Does TV create violence?

Deb Lewis wrote:

Does TV create violence, really? Maybe guns create violence. Knives. Baseball bats. Hammers. Axes, shovels, saws? Rope? Dynamite? Sharp sticks, rocks? Maybe it's language causes violence because most killers spoke. Maybe it's books. Clothing? Day time night time wind rain snow trees birds frogs.

For lots of kids, even the bad guys on TV are nicer than the real life crazy people they live and go to school with.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/violence
photo by Tara Joe Farrell
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The page also has this quote:

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"

—Dick Cavett

Swirl

Ren Allen wrote:

"You can read all the books, you can talk to unschoolers, attend a conference and join some lists. But until you GET IT at the internal level, until there is trust and a willingness to extend that trust to your children, unschooling is just a nice idea or philosophy to discuss...nothing more. For those that decide to learn to trust themselves and their children, they soon find their lives a bubbly, interesting swirl of natural learning."

—Ren Allen

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Hinano
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Structure and transformation

Mathematics could use a better name. Seriously. School has gone and made that one all scary. In addition (she said mathematically), it's not called the same thing in all English-speaking places. "Math" in some places, and "maths" in others.

But it's about measuring and weighing and sharing. It's about making decisions in video games (buy the watering can? risk danger to collect coins?) and it's about how fast music goes and which ladder to use to get onto the roof. It's almost never about numbers themselves, and it's never about workbooks (except for workbook manufacture and purchase).

I went to look for a different word for "mathematics," and I didn't find one. One Old English word was "telling." For arithmetic: "cyphering," or sums. So I went looking for modern, philosophical definitions of mathematics that had nothing to do with school, and I have collected all these bits and pieces for you: Mathematics is a science dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement; structure, space, and change; logic, transformations, numbers and more general ideas which encompass these concepts.

Structure and transformations? I use those things. Shape and arrangement? That covers art, and music. Flowers in vases and books on shelves.

Unschooling is simple but not easy, and it's not easy to understand, but when math is a normal part of life then people can discover it and use it in natural ways and it becomes a part of their native intelligence.

SandraDodd.com/math
photo by Holly Dodd, 2010 or earlier
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Open portals

When books are an obsession, it's considered a virtue. When mathematics is an obsession it's considered genius. When history is an obsession, that's scholarly.

When rock and roll is an obsession or folk art, or dance… maybe not as easily impressive to the outside world. But as all things are connected, let your child see the world from the portals that open to him, and don't press him to get in line at an entryway that doesn't sparkle and beckon.


from page 189 (or 218) of The Big Book, which links to SandraDodd.com/obsessions/feedpassions
photo by Lynda Raina
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Books? Old books?

The edition of The New York Public Library Desk Reference we have might be a little outdated, but the rules of ice hockey haven’t changed, nor the way in which one addresses a letter to the Pope, nor the date of the discovery of Krypton. (Some of you thought it was just a Superman thing, didn’t you? Nope—1898, the year before aspirin.)

(Before the internet, people had reference books, and even then they seemed like trivia. Trivia can be the interesting door that leads to strange, new knowledge.)

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Everywhere, all the time

My response to this question, from 2009:

What resources do you use for your children’s “educations”? Feel free to comment on the word “education”.

We don’t “educate” our children. We help arrange so that they have so many learning opportunities they can’t possibly take advantage of them all. We have friends with interesting jobs and hobbies. We invite them over, and we visit them. We have a house full of books, music, games, toys, movies, art materials, plants, food and dress-up clothes. We don’t expect learning to happen in the house, nor in museums, but we know it happens everywhere. We don’t expect learning to happen during daylight hours or on weekdays. We know it happens all the time. So we don’t “use resources” except that we see every thing we discuss or see, smell, touch, hear or taste to be a resource. It’s not a word we use, because it’s all of life.

SandraDodd.com/education
photo by Cá Maciel
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Climbing mountains and baking pies

In response to someone saying her child would rather take the easy route than try something tough, Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

It's human nature to avoid what we feel is a waste of time, energy and resources.
It's also human nature to pour energy into what we find fascinating.

