Stomping around (in a good way)

Carol/sognokids wrote of recovering from snobishness about TV, concluding with:

We had cable reinstalled the next day, and we never looked back. We don't watch a lot of TV, but when we do, we do it together. We have laughed and cried together as we have watched, and we have wondered and marveled. Television has been a wonderful learning experience for me. It taught me to loosen up, and to appreciate those wonderful moments when I cocoon with my family. And when I watch my husband and son stomping around the house like Godzilla as they destroy Tokyo, I know that I am standing on holy ground.

—Carol/sognokids

The rest is worth reading, and there's a story by Deb Lewis, too:
SandraDodd.com/t/godzilla
photo borrowed from 60 Years of Godzilla
variant post:
High horse on holy ground

School learning vs. real learning

School learning is like being told how to assemble the dragon piece of the jigsaw, which pieces to put where and in what order. And then the cat. And then the book. And then the bird. And you must do it in that order the way they tell you because they're teaching you how to assemble jigsaw puzzles and that can't be left to chance. Unfortunately by the time you're done with the process you're so sick of jigsaw puzzles you have no interest in doing them yourself and never see how the dragon and cat connect and don't even care.

Real learning is doing that billion piece jigsaw puzzles however you please. Or running off to watch TV. Or chase the dog. 🙂

—Joyce Fetteroll

A million-piece puzzle
photo by Gail Higgins
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Better expectations

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

What gets in the way of so many new unschooling parents is unreasonable expectations. They think kids must learn to read, spell, do math by a certain age, do chores, do what they're told, not eat more sugar than Mom thinks is right, bathe and sleep when Mom wants... They think unschooling parents have a magical way of getting kids to do those.

Some parent expectations come from how they were parented. Some come from school. Some come from friends and other parents. Some are accepted as truths just because the message is ubiquitous.

For unschooling to flourish, parents need to look directly at their kids. What does *this* child need? What is *this* child reaching for? If a resource helps a parent let go of unreasonable expectations and look directly at their child, then that's supportive of creating a learning environment. If a resource helps a parent understand their child better, that's a good thing *if* it removed a barrier to directly looking at their child. It's not a good thing if it puts a new filter between parent and child. (It's funny how parents who fear TV see addiction in their children. When they let go of their fear, they see engagement.)

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/waldorf
photo by Sarah Peshek

No road blocks

Kelli Traaseth wrote:

When I started unschooling, I thought it was just an educational approach. But as we went along in our lives, so many other things popped up. If they were learning as they were playing, as I knew they were, how could I limit that? How could I say, "time to go to bed now?" Or "time to shut the TV off now" or "shut the video game down now". Unschooling is such a continuum. If I did those above things, I would see them as huge road blocks in my child's learning. I want their learning to be a big freeway, things coming, things going, no road blocks.

—Kelli Traaseth
2004, 8th post or so down

SandraDodd.com/nest
photo by Cally Brown
(not a freeway, but pretend...)

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At the old, preserved forum (link below Kelli's name), you can go backward and forward a bit by changing the page number at the bottom left of the page. (In case you want to, in case you go there...)

Accepting help (and cake)

Deb Lewis wrote:

I always get in trouble with analogies, but I'm going to try one here. If I wanted to make a cake, and had never baked or cooked before, a cake recipe that just said "do whatever seems best to you, use your imagination" probably wouldn't be that helpful. If my friend, who always had lovely cakes (devil's food?) had given me this recipe, I would have to assume cake just didn't work for my family.

It would have been much more helpful to have an ingredients list and a plan for putting them together.

Ok, kids are not cakes, and maybe there's no ingredients list for unschooling, but I would hope, before I pour a bottle of vinegar in my batter, someone who knows about cakes would stop me. I would hope, before I add a text book or take away TV, someone who knows about unschooling would stop me.

—Deb Lewis
(original, on Always Learning)

SandraDodd.com/witness
photo (and cake) by Sandra Dodd,
when this blog was ten years old

Sometime I go EEEEEk.

EEEEEk.
What gets me more than the casual acceptance and recommendation of arbitrary limitations is the characterization of allowing children choices as "plonking a 3, 4, 5, 10 year old in front of the television/google."

Can you imagine ANYone "plonking" a ten year old in front of google? And what? Demanding he look something up? But I have seen kids that young have a BLAST with google and other search functions, about games, or YouTube, or NetFlix.

