Normal

"I sometimes look back and see how far my thoughts and actions had shifted from where I started and it was (and is) dizzying and exhilarating. Things that made me feel panicky five years ago are now so accepted and normal and joyful in our house. And I am still moving forward and trying to choose from more and better choices every day." —Anna Black

SandraDodd.com/change/stories
photo by Megan Valnes

On changing

A mom named Sara P. wrote:

This is still an ongoing process for me. I had to re-train myself in a lot of ways. I had to learn a new language. I had to learn to SEE again. I had to learn how to communicate. I had to learn patience. I had to learn how to put others first. .....WOW! Sometimes an old thought will creep in. Sometimes I find myself answering a question in *teacher tone*...but it is so few and far between, and I am so quick to catch it that nobody ever notices except me!

—Sara P

SandraDodd.com/change/stories
photo by Marin Holmes

Access to information

Little by little, years ago, I started to see that each little idea that had changed my own family had the potential, if I could explain it clearly enough, to change another family. Just a little was enough. As more and more families shared their successes and joys, the world changed. As more information was gathered and put where others could find it, the rate of change increased.

When I was first unschooling, we waited two months for a new issues of Growing Without Schooling. There was no internet discussion at all. When that began, a few years later, it was user groups, not even e- mail or webpages yet. Today someone can get more information about unschooling in one day than existed in the whole world when my oldest was five. I'm glad to have been part of honing, polishing, clarifying and gathering those ideas, stories and examples, and keeping them where others have quick access to them.

Interview with Sandra Dodd, Natural Parenting, 2010 (Section #5)
photo by Sandra Dodd
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How had I done this?

Little by little, years ago, I started to see that each little idea that had changed my own family had the potential, if I could explain it clearly enough, to change another family. Just a little was enough. As more and more families shared their successes and joys, the world changed. As more information was gathered and put where others could find it, the rate of change increased.

When I was first unschooling, we waited two months for a new issues of Growing Without Schooling. There was no internet discussion at all. When that began, a few years later, it was user groups, not even e-mail or webpages yet. Today someone can get more information about unschooling in one day than existed in the whole world when my oldest was five. I'm glad to have been part of honing, polishing, clarifying and gathering those ideas, stories and examples, and keeping them where others have quick access to them.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/naturalparenting2010
photo by Lisa J Haugen
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Clarity magnified

Online discussions of natural learning and parenting give people a serious opportunity to practice communicating clearly and carefully. For some people, an unschooling discussion will be their first "real writing"—the first time they've written real things for real people, rather than practice things for teachers. Those who stick with it or who have a native talent for it will find themselves getting direct and immediate feedback from other parents who have taken the ideas or examples or stories and used them to change their own real children's lives, and that is bigtime.

The Big Book of Unschooling, page 235
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Cats and history and folklore

Before looking at any links, you might want to try to think of a dozen or more examples of people keeping, shunning, worshiping, fearing, singing about, imagining, or poetically dancing about, or as, cats. You probably won't need to look far.

Think beyond house cats to wild and jungly, crazy, cartoony, and alien-species-imagined cats.

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Once you've thought up your own, you might check against other people's lists here:

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Cats in Literature? It’s a Long Tail

Feline Good with Our Favorite Literary Cats

Here, Kitty, Kitty… 20+ Children’s Books That Are the Cat’s Meow

The Worship of Cats

15 of the Most Famous Cat Characters in Books
That title was changed to "15 Well Known Cats in the Bookish World," but they didn't change the original title in the code. Somehow, there were discussions and disagreements there. Perhaps it was about cartoons and films.

Cats in stories and songs (a Google search link)

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scratch-art by Devyn Dodd
photo by Sandra Dodd

Learning however and whenever

Learn however and whenever you can, and remember no one person has everything you need.

That's what I wrote about what I took from the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer," from 1993. If you haven't seen it, consider watching it with unschooling in mind. The image is a still from that movie.



It's based on a true story, and the actor (Max Pomeranc) was a highly-ranked chess player for his age. They cast a chess player so he wouldn't need to pretend to be playing chess in the film.

If you want to know more about the person he was playing, and what happened in later years, the real Josh Waitzkin wrote this: The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. He tells some chess stories, but the book is largely how he became a martial arts champion in his twenties. He reads his own audiobook. I've heard it. His ideas about formal learning are not as unschooling-friendly as the story in the movie is, but hearing it (or reading it) from an unschooling point of view won't change your satisfaction about what you and your children are learning.

Just in case films and audiobooks make you feel guilty, there's a new page on my site:
What about Audiobooks?