Take joy in life

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Unschooling requires you to take joy in life. It requires you to appreciate the wonders of the world. Every minute you spend being cynical and paranoid is a minute of your life with your children that you have wasted and can never get back again. During that minute, you could have had a relationship-building experience together, but you created negativity in your lives, instead.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/negativity
photo by Gail Higgins

Life, thought and learning

Parents new to unschooling tend to worry that some activities are good preparation for life, but others are frivolous and should be forbidden or discouraged. Life and thought and learning, though, depend on connections being made. And the more points of information about anything at all being made inside an individual, the more points there will be to connect.

SandraDodd.com/connections/jokes
photo by Irene Adams

Finding more excitement

A mom once wrote:

I am ready for his Obsession with these [Yu-Gi-Oh] cards to be gone.

A dad named Lyle responded:

He's learning about the cards. He wants to learn to duel. He's found something that fascinates him, and has a deep passion for, and you don't want to help. I think you're the one with the obsession.

The mom:

We all went to the [aquarium] over Valentines Weekend! Learned a lot about Fish and Water, and wildlife.

Lyle:

Cool! Sounds great! And when you can show the same excitement about every other thing he does, you will be officially deschooled!

You're still looking for the learning, and I know that's a tough habit to get out of. But you can do it, with a lot of conscious effort on your part. Going to the aquarium is not better than dueling or playing a GameBoy. Different, but not better. I'll bet that the kids he knows talk more about dueling or video games than they do about fish and wildlife. He's in touch with what goes on around him, the people he knows and the things that they do. Including you. He enjoys Yu-Gi-Oh AND the aquarium. If you try real hard, you can do that too!

🙂
Lyle

That's the end of something longer, and interesting, at Deschooling and Games

The image is from an "Aquarium" page on a large Yu-Gi-Oh wiki page, which probably didn't exist when Lyle was writing to the mom quoted above. You can see the word "aquarium" translated into several languages, and more, there.

Many good moments

I don't make resolutions, and I think they're a bad idea. Deciding today what I want to hold important a year from now sets me up for failure.

Deciding that I want to make many good moments tomorrow, though, I can do with confidence and the expectation of success. I can't live a year at a time. I can't live a week, nor even a whole day at a time. I can only make a choice in this moment (or fail to remember to do so).

SandraDodd.com/moment
photo by Karen James (of beach art)

Learning let loose

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Don't worry if you don't know the answers. Anyone can look up the answers. Few can ask the questions.

As a real-life example, by watching Xena and reading Little Town on the Prairie, my daughter was exposed to three references to Julius Caesar, Brutus, and Marc Antony. She doesn't "know" Roman history now, but she's got a hook or point of reference to build from tomorrow, next week, three years from now: "You remember Julius Caesar. The guy Xena hates."

Unfortunately we learned in school that learning is locked up in books and reading is the only way to get to it. It's not. It's free. We're surrounded by it. We just need to relearn how to recognize it in its wild state.

—Joyce Fetteroll

Five Steps to Unschooling
https://sandradodd.com/joyce/steps
photo by Roya Dedeaux

King of the Monsters

Sandra Dodd to Deb Lewis:

If I could describe all your writing in just a few words, it might be "Peace, humor and scary monsters." Dylan's life has involved a lot of Godzilla and that ilk. Scooby Doo and Godzilla.

Deb Lewis:

Yes, a lot of Godzilla, beginning when he was very little. And then any movie with a monster, or any book about monsters. And then all kinds of horror and science fiction. Godzilla was the gateway monster, though, and it started with a movie marathon on television. I couldn’t have guessed then, when he was three years old, that he would find a lifetime of happiness in horror! And I didn’t know then that his love of monster movies would lead to learning to read and write, finding authors, making connections to other cultures, (and more movies and authors) and connections to music, theater, poetry, folklore, art, history... It turned out to be this rich and wonderful experience he might have missed, and I might never have understood if I’d said no to TV, or to Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

Before Dylan was reading or writing really well, he’d meticulously copy the titles and dates of movies he wanted, and request them from interlibrary loan. All that writing, and all the time spent watching movies with subtitles helped him read and write better. I remember the feeling of joy and wonder, mixed with some sadness and loss when he didn’t need me to read movie subtitles to him anymore. I learned so much about learning.

There's Even MORE at
Montana to Italy via Godzilla
(an interview with Deb Lewis)
photo by Deb Lewis

Conversations and interactions

The middle of a longer article:

They grew up with exposure, context, experiences and knowledge of those things mathematics is designed to describe. Our oldest son, Kirby, worked in a games store from the time he was fourteen, and was running tournaments for Pokemon, Magic the Gathering and other such structured strategy games, in the store and at hotels in town for several years. The knowledge required to play those games and even more to organize, judge and score tournaments, is huge.

When Kirby was 18 he took his first math class, at the community college. Like a musician who can't read music, he was baffled at first, but once he understood the notation, he soared, and had the highest test score in the class.

To some people reading this, it might seem there was no "higher math," but what we have done is create a home in which algebraic thinking is a standard part of conversations. Our interactions are analytical and involve factors and projections. They see the concepts and they use them.

SandraDodd.com/math/unerzogen
(There's a link there to the published German version.)
photo by Belinda Dutch