If they can look up game hints at ten, they will be able to look up building codes or disease treatments or various translations of Bible passages on their own anytime thereafter, given resources. Practicing on something that might seem "loose, easy and unnecessary" can *BE* what is needed for them to be competent, functional workers when they're older. And I won't say "when they're grown," because my kids were competent functional workers when they were mid-teens, every single one of them.

So when people who haven't had a child who is mid-teens disparages my knowledge in light of their paranoid theories, sometimes I go EEEEEk.

Sandra
2011

Plonking a child down in front of the television
is where I found it, but the original is here:
on Always Learning,
wherein the rant is all one paragraph.

photo by Sandra Dodd, of a granddaughter playing a game, a husband reading the news, and the TV was playing "Pupstruction" for another grandchild not appearing in that photo

TV [iPad (internet)]

There's a lot to be learned on TV and from watching TV. If your trust stops short of the TV, it's not much trust yet.

Trusting your heart and trusting your kids and trusting how learning works will all enlarge the range of things you see as learning situations, until the time when you don't see things except in terms of what can be learned.

Then TV won't be a problem.

Those are my thoughts.

—Sandra Dodd, 2001

Unschooling with the TV in the house
photo by Tara Joe Farrell

Helping them share

The problem I see with measured turns is that the quality of game play is compromised. If someone sees the clock and that's when they have to stop, they won't play as thoughtfully. They're less likely to look around at the art or appreciate the music. If they're starting to read, they're less likely to take a moment to look at the text and see if they can tell what it says.

The benefits of game play will not come to full fruition if kids' time is measured that way, and they're not learning to share.

If they only have an hour, they will take ALL of that hour, just as kids whose TV time is limited will.

It they can play as long as they want to, they might play for five or ten minutes and be done.

SandraDodd.com/sharing
photo by Sarah S.

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

Lifelong learning from TV and video

Respect your children's interests and viewing. Think of your own childhood memories.

Calling something crap has never given anyone joy, but Bob the Builder has.

Remember
photo by Meredith Dew

Joy and flow

"Where joy is, you will find learning. Where joy is, you will find flow."

—Clare Kirkpatrick

Parent paragraph of that above—all Clare's words:

"I see lots of reasons for NOT limiting my kids' time on the computer or game playing or watching tv or knitting or reading or playing with barbies or playdough or baking or anything. Those reasons are that where joy is, you will find learning. Where joy is, you will find flow. These are all things we want to *help* our children do *if* that is what they want because we want them to learn. I could, if I wanted to, name many, many things that my children would *not* be doing if I had limited their time doing the things they love, including being on the computer and gaming."

—Clare Kirkpatrick
(original)

Generate Joy
photo by Kinsey Norris
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In every moment

Caren Knox / dharmamamma, when her kids were young:

We learn through all five senses, frequently the sixth, and through connection with each other. We learn from books, from magazines, from movies and TV and You Tube Poop. We learn from Barbies, from guns and swords and Bionicles and Legos. We learn through talking, through watching and asking, or waiting. We learn through cooking, shopping, eating, eliminating. We learn from driving or riding the bus or walking or biking. We learn by listening to music, or playing an instrument or singing or banging a rhythm on the table. We learn through living, whatever life looks like that day, whether it's a trip to Discovery Place and the library or a day of not getting off the couch because we're so hooked by David Tennant as Dr. Who we watch all the episodes on the XBox.

There are as many ways to learn as there are... people. Multiplied by infinite ways to learn. Learning's not an event, it's in every moment.

—Caren Knox

How do they Learn?—Caren Knox
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Finding a social spot

Humans are social animals, and learn in mixed-age groups, when they learn naturally. A family can create that natural learning environment, or can fail to create it. :-/ Being around other people, though, IF AND WHEN a child wants to learn and is encouraged by parents to learn how to be considerate and sociable, can be a good place to learn "manners"—ways to behave politely.

In school, children are still social animals with the need to identify who might help them, and what their role is within the social structure. The social structure being unnaturally 20+ kids the same age, they figure out who are the leaders and the "young" and they act in accordance with their instincts in an unnatural setting. More adults to—teens, and young adults, and middle-aged, and elderly, behaving in natural real-world ways. TV is better for that than school is. Ideally, a rich unschooled life *IN* the real world is better than either.



photo by Julie D

I can't find where I wrote that, up there, but three people shared it in 2012,
and I still think it's true. —Sandra

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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Is learning fun?

