Blending and mixing

Rather than sorting things out with your children, try to keep blending and mixing. Religion leads to history, to geography, to clothing, to fashion, to business and imports to transportation to law. Law leads to ethics to medicine to religion. Any of those "leads to" points could lead to a dozen OTHER destinations, so even with a list that short, it starts to blanket time and space. Don't resist those weird tangents; jump on them and ride.

SandraDodd.com/subjects
photo by Sandra Dodd, at Taco Bell in a mall in Bangalore
(click it to see another Taco Bell sign from that day)
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Hear what you say

Saying what one means rather than using phrases without thinking is very, very important.

Hearing what I say as a mom is crucial to mindfulness.

SandraDodd.com/mindfulofwords
photo by Sandra Dodd

Too good to be true?

"It sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. Being connected is better than being controlling. Being interested is better than being bored. Being fun is more fun than not being fun!"

—Melissa Wiley

SandraDodd.com/quotes
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Surprising changes

When my firstborn son was four and we decided not to enroll him in kindergarten that fall, I thought I could foresee the future. I knew unschoolers. I knew alternative education. I knew it could be really fun, and good. What happened over the next nineteen years surprised me. Because of unschooling, I changed. My husband changed. The way we interacted with the world and other people changed, all for the better. Our relationships with all three of our children surpassed any of our imaginings.

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The text was the written introduction to a talk I gave in 2009. There is no recording of that day, but this one, later the same same year, is similar: Transformations (sound file, photo, and notes there).

The photo is by David Jio, of a light too bright to see directly, and the more-detailed shadow/projection of what it really looks like. That light is has been in our front room for years. Sometimes a very intense thing can hardly be perceived directly, but the effects and afterimages can be examined.
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The world changes slowly

The world changes slowly, but it tends to stay changed! Flight was not possible before balloons. Food storage and transportation were difficult before canning and refrigeration. Without today’s wealth of books, videos and online information, home learning would be much more difficult. We can live in the light of our shared knowledge and ideas, in freedom and with confidence, at the cutting edge of education’s future.



SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo by Sandra Dodd; a hot air balloon visible out our back gate

A better way

When a parent is very needy, they might need extra help to get to the stable spot where they can parent their children thoughtfully. I don't know a better way than for them to move quickly toward unschooling.

SandraDodd.com/doit
photo by Sandra Dodd

Don't bring school home

From a newspaper article twelve years ago:

Whatever the long-term plans are, Dodd has some advice for those considering home-schooling or even the more radical step of unschooling:

"Don't rush. This is a hard but crucial piece of advice. Rush to take him out of school but don't rush to replace it with anything. Bring your child home, don't bring school home. You don't even have to bring their terminology and judgments home. You can start from scratch, brush off the labels, and find your son where he is. Forget school. Move to life."


SandraDodd.com/media/ABQjournal
photo by Sandra Dodd
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