Over, under, in between

Where we are in relationship to others changes all the time, with physical realities of space, place, size and age, mood, waking and sleeping. We move; they move.

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Pam Sorooshian wrote:

"Unschooling is more like a dance between partners who are so perfectly in synch with each other that it is hard to tell who is leading. The partners are sensitive to each others' little indications, little movements, slight shifts and they respond. Sometimes one leads and sometimes the other."

—Pam Sorooshian

Being your child's PARTNER, not his adversary
photo by Jo Isaac
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Learning by osmosis

A cranky person once 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.

"Osmosis and Television Shows"
photo by Janine Davies

Ages and stages

Yesterday I bent over and picked an inch-tall tumbleweed sprout from a crack in a sidewalk. It was a tiny bit of community service.

The wind is blowing here, and all the big tumbleweeds will pass through chain link fences, or barbed wire, and scatter themselves into thousands of seeds. It happens every year.

A tiny baby hardly resembles adult forms, or the changes that take place in old folks. Where you are now is young compared to where you'll be later. Those changed old folks are always saying you will miss having those young children, and I found it to be true. It also irritated me for someone who was sleeping in a quiet, clean home to tell the baby-sticky, frazzled younger me that these were good days I would miss.

"Truth" is irritating, when we're sprouts, sprigs, teens, new parents, but just as the winds blow, people express the wisdom they gained as they aged and discovered that they missed having children in the house, as those other older older-folks had told them that they would.

"Results" (a half-random link)
tumbleweed photo by Holly Dodd
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Experience and knowing

Once someone was going on about power, and giving children power over themselves, and the power to decide what to learn.

As we had been talking about natural learning, naturally I responded:

"The power to decide what to learn" makes a pretzel of the straight line between experience and knowing.

My children don't "decide what to learn, how to learn, and when to learn it."

They learn all the time. They learn from dreams, from eating, from walking, from singing, from conversations, from watching plants grow and storms roll.

They learn from movies, books, websites, and asking questions.

They eat when they're hungry (when possible or convenient; I'm making a lunch for Holly to take to work today as she's working in the flower shop for eight or nine hours, as Mother's Day is Sunday here).

They sleep when they're tired, unless there's something they'd rather do that's worth staying awake for. They don't always "decide" when to wake up. They wake up when they're through sleeping, or when the alarm goes off if they've chosen to get up early, or when I come and wake them up if they've left me a note.

the original is here
photo by Gail Higgins

Choices, priorities and locations

Laying "have to" on our kids, or on ourselves or on outsiders is less useful and healthy than looking at rights and choices and priorities and locations.

Can you jump on the bed?

Depends whose bed, which bed, where, when. Is someone sleeping? Is it an antique? Who owns this bed?


SandraDodd.com/etiquette
(original, in a discussion on facebook)
photo by some realtor, once,
in a house that's now Holly Dodd's

Dreamy

Dreamy. "Dreamy" can be attractive, or otherworldly. Dreams only take a moment, some say. "Dream big," others say. Let ideas float and flit, dreamlike, through your waking and sleeping. You don't need to catch them all.

SandraDodd.com/learnnothingday/2009
photo by Lydia Koltai

Waking or sleeping

When the kids were babies they would go to sleep with us, nursing, or in dad's lap, and we'd put them in bed. That evolved into them going to sleep where they wanted to, or in a carseat, or a backpack (hiking/frame-pack) or beside us on the couch or on a blanket on the floor where one of us was doing something, and we'd put them in bed.

Getting up used to be "get up by noon," when they got old enough to want to stay up late on the computer or watching movies or playing games. Then it became "Sleep as long as you want to, but at noon others are free to make noise." We still try to keep it quiet until noon or until everyone's awake, whichever comes first.
. . . .
When Marty worked at a grocery store, he woke himself up at 5:30 to get there at 6:00. He had a very timed and regular routine for himself. The first few weeks I got up too to make sure he'd be up, but he worked there full time for over a year and was only late once.

The lack of a "regular schedule" has never kept our kids from getting where they needed or wanted to be on time without trouble. When Kirby was very young, eight or so, he used to wake up at 6:25 a.m. to record Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at 6:30. He would pause for the commercials so they wouldn't be on the tape, and then when the show was over he would go back to bed. He has them all on tape, marked in his little-kid writing.

The account above is from 2007, and is similar to some things here: SandraDodd.com/sleep
photo by Sandra Dodd, of stained-glass light falling on a young friend's lovey.