Seeing what learning is

When a newcomer was very confused, Meredith Novak wrote:

The basis of unschooling comes from seeing learning as a substantial human drive and seeing that learning depends absolutely on the perceptions of the learner. The second part is what makes everything tricky - you can't control what someone else learns. At best you can work on seeing the world from another person's perspective and try to create an environment which helps that person learn.

It can help a lot to think about how people learn via their hobbies. In a way, that's what real life unschooling looks like: people learning through hobbies. It usually involves a lot of playing around - and the playing around parts are just as important to learning as the parts where you need to go look something up, or network with another hobbyist, or take a class or workshop to improve a skill.

One of the common parenting/educational myths is that it's possible to imbue children with "good habits" by making them do certain things over and over. It Seems like it Should work... but when you look at adults there's no evidence it does. The results are pretty random. It's not a strategy that helps people learn about the world.

—Meredith Meredith
July 2012

SandraDodd.com/meredithnovak
photo by Carolyn Vandenbusch Neves

Random words, or CHOSEN words?

In an unschooling discussion, once, someone commented just this:

Evidently this is a place to choose one's words extremely carefully.

I responded:

YES!!
Yes, it is.
This group is a place to choose one's words carefully.

One wonderful thing about that is that if one practices that here, and sees the value in it, maybe she will begin to choose her words more carefully when speaking to her children, or her partner. Her other friends and relatives probably wouldn't mind if she chose her words carefully when speaking to them.

And in other groups, too—a humor group, or Korean drama group, Viking crafts group, puppy-training group—wouldn't it be best to choose one's words carefully?

SandraDodd.com/mindfulofwords
photo by Sandra Dodd

Sparkly, happy, random thoughts

Humor is a great warm-up for any thinking. If one's mind can jump to get a joke, it will be easier for it to jump to synthesize any ideas, to make a complex plan, to use a tool in an unexpected way, to understand history and the complexities of politics. If a child can connect something about a food with a place name or an article of clothing, parents shouldn't worry that he hasn't memorized political boundaries or the multiplication table.

The more that fun, divergent thought is discouraged, the more quiet and dark those minds will be. The more that sparkly, happy, random thoughts are encouraged, the brighter that home will be.

SandraDodd.com/connections/jokes
photo, sign, found uncredited, "out there"

Webs, nets, connections

The terms "web" and "net" have both been commandeered by the internet. The idea of a grid or web or matrix to represent the connections involved in learning and memory is a good one, though—of many "dots" connected in all directions.

The photo here is of the two-dimensional web—very flat—of a garden spider, outside my house this week. Black widow spiders make a web that's three-dimensional, but has no pattern. We have those in our yard, too.

The webs on which our own mental models of the universe are based are more complex—with past and future, emotion and theory, alternative stories and secondary theories. We have sounds and songs, scents and tastes to remember, and can sort things by temperature or texture, in our minds and imaginations.

Rejoice in the random!

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd

Very random

Try to embrace "very random" so unschooling will work optimally! 🙂

Even for kids who are in school, the more parents talk and joke and wonder with them, the more learning will happen, and the better relationships will be.

Webs, nets, connections
photo by Cátia Maciel

Illuminating the world

I remember being in school and asking "Why do we need to know this?" I asked it, other kids asked it, and one answer I remember was when I asked my Algebra II teacher, when I was 15, why we needed to know how to figure out square roots. He said it was in case we wanted to figure out how far away stars were. I said, "Don't we have people to do that?"

I didn't care how far away stars were. I thought it should be left to those who really are curious or have a need to know. That need to know the distance of stars has never been good for anything at all yet, as far as I know.

It wasn't long after that (six years) that I myself was a teacher in that same school. Luckily for me and for all the world, I wasn't teaching algebra or astronomy. But still I would be asked "Why do we have to learn this?" Sometimes I gave a serious answer, and sometimes a philosophical answer. Sometimes I made light of it. Sometimes the honest answer was "You don't have to learn this, but I have to try to teach it so I can get paid." Or "Only some of you will need to know it, but they don't know which ones yet, so I have to say it to everybody."

Then one day, the question came phrased a new and better way: "What is this GOOD for?" The answer I gave then changed my life and thinking. I said quickly "So you can get more jokes." I think we were reading a simplified Romeo and Juliet at the time. I could've gone into literature and history and fine arts, but the truth is that the best and most immediate use of most random learning is that it illuminates the world. The more we know, the more jokes we will get.

To Get More Jokes
photo by Sandra Dodd
(click the photo if you don't know what it is)

Here and now

Don't have so much of past and future in your head that you can't live now.

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd

Chaotic, random, effortless

"School is to unschooling as foreign language class is to learning to talk. The first is orderly, thorough, hard and hardly works. The second is chaotic, random, effortless and works like a charm."

—Joyce Fetteroll
July 2018

SandraDodd.com/definitions
photo by Rosie Moon

Chaotic, random, effortless

"School is to unschooling as foreign language class is to learning to talk. The first is orderly, thorough, hard and hardly works. The second is chaotic, random, effortless and works like a charm."

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/definitions
photo by Julie D

Examine ideas yourself

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

If a parent has found something that works for their family without understanding why it worked and how much personality played in it, then for others it's little better than rolling dice and picking some technique at random.

On the other hand, those who are living examined lives. thinking about and discussing why something works in the context of growing relationships, that's way better than dice! And no one should swallow what's said uncritically. They should take it in, turn it over, ask questions and examine it for themselves.

