Huge and wonderful choice

Robyn Coburn wrote:

Intentions matter. Guidance offered from the place of partnership and trust has a different feeling, avoids rebellion, and is just plain less focused on the trivial. Guidance means optional acceptance instead of mandatory compliance. Guidance means parents being safety nets, not trap doors or examiners. Guidance facilitates mindfulness. Directives shut it down, and may even foster resentment instead.

The idea of Unschooling is for parents to be the facilitators of options, the openers of doors, the creators of environments of freedom, and the guardians of choice, not the installers of roadblocks and barriers. Unschoolers are making the huge and wonderful choice to renounce our legal entitlements to be the authoritarian controllers of our children's lives, and instead choose to be their partners.

—Robyn Coburn

SandraDodd.com/choicerobyn
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a long-ago Kirby

Pleasantly surprised

I was asked:

Did your kids have rules like bedtimes, no candy before dinner ... that sort of thing?

I wrote:

We didn't have those rules, but our kids went to bed every night and didn't eat candy before dinner. It seems crazy to people who believe that the only options are rules or chaos, but our children slept when they were sleepy, and ate when they were hungry (or when something smelled really good, or others were eating), and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they were able to know what their bodies needed. I grew up by the clock, up at 6:30, eat quickly, bus stop, school, wait until lunch, eat, wait until dinner, go to bed. I had no idea that sleep and food could be separated from a schedule like that, but they can be.

Not so crazy after all
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Cursive or joined-up writing

Here is a topic that doesn't apply to everyone. Nice!

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"But cursive is faster," you might think or say. That's what John Holt thought. He thought it because that was the justification given to him as a child when people taught cursive (though he was old enough to have used fountain pens not just for fun).

In his book Learning All the Time, John Holt tells of having taught fifth grade and having explained to them what he "knew" about cursive writing. But three of those ten- and eleven-year-old children could print faster than the teacher could write in cursive. They raced. They timed it more than once. He discovered he was the fourth fastest writer in the room.

SandraDodd.com/cursive
Brits use the term "joined-up writing" and theirs is a connected sort of italic script. Canadians use "manuscript writing", I think. Americans use "cursive."

More, and much more

Unschooling is more than just the absence of school. As we change, our perceptions change, and the perceptions of others toward us changes.


How Unschooling Changes People
photo by Sandra Dodd

Beyond normal

Being a good parent, not according to a list in a magazine, or vague memories of what grandparents might have thought or said, but being a good parent in the eyes of one's children, in one's examined soul, is a big thing most parents never even see a glimpse of.

We can go beyond normal.

SandraDodd.com/peace/becoming
photo by Janine Davies
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Unschooling, Time and Energy

Someone asked:

Is Unschooling Exhausting?

My first thought is "compared to what?"
Is unschooling more exhausting than having a child in school?
Is unschooling more exhausting than doing school at home?



SandraDodd.com/unschoolingtime
photo by Sandra Dodd

Every word

If you think of every word you use, you won't be able to berate yourself with the voices of others.... Everyone has those little loops of voice in their heads. You can "simply accept" that or you can decide on a case by case basis which ones to keep until you die and which ones to start talking back to.

If you use language without careful examination, you won't be speaking mindfully. School-style responses and reports involve parroting back, sounding confident, using the right buzzwords. But to be truly original and thoughtful, each word needs to be the one one really meant to use. It's a different kind of thinking.

SandraDodd.com/skepticism
photo by Sandra Dodd, of birds outside Schuyler's house