On the topic of learning courtesy and responsibility from video games:
When a more experienced player helps a newer player, that rarely has to do with age. When an adult can take advice and assistance from a kid, or a teen can take advice from a young child, that's an all-new opportunity for humility, respect and courtesy, all three of which are lacking in many lives.
People have long valued the character-building sportsmanship and integrity involved in athletic games. "You never really know a man until you've played golf with him," I've heard. Tennis courts, swimming pools, public greens and sports fields all have rules and traditions.
Multi-player games provide opportunities to practice, improve and use one's interpersonal skills in many ways, with a chance to earn real-world respect and admiration.
Debbie Regan wrote, to someone afraid a child was "falling behind":
"While schooly people are focussing on that fictional finish line, the real world is still humming along. People are walking around and past the fretting throng, living interesting lives, doing cool things, being productive, enjoying life."
Relevancy is very important in learning. I knew wax's melting point by heart but freaked out when it melted so fast while I was doing project with my [four-year-old son]. I never played with wax before. I knew physics on paper very well but played with pulleys in real life just recently. I knew areodynamics from school but had real appreciation of it through flying kite with my son.
Unschooling my children sparkles my curiosity and burning desire to learn. The world is a wonder!
My real and happy kid says a lot more about unschooling than I could ever convey by analyzing human nature. If I'm afraid to talk about my real unschooling life, how will I single-handedly change the world for the better? I've printed out my super hero license and I've sewn my Tick suit. Now, Evildoers, Eat My Justice!
Real learning looks very different from schoolish learning. Real learning looks like playing. Even when it matches something kids do in school (learning the names of the different clouds for instance) it still looks more like goofing around because it stops as soon as their interest is satisfied. They don't push on like they're "supposed" to. No, what they do is revisit it when the feel the need to build on it and they draw on it (though not necessarily making it obvious to us) to help them understand more of the world. *Everything* connects to everything else.
Polly Berrien Berends refers to infants as "seeing beings," and that changed
my life, when I read Whole Child/Whole Parent, when Kirby was a baby. To
realize so profoundly that his whole, real life was fully in progress changed MY
whole, real life. And that's the purpose of her book, and the meaning of the
title. When we help our child to be whole, or rather when we acknowledge
and honor his wholeness, seeing him as the seeing being he is, then we know that
we too are, and always were, "seeing beings." We are as much a part of that
child's world as he is of ours, and we are both part of the same wholeness.
Bring the world to your children and your children to the world. Revel in what brings you together as a family. Watch tv and movies and listen to music and the radio. Laugh together, cry together, be shocked together. Analyze and critique and think together about what you experience. Notice what your child loves and offer more of it, not less. What IS it about particular shows that engage your child—build on that. Don't operate out of fear. Think for yourself and about your own real child. Don't be swayed by pseudostudies done on school children.
With my kids, it was a posture I took, partly physical, partly mental, in which I accepted and recognized that I had the power to make them unhappy, and the easy ability to allow them to be in danger (from me, in part) if I wasn't really mindful and careful to focus on their safety, comfort and joy.
Some of the same relatives and friends who were greatly in favor of my partnership with Keith seemed critical of our kindness to our children. There is a wide stripe of anti-child tradition in the world. I didn't treat my child as a real person. I acknowledged from the beginning that he WAS a real person. I recognized and nurtured his wholeness and tried not to screw him up. I became his partner, rather than acting like his partner or "treating him" as a partner. It's not just semantics, though it is semantics. It's about the power of words to show, affect and clarify thought and belief.
An idea, expressed in words, changed my life. "Be your child's partner, not his adversary."
Sandra Dodd, response in 2000 to: Can anyone explain to me "unschooling"?
It's like "just say no."
Just say no to school years and school schedules and school expectations, school habits and fears and terminology. Just say no to separating the world into important and unimportant things, into separating knowledge into math, science, history and language arts, with music, art and "PE" set in their less important little places.
Most of unschooling has to happen inside the parents. They need to spend some time sorting out what is real from what is construct, and what occurs in nature from what only occurs in school (and then in the minds of those who were told school was real life, school was a kid's fulltime job, school was more important than anything, school would keep them from being ignorant, school would make them happy and rich and right).
It's what happens after all that school stuff is banished from your life.
