Check your direction

This is important for everyone: Do not do what you don't understand.

If you get bad advice, and it seems bad, don't take it!

If you get a bad suggestion, and it doesn't seem to be helping, don't do it!

Read a little, try a little, wait a while, watch. If you're going the wrong direction, don't keep going.
Sandra, from Always Learning
photo by Holly Dodd
near Las Vegas, New Mexico
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Your relationship with learning

You can't wait until you understand it to begin. Much of your understanding will come from the changes you see in your child and in your own thinking, and in your relationship with and perception of learning itself. You can't read a touch and then go and unschool for a year and then come back and see what you did wrong; you could be a year in the wrong direction.

Read some, do some. Think. Rest. Watch your child directly and as clearly as you can...

from The Big Book of Unschooling, page 36 (or 39)
photo by Holly Dodd
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Easy learning

The books that have helped us with unschooling have been things that amused or intrigued or provided answers to questions. How-to and trivia books have been popular here. Real-life combined with humor makes for easy learning.

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Peace and learning

Given a choice between something funny and something somber, go with funny if your goal is peace and learning. Very few things need to be still and serious.



The Big Book of Unschooling, page 128 (or 140)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Sweetness

If you're going to unschool, it needs to be better than school. If that involves getting mental, emotional or physical therapy for the parents, then do it! The house doesn't work if the roof is leaking and there's no heat. Parents don't work if they're in an emotional fog and can't pay sweet attention to their kids.


Healing Presence
photo by Sandra Dodd, of some ice cream in Leiden

Tweak toward affection

Did you do something to make a child's life better and richer? Be grateful that you thought to do that, or know how to do that. Did your child look at you with affection? Can you tweak your life enough that those affectionate looks come even more often?

The Big Book of Unschooling, page 275 (or 318)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Food

The more one's reaction to "food" (the word, the idea, the substance) is strong and emotional, the more evidence there is that the way in which that person was raised to see and deal with food should not be repeated.

SandraDodd.com/food
photo by Sandra Dodd

Choose

Choose to make choices.

SandraDodd.com/choices
photo by Sandra Dodd

It gets easier

Some home educating families feel that they're on trial, or at least being tested. If someone asks you something like "What about his social growth?" it's not an oral exam. You're not required to recite. You could say "We're not worried about it" and smile, until you develop particular stories about your own child. It's easier as your children get older and you're sharing what you *know* rather than what you've read or heard.

SandraDodd.com/musicroom
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a flower in Albuquerque

A better path

Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them."

—John Holt,
from How Children Fail

SandraDodd.com/johnholt
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Wonderful

Find wonder. Let the world be full of wonder. Wonderful.

SandraDodd.com/leiden
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Whole and healthy and strong and free

We can see how controlling food is related to controlling education, sleep, playtime and other areas of our childrens' lives. We can mess them up early (which our culture applauds) or we can learn to let them grow whole and healthy and strong and free, not crippled in mind and spirit.

SandraDodd.com/eating/longterm
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Live in joy.

Parents should learn to be calm and thoughtful instead of panicky and reactionary. It's better for health and decision-making, and it sets a good example for the children. Don't live in fear when you can live in joy.



SandraDodd.com/beginning
photo by Sandra Dodd (click to enlarge)

Free-form experimentation and analysis

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Unschooling looks nothing like school. It looks like play. Play—which is actually free-form experimentation and analysis—is how we—humans and really all mammals—are designed to make sense of the world around us. We build up an understanding of how the universe works by trying things out and seeing what happens. Then taking that new understanding to try more stuff out.

Written that way it sounds formal and directed. In actual practice it is free ranging and chaotic. But it works wonderfully well because it's what we're designed to do.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/playing
photo by Sandra Dodd

Magical music

Words are just words, on the one hand, and they are our connection to the divine, on the other. And the divine is often depicted with more than two hands (even Jesus has the nail-pierced hands, and his other hands, though not on the same statue like Ganesha might have), so on another hand words are magical music. And on another hand they are our link to the past and our messages to the future.

SandraDodd.com/wordswords
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a little bird feeder,
or something, in Yvoire, France

Decide, don't slide.

Better choices make things better.

Decide. Don't slide.

(from a little exchange with an unschooling dad June 25, 2012)
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Cowtrails

"Flexibility to pursue tangents and cowtrails, and continuing to see the wonder in everyday things will lead to learning experiences without prior planning."

SandraDodd.com/puddle
photo by Sandra Dodd

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A "cowtrail" isn't a cattle trail. It's a little path worn by cattle walking single file in the same place, for years, between water and some favorite shade or gathering place. Sometimes they're called "cow paths." Sometimes little kids can follow them better than adults can, because the cattle might have gone under branches, tunnel-like.

"The easy way out"

In response to someone who had written, in 2003, that she had thought about unschooling, but maybe just because she was looking for an easy way out. A couple of responses from that day:

"Unschooling is not "the easy way out," it's the joyful way IN. The way into peaceful family life, happy children and meaningful learning that lasts a lifetime."                    —Ren Allen "Unschooling isn't easy. It's full time. What it takes is a change of belief and priorities. Lots have done it, and I'm sure you can too."                    —Sandra Dodd

from an old unschooling.com page, found by Rachel on June 23, 2012
Photo by Sandra Dodd

Click the image (or here) for more information about that tree.

Solutions, not obstacles

"It helps to think of the solutions instead of the obstacles."

—Schuyler Waynforth

Understanding Anger
photo by Sandra Dodd

Different eyes

You and your children see the world through different eyes.

Be kind, and expect them to see things you can't see. Be reasonable and understand that they can't be you and won't become you. They were born in a different time, and are living in a different way.