If someone is made to climb a mountain, they'll find the easiest path, and perhaps even cheat.

If someone desires to climb a mountain, they may even make it more difficult—challenging—for themselves if the route doesn't light their fire.

If it were human nature to go the easy route, I wouldn't be sitting here writing out a response! No one would write a novel. No one would climb Mt. Everest. No one would bake a cherry pie from scratch. No one would have kids.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/pressure
Photo by Sandra Dodd, of Holly Dodd riding a steam train restored and largely operated by volunteers. The easy route would have been for them to stay home and read books and watch movies about trains.
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Books and clocks. . . music, blocks

Meredith Novak wrote, on facebook:

If you live in a home with books and clocks, movies, music, blocks, games, dishes, furniture, toys, clothes, the internet, and adults who are interested in kids, then you have "the basics" all around your kids all the time. And because those basics are there, kids will learn about them&mdashthey'll learn that words are a valuable tool and there are many ways to use them. They'll learn that numbers and patterns are as useful as words and sometimes better than words for a given purpose. They'll learn those things without lessons, living and playing and snuggling on the couch with you without ever needing to draw a line between those things and learning. —Meredith Novak *

SandraDodd.com/meredithnovak
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Bright and confident

I couldn't have predicted how easy it would be for them to learn to read starting with huge vocabularies, and without pressure and tests and measures. When they could read, they knew it because they started reading.

The symbols turned to language. When I started reading my vocabulary was very small, and the books we were reading didn't help that. I couldn't read anything outside of that first grade "reader," but the teacher told me I was reading.

Most people have never known a later reader who was bright and confident. I hadn't before I met unschoolers. Three fifths of my family now consists of people whose late reading was not detrimental, and I have made the acquaintance of many others like them.

SandraDodd.com/persephonics
photo by Sandra Dodd

A world of input

There is an artistic motif known as "the tree of knowledge." I don't know how old it is, but there are also artists' trees known as "tree of life" and sometimes they're very similar.. . . .

Thinking about this concept though, in light of my children's never having gone to school, has brought lots of thoughts welling up in me about our culture's worship of books, both in what's good and understandable about that attitude, and also of the ways it has been and continues to be harmful and unreasonable in light of Howard Gardner's writings about multiple intelligences and of the "information age," which gives even non-reading children access to a huge world of input.

SandraDodd.com/bookmotif
image inked in by Sandra, but black-and-white art is from an old bookplate
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Providing entertainment

In response to:

How did you get comfortable with not racing around and "providing" entertainment for your children?

I wrote, in 2002:

Gradually!

I still provide entertainment for my children (and they provide things for the rest of the family too, because (shhh...) they think that's just how people in families are! They don't associate it with unschooling directly.

SandraDodd.com/addlightandstir

photo by Marty Dodd, earlier this year when he was out entertaining his girlfriend on a road trip because she was unexpectedly unemployed and he had a broken arm
P.S. The quote up top is from 2002. I'm still entertaining my kids 11 years later. The other day I subscribed to the last season of Breaking Bad, on Amazon, for Holly, who is 21 and lives at home. New episodes appear after they're aired.

Yesterday, Marty (24, and living separately now) and I were talking about a set of humorous history books I recently bought for him and me (matching sets), and about when Hannibal's Carthaginian army attacked Rome from the mountainous northwest. It was all about entertainment. Marty's current enrollment in a world history class is a trivial sidenote.

Learning in the wild

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

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

SandraDodd.com/joyce/steps
photo by Colleen Prieto
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Pick a goal, any goal...

In response to anti-"screentime" rhetoric:

If one's goal is to make school the most interesting thing on a child's horizon, then by all means—turn off the TV, don't give them any great picture books, avoid popular music, and close all the windows.


If one's goal is to make learning a constant condition of a child's life, then turn ON the TV, give them all the books and magazines and music they want, open the windows, explore! Explore when you're out of the house, and explore when you're in the house.