Critical examination is better for reaching clear goals than pretty sentiments of "following the heart" and "mom knows best."

—Joyce Fetteroll, 2008

SandraDodd.com/joyce/followyourheart
photo by Vlad Gurdiga

Transporters

Elevators, subways, trains, airplanes—all seem like transporters to me in a way that automobiles don't. You get in, a door closes, you get out somewhere else.

Although it mostly goes to "older floors," there's one on my site, too. Someday, newer pages will be added, I hope. 😊

---

Came back in 2025 to say I think it's filled with ALL the pages. There are nearly 950 pages in the randomizer, and when new pages are created, I'm adding them immediately.


Randomizer (SandraDodd.com/random)
photo (top) by Shawn Smythe Haunschild
art (bottom) by Bo King

Sitting in the sun

You might see a creature sitting in the sun, prepared to run.

Sometimes you might BE a creature sitting in the sun, prepared to run.

If lizard photos bother you, come back in a week when I will have run out of them.

If your subscription is going into your spam or promotions folder, figure out how to redirect it so you'll see it more easily. If you can't figure it out, maybe ask a younger person. There might be one sitting near you.

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd

Warmth and peace

"I'm amazed at not only the change in me but also how the little changes in our family form random, occasional pockets of warmth and peace. Hopefully, those little pockets will get larger and more frequent until we are fairly awash in it!"

an expression of appreciation for discussions
photo by Sandra Dodd
(sunlight flashing through a faceted amber-glass leaf)

Limitations

Sometimes limitations are physical. Sometimes they have to do with resources, weather, health, fears and random happenstance.

There are no guarantees, but appreciation and gratitude are better than any of their opposites.

Above and beyond limitations; underneath and through limitations
photo by Karen James

Mature without pretending

Most of the unschooled teens I've met had a calm and maturity that I'm not used to finding even in random adults in their 20's and 30's, who are sometimes awkwardly pretending to be mature, or sometimes still actively reveling in their new-adult freedom.

I've known teens (and am related to some) who are as comfortable with younger children as with older teens and adults and grandparents. They see people as people. They will be drawn to interesting people and will avoid dull or harsh people, but they don't choose by age.

Big Book of Unschooling, page 299 (258 in first edition)
photo by Karen James

It's not magic.

Joyce Fetteroll wrote, on quora.com:

So much stress could be avoided if parents had realistic expectations of their child's development. If a child's actions say, "I'm not ready yet," they aren't ready.. . . .
It’s important to note that you aren’t seeing a random sample of children at restaurants. The wise parents of kids who aren’t yet ready to handle a restaurant meal don’t bring them to restaurants. It’s not magic. It’s wisdom.

—Joyce Fetteroll

(Question about children in a restaurant)
photo by Jill Parmer

Museum of the Random

I love thrift shops, charity shops, yard sales, flea markets, car boot sales. In The Netherlands, on the King's birthday, people are allowed to put things out in front of their houses, to sell. Then they need to wait a year. Albuquerque has an ordinance that says a family can have a garage sale or yard sale twice a year. Most people never do, and some have one nearly every week, so it all evens out.


I have some wonderful things with good stories, bought off a little table at a casual local fair at a hill fort in Cambridgeshire in 1979. From a yard sale in Colorado Springs in 1970, I got a Chinese Checkers board made of wood, with a set of marbles I still have. But even the names of the places are exotic and collectible: Wandlebury. Colorado Springs (called more locally "C-Springs" or "the Springs").

When digital cameras came along, I bought fewer things and spent less money for other people's used treasures. As museums and ever-changing collections, they are wonderous. Unlike "real museums," if you love something, you might be able to buy it! But you can probably pick it up and examine it, even if you don't take it home.

SandraDodd.com/museum
photo by Sandra Dodd, at Family Thrift, not far from the house,
a shop to benefit programs for veterans of the Vietnam War

Ages and stages

Yesterday I bent over and picked an inch-tall tumbleweed sprout from a crack in a sidewalk. It was a tiny bit of community service.

The wind is blowing here, and all the big tumbleweeds will pass through chain link fences, or barbed wire, and scatter themselves into thousands of seeds. It happens every year.

A tiny baby hardly resembles adult forms, or the changes that take place in old folks. Where you are now is young compared to where you'll be later. Those changed old folks are always saying you will miss having those young children, and I found it to be true. It also irritated me for someone who was sleeping in a quiet, clean home to tell the baby-sticky, frazzled younger me that these were good days I would miss.

"Truth" is irritating, when we're sprouts, sprigs, teens, new parents, but just as the winds blow, people express the wisdom they gained as they aged and discovered that they missed having children in the house, as those other older older-folks had told them that they would.

"Results" (a half-random link)
tumbleweed photo by Holly Dodd
__

Fond remembrance

When stress comes and you need a break, sometimes bringing to mind one shining moment, however small, will help. Remember, if you can, a scent or an emotion, the feeling of the air, or a sweet word spoken another day, another place. Breathe in that remembrance and be at peace in that one breath.

Be grateful for that memory.

The next moment might be easier.

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd, of Holly Dodd in Florida, in warm sunshine

Random efficiency

Unschooling is a way to homeschool, but without the schoolishness. Things can be learned in whatever order they come along, and the learner will eventually connect all the information he has gathered, but maybe not in the same way or in the same order as the assembly line would have had him do it.

—Sandra Dodd
(original interview)

Shockingly efficient
photo by Kristy Hinds