A good nest

The nest I built for my children even before I knew we would homeschool was made of toys and books, music and videos, and a yard without stickers. It was a good nest.


from "Books and Saxophones," 2003: SandraDodd.com/bookandsax
photo by Sandra Dodd

Learn to love

A new unschooler wrote:
"I hate when people say that adhd isn't real."

Any unschooling parent who hates anything is at a disadvantage.

If an unschooling parent REALLY hates something, or five things, or ten, the spaces around those dark places will be harder to fill with wonder, joy and curiosity to learn.

SandraDodd.com/wonder

SandraDodd.com/joy

Hoping to begin unschooling while clinging to hatred isn't healthy physically, socially or philosophically.

SandraDodd.com/negativity
photo by Marty Dodd

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P.S. You don't need to learn to love everything, but learning to move toward neutrality from "hatred" (even using the term "I hate") WILL make a difference in parenting and unschooling.

Learn to see everything!

"How will they learn everything they need to know?"

Do the best of the high school graduates know everything they need to know? No, and at some point, ideally, they start learning on their own. Some fail to get to that point, though. Unschooled kids have a head start. They know how to find what they need to know, and they have not been trained to ignore things that won't be on the test.

When parents see how and what their children are actually learning instead of just scanning for the half dozen school-things, unschooling will make sense to the parents. If you wait for school to congeal from a busy life, you'll keep being disappointed. If you learn to see everything instead of just school things, unschooling will start working for you. When you see it you will believe it.


SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Ashlee Junker
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Minor little stories

My granny had a button box, in a fruit-cake tin. The kind with Texas pictures on it—a star, a cowboy, the Alamo.


I still see those tins sometimes. Even when I was older and went to her house I would ask to play with those. Partly she didn't have much to do. Partly it was fun to see which ones I remembered, and to look at them with more experience. At first, when I was little, I could only tell the big ones from the little ones, and sort by color or number of holes. And there used to be the BIG coat buttons from the 1930s and 40's.

As I got older, they got older and more "antique." And as I got older I could tell that some of those buttons were older than my grandmother. Nothing special in there, just the collection of her life, and she hardly ever sewed anything but quilts, and she crocheted. Most of the dresses and aprons she made just tied.

I wish I had thought to put them out and talk about them, in those days, but they were private with me, and she would have told me to get them off the table, probably, anyway.

They talked over quilting, she and the older female relatives. My papaw didn't have a truck. But the men talked walking slowly down to fish, and while fishing, and while walking slowly back.

Doing Two Things at Once
Similar tin to the one I remember, image lifted gratefully from an eBay listing.
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Being online is good because...

If time spent here keeps you from poking and prodding and pushing your kids, that's good.

If time spent here gives you confidence to unschool that will save you TONS of money and energy and worry and heartache and interpersonal repair, that's good.

If you took a course on unschooling and had to go to class a time or two a week, with commuting time, and reading and paper-writing time, and if it cost what a college class costs in tuition, but you could just do THIS instead, that would be good. (And hey! It's true!)

SandraDodd.com/lists/justification
photo by Sandra Dodd, of the mailbox out front

Hooks to hang Hamlet on

Sometimes it's even easier if the humor comes first and the "real" information later. Someone who has seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Simpsons episode about Hamlet, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company's little Hamlet will have many hooks to hang the real Hamlet on, if and when they see it.

SandraDodd.com/connections/jokes
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Change the world

If by "change the world" a person means "make the world better," then step #1 must be to decide right then not to make the world worse.

Accidents sometimes make the world worse, and carelessness, and flukes of weather and acts of God. But if a personal decision makes the world worse, then what?

There are different levels of "oops"—didn't know, didn't think, forgot, didn't care, was pisssed off or drunk, was furious and wanted to do damage... What can be undone? What can be atoned for?

The world starts to get better when people stop making it worse, and a person's life starts to get better when he consciously decides to do what is better instead of what is worse in any given moment.

Philosophy, or That's what it's all about!
photo by Sandra Dodd