SandraDodd.com/t/learning
photo of Holly Dodd by Quinn Trainor
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This post is a re-titled re-run from May 5, 2011. The window behind her has metal without glass. It is in "the rock house" (the Kiwanis cabin) at the top of the Sandia Mountains.

There is more on my site now about the prejudices some parents can succumb to than there used to be, too: "Screentime"

Proxy baby

When Kirby was a baby, about ten months old, I was at the library with him. A woman whispered questions to me, in the shelves of books (the stacks). Her daughter had married a foreigner and moved to Denmark. They had a baby she hadn't yet met. She was asking me how old Kirby was and whether he was average size and what size clothes I thought she might send.

She was sad and said by the time she saw her grandson, he would be walking and she was missing all the baby days. We were nice with one another, and said bye, and I walked away.

But after maybe five or six steps, I turned around and hurried back to find her. I said "Do you want to hold him?"

She got tears in her eyes and nodded and she hugged Kirby with her eyes closed and rocked him a little bit, kind of got the feel of him, and the smell of his head, which wouldn't have been as good as her own grandson's, but it was better than nothing.

When she handed him back she seemed much calmer and better. It was therapeutic for her. And I've always been glad that I thought of it before it was too late.

SandraDodd.com/kirby
Keith probably took this photo.

For the record, this happened in the stacks by the north wall of what was then called the Wyoming Branch library, behind Hoffmantown Center, in Albuquerque. It was surrounded by rose gardens. Now it has been renamed the Tony Hillerman Library, but in 1987, it wasn't called that.
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Hearing their voices, seeing their eyes

When deciding whether it's worth the money to go to an unschooling conference, factor in the money you saved by not buying a curriculum for each child. Count it as research for the parents, a learning experience for the children and a vacation for the family.. . . .
Meeting other unschoolers, hearing their voices and seeing their eyes will give you a connection that books and websites cannot provide.

SandraDodd.com/conferences
photo by Tim Mensch, December 2011

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I realize that not everyone can attend a conferences,
but for those who can, it can be a great advantage. —Sandra

A bubbly, interesting swirl

Ren Allen wrote:

You can attend a thousand Zen classes at a University and still not understand it because it is something that is internal. You can have a bunch of nice meditation products and still be angry. You can make a big deal out of living simply and still miss all the beauty around you.

It's not about the accoutrements but the "seeing with new eyes."

Sorta like unschooling.

You can read all the books, you can talk to unschoolers, attend a conference and join some lists. But until you GET IT at the internal level, until there is trust and a willingness to extend that trust to your children, unschooling is just a nice idea or philosophy to discuss...nothing more. For those that decide to learn to trust themselves and their children, they soon find their lives a bubbly, interesting swirl of natural learning.

—Ren Allen

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Sandra Dodd; cool things
in Ericka Mahowald's room in Northborough, Massachusetts
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Trained like a cat

I had a friend when my kids were single-digit ages. After she hung out with our family a while, she decided she would unschool just like we did. Before long she explained to me her liberal total-unschooling policy on her son's reading. He was eight or nine. She told him he could read any book he wanted to, as long as he finished any book he started.

Quicker than training a cat not to get on the table, she trained him not to start any books at all.

SandraDodd.com/finishwhatyoustart
photo by Sandra 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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Osmosis and television shows

A cranky person wrote to me:

I do unschool but I obviously do not subscribe to your radical view of unschooling where children are expected to learn by osmosis and television shows.

To the Always Learning discussion list I wrote:

When the environment is rich, children learn by osmosis, if the membrane through which ideas pass is their perception of the world. What they see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think becomes a part of their experience, and they learn. And they learn from television shows, movies, paintings, books, plants, toys, games, movement, sports, dancing, singing, hearing music, drawing, sleeping.... as if by osmosis, they live and they learn.

SandraDodd.com/tv
photo by Sandra Dodd of a tractor covered in lights
Albuquerque Bio-Park's "River of Lights," 2011

The awful control beam

If the "control force" is great with you, maybe use it to control your own clutter or organize your papers or rearrange your books or clothing. File your photos and negatives. Scan some stuff. Don't turn that awful control beam on people you love.

SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Sandra Dodd
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