Kathryn Baptista wrote, in a discussion about formerly-schooled kids who assert that learning is not fun:

Playing games is fun. Watching tv is fun. Reading can be fun (if it's something you like and you're doing it for...well...fun.) Playing with (and maybe even taking care of) the dog is fun, pretending to be a pirate, making things, using the computer, maybe cooking... Fun.

You get the idea. And most people who are here, even the beginners, will recognize that for any and all of these things that kids choose to do for fun during the day can be a source of remarkable learning.

—Kathryn Baptista
2006

CONNECTIONS: How Learning Works
photo by Lourdes Garcia

Inside the learner

Joyce Fetteroll wrote, on Quora:

Here's a good collection of thoughts on the difference between Teaching vs. Learning. The primary difference is where the focus is. When the focus is on what's happening inside the learner, it doesn't matter what the source is. It can be TV, a mother, an activity, a mistake. It doesn't matter. When kids are engaged, they're learning. When the focus is on the teacher (or source) it shines a spotlight on the presentation rather than the effect. If the students aren't engaged, the teacher might as well be singing and dancing in an empty room. Engagement is what matters, not teaching.

What Teaching Never Can Be

—Joyce Fetteroll

Can those who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't "learn", teach teachers anything?
photo by Lisa J Haugen

Women, mummies, Abe Lincoln

Lyle Perry, who unschooled two boys, wrote:

While watching a movie, a Kotex commercial came on and spawned a lengthy discussion on menstruation, and how all the different methods of protection work, or don't work, the reasons why women pick one method over another, and what did women do back before companies like Kotex existed. Then the discussion moved to the different methods of birth control, then to birth itself, and C-sections, natural childbirth, etc. All from one little Kotex commercial.

While watching The Mummy (cartoon), we talked about Egypt and the pharoahs, and then slavery, which eventually led to the civil war and Abe Lincoln, and then on to other presidents that had done "great" things.

That's just a few off the top of my head, but the main thing to remember is that none of these discussions were planned, and it's always the kids that initiate the talks, and when they stop asking "why, when, how, who and where" the talk is over. They may come back at a later date and want more information to add to what they know, or they may be satisfied and leave it at that.

TV is not a "bad" thing. TV can be very, very cool.

SandraDodd.com/t/learning or (bonus link):
SandraDodd.com/presidents
photo by EsterSiroky

Looking and learning

Amy Carpenter wrote:

For us, right where our kids were—loving music and TV and video games—was a great starting place for more. Going to concerts, finding out how different bands have influenced each other, figuring out how people have made the movies they've posted on YouTube, researching FAQs, talking with other gamers, looking up weapons that are used in the video games, playing the music we've heard in video games, pretending and finding new connections through our pretend games, talking through the logic of different strategies, looking up actors on IMDB—all of this keeps leading to more and more learning about how the world works, about how the creative process works.

—Amy Carpenter

SandraDodd.com/activeunschooling
photo by Rhiannon Theurer
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Interactive

Julie, Adam's mom, wrote in 2009:

Adam and I went to a concert in London for children under five. It was very interactive with the presenter asking questions as they introduced the different instruments.

Adam was really engaged with it and was answering lots of the questions identifying the instruments. When he identified the piccolo the lady presenting it said how did he know what a piccolo was and he said “I watched the Tweenies. And they are very interested in music and they talked about the woodwind section in the orchestra. So I’ve seen a piccolo before."

It was really funny because a lot of the people who were there don’t let their kids watch TV and kind of look down on the Tweenies.

—Julie D

SandraDodd.com/t/learning
photo by Remy C BW
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Remember...

"I will never forget how I realized that I could be an independent person from watching "That Girl," or how seeing Barbara Jordan give the DNC speech as the first Black Woman ever to do so impacted me in ways that stay with me to this day."

—Jocelyn Cooper

You remember learning things. Your children are learning, too.
Read more: SandraDodd.com/t/memories
photo by Sandra Dodd

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Sorry for the American references, but here:

"That Girl" was a game-changing television program, and Barbara Jordan (a U.S. Representative from Texas) gave a speech aired on TV at the 1976 Democratic National Convention at which Jimmy Carter was nominated to run for president.