Sandra Dodd, response in 2000 to: Can anyone explain to me "unschooling"?
It's like "just say no."
Just say no to school years and school schedules and school expectations, school habits and fears and terminology. Just say no to separating the world into important and unimportant things, into separating knowledge into math, science, history and language arts, with music, art and "PE" set in their less important little places.
Most of unschooling has to happen inside the parents. They need to spend some time sorting out what is real from what is construct, and what occurs in nature from what only occurs in school (and then in the minds of those who were told school was real life, school was a kid's fulltime job, school was more important than anything, school would keep them from being ignorant, school would make them happy and rich and right).
It's what happens after all that school stuff is banished from your life.
Your own dwelling place is a small part of the whole universe. The things you have collected, and that you use, are all part of the universe.
From the point of view of your family (especially the younger members), where you live is HUGE, and detailed, and familiar, but the outside world starts off vague and hardly real.
All these perspectives make sense, depending on the moment and the context. Go with what is sweet and peaceful and feels safe and good.
Movies touch and show just about everything in the world. There are movies about history and movies that are history. There are movies about art and movies that are art. There are movies about music and movies that would be nearly nothing in the absence of their soundtracks. Movies show us different places and lifestyles, real and imagined.
Being Ethan's mom changed me. I surprised myself in good ways. In learning to give to him, I grew to really like myself. The walls started coming down. I started to soften - to have compassion for myself.... I challenged myself to continue to do better, because I now knew I could. I had a found confidence in that new truth. Honesty and humility too. All good things for learning to really flourish.
As I became happier with myself and the world around me, I would say that real learning started to happen. From my experience, when trauma heals, learning begins to become more fluid again. Richer. More meaningful. More lasting.
Living in the world peacefully and respectfully are good places to begin to focus when new to unschooing. The best advice I was given was to look at my son. Not at ideals. Not at freedom. Not at school or no school. Not at labels. Not at big ideas. Look at my son. Be with him. Get to know him deeply. And, then to read a bit about unschooling. Give something new a try. See how it goes in the context of our real day to day life.
The world is FULL of natural limits. Our lives are FULL of natural limits. It's the way we deal with those limits that matters. Finding solutions and dealing with obstacles and knowing what limits are real.
Living in the world peacefully and respectfully are good places to begin to focus when new to unschooing. The best advice I was given was to look at my son. Not at ideals. Not at freedom. Not at school or no school. Not at labels. Not at big ideas. Look at my son. Be with him. Get to know him deeply. And, then to read a bit about unschooling. Give something new a try. See how it goes in the context of our real day to day life.
The whole world is made of little bits of information. Yesterday, at my house, Holly asked who first did "Dream Lover." I was thinking someone like Dion, or Bobby Vee, and while I was thinking she said "Bobby Darin," and I said no, not first.
Spoiler: I was wrong.
She pulled the computer out of her pocket, looked the song up, and played the beginnings of a couple, on Spotify. "That one!" I said, to the one by Dion. It listed Ben E. King, among others, so we figured (falsely) that it was his first, THEN Dion, then Bobby Darin.
Does it matter? To us, it does. To music history, and royalties, it matters. As to political correctness and the basis of assumptions, it ties in to all sorts of socio-political, economic, maybe geographical aspects. Trivia is what knowledge is made of. Enough little bits form a rich whole.
We could each explain why we thought what about whom, in all that. Those explanations would lead to other trivia, stories of other songs, writers, and musicians.
Any interest can lead to all interests. Let curiosity flow.
These will (while they're there) link to recordings at YouTube, but if you have Spotify or another music service, you can find recordings by these and many other people. There are other songs with similar names, too. I will embed Bobby Darin's version, because he wrote it, but it's not the one I knew as a kid.
Living in the world peacefully and respectfully are good places to begin to focus when new to unschooing. The best advice I was given was to look at my son. Not at ideals. Not at freedom. Not at school or no school. Not at labels. Not at big ideas. Look at my son. Be with him. Get to know him deeply. And, then to read a bit about unschooling. Give something new a try. See how it goes in the context of our real day to day life.
When a young adult has been making real decisions for years, and what their parents want is to help them think clearly and to make careful decisions based on the preferences and beliefs of the young person himself, the same old world looks very different.
