'm addicted to thinking dangerous thoughts.

From a 2009 chat/interview with Pam Sorooshian;
transcript: SandraDodd.com/chats/pamsorooshian
photo by Marty Dodd
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Sounding off

Patti Schmidt wrote:

It seems to me that "phonics" essentially serves the purpose of "teaching" a child to read before he's ready and fully grasps context and meaning. I know that I can read Spanish, which is a much more consistently phonetic language than English, complete with accent and everything, and literally not understand one bit of what I'm saying.

I remember being tested separately for "reading" and reading comprehension. If one can't understand the words and phrases, then isn't it just decoding with an internalized phonics decoder ring?

Turning script to sound is one trick, but the reading that people want will turn marks to meaning. The same way that musical notation (and a musician who can decipher and play or sing it) can bring music into the air, so can the written word becoming lively language again.

Patti discovered, as many unschooling parents have, that while some children appreciate phonics hints, or figure phonics out on their own, others learn to read in their own other ways.

More of Patti's story of children learning differently:
SandraDodd.com/r/patti
photo by Sandra Dodd

The photo was taken of the insde of a church door in Durham, in England. "The draught is dreadful" cannot be read easily with American phonics (or sight reading, or look-say). But it's cute, and it's alliterative, which is an ancient tradition in the English language, and in the naming of the alter-egos of comic-book super heroes.

What about "Educational" Materials?

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Resistance to things that look schooly or educational makes sense—we're promoting letting all those things go completely, especially at the beginning stages of unschooling, and we talk about how beneficial that can be for helping people to help them understand that learning happens all the time, that much of what is "taught" in school is learned naturally by unschoolers in the course of living their complete schoolishness-free lives.

I don't think it makes sense to criticize unschoolers for being anti-schoolishness. That goes with the territory.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/stages/materials
image by WordCloud, of words by Sandra Dodd

In 2013, someone said my facebook posts were negative. In those days, WordCloud could generate artsy data from a facebook URL (or any URL or document). The posts were candid (they were already there). The size is based on the number of times words were repeated, in that sample of 293 posts—a year's worth. Looked pretty positive!

Changing sensibilities

Common sense among unschoolers is (and should be, needs to be) more particular and rarified than everyday "common sense."

Does it seem like common sense, after a few years of unschooling, that it's good to let people sleep if they don't need to be anywhere? And that the nicer you are to them, the nicer they're likely to be to you and to others? It seems like common sense to me that learning is learning regardless of the source, and that what's engaging and fun has value.

SandraDodd.com/change (though these words aren't there)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Support

Supporting someone or something requires strength and confidence.

Support is holding something up.
Support is upholding something.

Support your child. Lift him up above you.

New words, relating to older ideas:
SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Sandra Dodd
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King of the Monsters

Sandra Dodd to Deb Lewis:

If I could describe all your writing in just a few words, it might be "Peace, humor and scary monsters." Dylan's life has involved a lot of Godzilla and that ilk. Scooby Doo and Godzilla.

Deb Lewis:

Yes, a lot of Godzilla, beginning when he was very little. And then any movie with a monster, or any book about monsters. And then all kinds of horror and science fiction. Godzilla was the gateway monster, though, and it started with a movie marathon on television. I couldn’t have guessed then, when he was three years old, that he would find a lifetime of happiness in horror! And I didn’t know then that his love of monster movies would lead to learning to read and write, finding authors, making connections to other cultures, (and more movies and authors) and connections to music, theater, poetry, folklore, art, history... It turned out to be this rich and wonderful experience he might have missed, and I might never have understood if I’d said no to TV, or to Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

Before Dylan was reading or writing really well, he’d meticulously copy the titles and dates of movies he wanted, and request them from interlibrary loan. All that writing, and all the time spent watching movies with subtitles helped him read and write better. I remember the feeling of joy and wonder, mixed with some sadness and loss when he didn’t need me to read movie subtitles to him anymore. I learned so much about learning.

There's Even MORE at
Montana to Italy via Godzilla
(an interview with Deb Lewis)
photo by Deb Lewis

Focus on the relationship

Create a situation where the children are calm and at peace and glad to be there.

More "calm and at peace" posts

The quote above is from the end of Learn Nothing Day - A Conversation with Sandra Dodd, from July 2024. The title words were spoken by Cathy Koetsier, my interviewer in the podcast linked here.
photo by Cátia Maciel

Odd combos

The connection between humor and learning is well known. Unexpected juxtaposition is the basis of a lot of humor, and even more learning.

It can be physical, musical, verbal, mathematical, but basically what it means is that unexpected combinations or outcomes can be funny. There are funny chemistry experiments, plays on words, math tricks, embarrassingly amusing stories from history, and there are parodies of famous pieces or styles of art and music.

SandraDodd.com/playing
photo by Sandra Dodd, one day at Goodwill
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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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Right now, today

Deb Lewis's words:

You don't get another chance to be the mom to these kids right now, today. When they are grown and gone from you, you can have the cleanest house in the neighborhood. But what is the most important thing today? What will you be happier remembering in your old age; that your house always looked nice or that your kids were happy? What will your children be happy to remember about their time with you? Dirty houses always wait for you to get around to them. Children don't, and shouldn't have to.

Happy, happy, happy.

— Deb Lewis

Modelling Joy
photo by Sarah Peshek

Wisdom at its finest

Willow Lune wrote

The wisdom coming from these unschooled kids amazes (and surprises) me on a regular basis. The choices they make and the thoughtfulness they put into decisions. The in-depth discussions. Their take on the world. Their willingness to give feedback, knowing that their words matter. Wow—wisdom at its finest.

—Willow Lune

SandraDodd.com/surprise
photo by Rosie Moon

Learning from life

Me, interviewed, answering this question:

Q: If you were to define unschooling in three words, what would they be?

A: I wouldn’t. It’s too easy to mislead. Too often, people grab a phrase or idea and run off and make a mess with it. If it’s used lightly though, I don’t mind “learning from life”.

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The interviewer said I had been writing about unschooling online since Yahoogroups days, but I was on in 1993, even before the AOL message boards came and went. 🙂

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Sandra Dodd—30 years of Unschooling
photo by Holly Dodd

Lessons and pressure won't help.

Each person who learns to read learns almost suddenly, at some point. It happens whether he's in school or not. Before that point, the words are scribbles. After that point, he sees a word and knows what it means, without sounding it out, without looking it up. The scribbles turn to words. . . . .
Before a child can read, He Cannot Read. Lessons and pressure won't help. It's not making sense yet. One day the marks become words, IF he has not been pressured and shamed, rushed and blamed.

Some Thoughts About Later Reading
photo by Andrea Quenneville