SandraDodd.com/happy
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Contagious good parenting

Being a good parent makes a person more attractive to the other parent, and makes the other parent grateful and respectful. Gratitude and respect make it easier to have compassion and patience.

page 270 (or 311) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd
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A fair clip

At a fair clip, I thought of all of these:

paper clip
hair clip
clipping hair
clipper ship
clip-clop
clipped speech
clipping coupons
newspaper clippings
fingernail clippings
clipping the grass

and that was without asking anyone else or using a websearch or dictionary.

How do parents learn to play?

Learn by doing.

Play with words, thoughts, ideas.

SandraDodd.com/playing
scanner image by Sandra Dodd
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Which hat?

These hats are in a museum in Pennsylvania, in a reproduction milliner's shop.

Recently Just Add Light had a quote and link to something by Pam Sorooshian about whether one should be a child's friend, or parent. Pam knows one should be both, and explained that elegantly.

I was with a group of home ed families in France, some unschoolers, others in the various stages of consideration of unschooling, and someone asked to to tell how I am as a woman. Bea Mantovani was the translator, and said the question didn't really translate. The questioner tried to clarify. She said I had spoken of my husband, and of being a mother, but how was I as a woman, separate from that?

I remember my confusion better than my response. One thing I said was that I AM a mother.

I suspected, and it was later confirmed, that it was a socio-political question, a feminist concept about identity above and beyond motherhood. But the question sets motherhood in a low position, if only the brightest and the best exist apart from and outside of that, and if to have no answer made me unaware or less whole.

For one thing, though, I was in France speaking to people because I had been invited to do so. I've written thousands of thousands of words about parenting and how children can exist in a peaceful world of easy growth in all directions.

I'm a changing-the-world woman. But even that didn't answer the question, because it still was an extension of mothering, which I had explained had involved sharing and modeling since I nursed babies at La Leche League meetings.

I would most like to be known as a woman of integrity, and for that to be true, I can't deny or reject any aspect of my being. I can't divide myself into parts and still be one integral whole. Any hat I might put on is still on my own head.

SandraDodd.com/integrity

Affection and Esteem (from this blog, June 6, 2012)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Photos don't have to be upright

Photos don't have to be upright, but I usually like for them to be.

I'm sorry for the glitch with today's post, and it's not yet fixed. I've written to Photobucket. For a while I was making errors because of Blogger changing, and now there's a Photobucket problem.

There was one photo by Holly that was sideways on purpose so the words would be the readable direction.

I know my writing is always about peace and goodness and living lightly and being open to what happens. I know my photos are often of trees or trucks, the view through a hole in a wall, or doorways, or fires or flowers. I like rooflines, and plants growing in odd places. I like light coming through glass—refracting, reflecting and projecting its shadows and colors. I like round things.

(The cake photo is by Cathy Koetsier, and Holly Dodd took one or two of them.)

Thank you for reading. You don't have to read these, so thanks for choosing to do so. I don't have to make them and send them out, but I like to.

Other solutions

"If you're trapped by have to's then there are no other solutions. If you recognize that there are other solutions then you can free up your thinking to allow them to come."

—Joyce Fetteroll

"There are just things we have to do" (on Joyce's site)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Progress toward joy

Some of the things that help people be confidently in the moment, feeling satisfied and content are:

• Breathing
  
• Gratitude
  
• Happy thoughts
  
• Fondness
  
• Acceptance

At first it might be relief and not joy, but as relief is a step away from fear, more relief will be progress toward joy.

The Big Book of Unschooling, page 275 (or 318)
photo by Holly Dodd

Counting and measuring

Measuring, weighing and counting can be fun!

Try not to measure, weigh or count relationships or learning, though. Learn not to keep count in the areas of knowledge or effort or interest.

Give, give, give
photo by Sandra Dodd
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As big as the world

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

If you look at school and curriculum objectively rather than the fonts of knowledge they're touted to be, it's easier to see how hugely limiting they are.

Kids are stuck inside memorizing facts about life and the world from someone predigested facts about it.

Unschooled kids are out in the world learning as humans are designed to learn: by gathering in what they observe and pulling understanding from it.

Schooled kids lives are limited. Unschooled kids lives are as big as the world around them. And with the internet and TV, that's practically infinite!

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joycefetteroll
photo by Sandra Dodd

Safe place

If your relationship with your child is about you leading him along with you instead of pushing him away, you will be his safe place.

Make yourself his safe place.

SandraDodd.com/safety
photo by Sandra Dodd

Play with words

Playing with words makes them come to life.

The history of England, of math, of writing, of counting.... Any portal into the universe is as real as any other. If an interest in language or butterflies or patterns or water creates connections for that person to anything else in the world, that can lead to EVERYTHING else in the world.

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A parent cannot decipher the whole world for her child, but she can help him begin to decipher it.

SandraDodd.com/etymology
photo by Sandra Dodd, in a park in Bangalore
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What makes things wonderful

The most common use of the word "wonder" these days is to express a question in a way that isn't likely to be answered, as in "I wonder when this tree will blossom?" It's also used to play with very young children with peek-a-boo games. "I wonder where Holly is? Where could she be? There she is!"

The deeper meaning of the word is what makes things wonderful. Full of wonder. Some adults are afraid of "wonder," though, because it involves relaxing into not understanding. It requires acceptance that one does not know. At its core, it is acceptance of and admiration for the mysterious and the hidden. It is taking joy in the revelation of simple things for which there are no words.

Similar page, SandraDodd.com/wonder
(though the quote is from page 279 (or 322) of The Big Book of Unschooling)
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Real writing

Writing to real people for real purposes improves writing in real ways.


The quote is mine from a post to Always Learning,
but here's a link to go with it: SandraDodd.com/writing
photo by Sandra Dodd