Pathways and connections

"I learned early on that being excited with my kids about whatever they are excited about opens pathways and connections that are magical—not just for their learning but for our relationship and their relationship with the world."

—Jen Keefe

"Following their Interests": SandraDodd.com/jeninterests
photo by Ester Siroky

Better now

The second you have a positive attitude, even fleetingly, your life is better, right then.

SandraDodd.com, any page
photo by Sandra Dodd, a library in Bangalore
__

Being merry and light

If a single, childless person wants to spend a LOT of energy being negative about school, cataloging school's ills, revealing and reviewing school damage, then that's a hobby.

If the parent of unschooled children wants to do that, I think the energy and emotion could be better and more positively spent being merry and light with children who are not in school.

No one can have everything. You can't store up and identify with cynicism, pessimism and self-righteous ire and still pour out joy and happiness to your family.


moving away from negativity about school
photo by Nicole Kenyon

Slide bars or dimmer switches

Rather than moving from one edge of a dichotomy to the other, the goal is to move to a whole new previously unknown middle place. My model won't work in everyone's head (as we're not as plug-and-play as some would like to think), but here is one way to look at this problem: See if you have a dial in your mind that says "everything" at one extreme and "nothing" at the other. It's impossible for anyone to do everything or nothing. Maybe label it "too much" and "not enough" instead, and try for the midpoint. Replace any on/off switches in your mind with slide bars or dimmers!

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Rosie Moon

Tiny sparks of imagination

Lyle Perry wrote:

Unschooling is like the tiny sparks of imagination that arc through a person's mind when they really watch a bird fly for the first time, and the huge lightning bolts of clarity when they realize how that miracle can actually happen, that make unschooling work.

I think one of the most difficult things for people to grasp about unschooling is the time factor that can be involved between connecting those tiny sparks to the huge lightning bolts. It may be days, months, or years between the time a person watches something happen and the time they understand why or how it happened. But the time factor doesn't make the event any less important, and in many cases it's the time factor that makes all the difference. A person understands when they are ready to understand. No time schedule can ever change that.

—Lyle Perry

SandraDodd.com/lyle/definition
photo by Karen James

The open flow of real-world sharing

from 2004, Sandra Dodd:

The best thing unschoolers can do is to unschool well. The best thing those who are interested in helping others come along the same path can do is explain what helped it work well.

Reading other families' personal stories, hearing about paths that didn't work well and others that did is what helped me when I was new to this, and that's what I've been involved in helping happen ever since—real unschoolers sharing their real experiences.

Some people don't want to share in public and that's fine. Some people share things in public that turn out not to be true, and that's not cool. But over the years, many hundreds of unschoolers who first found one another through AOL's message boards, or at conferences, or through e-mail correspondence have met other unschoolers in person, and each person must ultimately gauge for herself who to emulate or trust or to go to for inspiration or whatever. There is no central board certifying unschoolers or conference organizers or listowners. It's the open flow of real-world sharing.

In 2024 I'm still offering a hand.
SandraDodd.com/help
photo by Linda Wyatt

Be there, listening

Deb Lewis wrote:

Once you’re really listening to your kids and not your sense of injustice, you’ll find that answering them and interacting with them is intellectually rewarding and stimulating and fun. It’s not something you *have* to do. It’s something you *get* to do for a very little while. You can’t change this need your kids have right now. You can only change how you see it, how you think about it and meet it. And that’s good because that’s entirely in your power to do.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Sandra Dodd
in Northern Ireland, years ago