Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Wild Salmon Rally

On October 25th, the day the Cohen Commission began proceedings in Vancouver, Alexandra Morton led a heartful delegation of wild salmon supporters into Vanier Park by canoe, ending their Fraser River journey from Hope to Vancouver. Then they and others walked up to the Vancouver Art Gallery, where we joined them to walk down Georgia to honour the Cohen Commission's work at its offices... then back to the Art Gallery for the many speeches and songs. It was a wonderful, spirited gathering, in the pouring rain, and wonderful to know there is so much support for wild salmon.




A couple of other homeschool families from Bowen were there, too, as well as a bunch of other Bowen people! How nice for us to feel so in community!

The Raging Grannies were there, too!


The snippets in the following video are just a very little bit of what went on; unfortunately we were inside the Art Gallery for a kids' hand-warming and toilet break when Alexandra Morton actually spoke, so I didn't get any footage. Also terrible quality is the footage I did get... but that's testament to the great crowd that was there. :--)

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Potion-making with our friends!!!

Thanks to Heather, who initiated, planned, and made happen this fabulous day. We had fun. Definitely check out the video of the bubbling potions. The kids (and mothers) followed some recipes for specific reactions, but then just freely experimented with the ingredients, to create their own magical solutions. Seeing the effects of chemical interaction, and pouring, feeling, mixing, and tasting(!) with their own hands is the best learning available!!







Monday, October 18, 2010

Wild Art!

What can we get from art?
When we experience art as an open-ended, non-coercive, self-directed joy - as play and experimentation with idea and material - we open ourselves to create from our souls outward. In this creation we open our minds to deep understanding of art, of humanity, of process, and of every "subject area" in the world. When we leave behind the boundaries of our expectations for an undefined end-result; when we abandon learning "art skills" and embrace the process of exploration, we learn more. And happily, the products that come in the end will not fit the molds we've come to recognize. Instead we'll find our own, new forms, and their uniqueness and beauty will embody all that is wonderful in our souls. The paths we forge in our creative freedom will lead our journeys for creative learning in all areas of our lives.

Great artists do not come from great training; they come from inspired creative souls who dare not to follow directions. This is passionate self-directed learning! This is life!

Today, take a handful of random materials and see how creative you can be! There is no wrong way to express yourself!

(This is sort of an addendum to my previous post: Self-Directed Art and Learning.)

Recent Activities



Watching a demonstration of broom-making at the fabulous broom shop on Granville Island.

Harvesting horse chestnuts to keep the spiders out of our house! This is an annual tradition, for us. We have discovered that older chestnuts are less effective than fresh, so in chestnut season we get rid of all the little stashes of old chestnuts and gather a massive heap of new, to nestle into the corners and woodbox, etc. We have a lot of hobo spiders in our house, due to the firewood we bring in nearly every day, so this chestnut thing is an important part of our lives!

Playing with the beautiful metallic sculpture in Vanier Park. We saw this sculpture when it was partly finished, last year. The transformation from lumpy rod with what looked like tied-on garbage ... to shiny watery-looking beauty was amazing!
Ethan, Taliesin and Rhiannon hard at work with one of their favourite activities: "mining"! This particular "mine shaft" is now about 3 feet deep! There is an equally deep one into the side of the bank, behind Rhiannon!
 
This tiny salamander is one of the exciting finds from the mine. Taliesin made it a little hole in the bank with some vegetation and an exit, in case it might like to hibernate, there.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Links

Just added Banskyfilm to the links. So excellent. :-)

I'm still debating (yes, after all these years) whether the links should be sorted, or whether they should even be there at all. I sorted them because I thought it made it easier to look through, but it seems to defy our theory -- that all learning is cross-pollination-learning, and you can't really learn just one subject area at a time. I don't believe in subject areas. It seems so contrary to the way we learn, and the way our brains work. But then how to make the long list of links more easily traversable? Then when I think of it, I begin to wonder if they should be there at all. If you've ever found that list useful, add a quick note here. If a few months go by and nobody mentions it, I might dispense of it.

It also implies that these things should be learned online. I do a lot online with my kids (OK... a few hours/week), but certainly don't think it can take the place of in-person experience.

I sure spend a lot of time debating on this blog, don't I? Oh well... a healthy debate (even with oneself) is useful, right?

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Self-Directed Art & Learning

About 17 years ago, now, I nervously went in to teach my very first class. I had been hired by a couple of parents to teach their young children art. I was 17. I was terrified. I don't remember what I asked the first girl I spoke to, but I will never forget her answer: "I can only draw angels." She pulled out a pen and paper and drew some patterned "angels" -- a whole row of them! I was heartbroken to hear her limit herself that way, and wanted nothing more than to show her that she could be free from her angels. It was at that moment that I became an art teacher. Thank you, Sarah.

I came to my views on open-ended art naturally. My mother is a music therapist and Reggio Emilia preschool teacher at Bowen Island Preschool and my father owns BC Playthings toy store, where he promotes child-centred activity and natural toys. In both this preschool and this toy store, colouring books are not allowed. And furthermore, every person I have taught or worked with has driven the idea that open-ended learning is essential deeper into my being.

Not only is open-endedness essential for creativity, but the ability to creatively explore is essential for learning anything! A teacher-directed activity implies that the teacher knows best, while self-directed learning implies that the learner's thoughts and actions are most valuable. As soon as those thoughts or actions lose perceived value, the learner loses interest, and the desire to explore and learn begins to slip away. Some people are very attached to following instructions, but I feel this is a result of lack of confidence, or even of failure to measure up. Then we have to remind ourselves: if we are only looking to measure up, then how can we ever reach our true potential, which may very well be higher than up, or simply in a different direction? We have to give ourselves the freedom to go in any direction, to go where our authentic selves will naturally go.

The importance of self-direction in learning also has little to do with age. This is why I often choose to use the term self-directed over child-directed or child-centred; I believe this applies to people of all ages. People of any age will learn more when they are inspired to explore; the only change that comes with age is that many of us have our independence squashed as we grow up. That doesn't mean it's gone. It's just in need of some nourishment. Give a born-and-raised Canadian adult a handful of mosaic squares, some glue and a piece of paper, and she will likely begin gluing the squares into some recognizable shape or pattern. Give them to my unschooled six-year-old, and she might fold them into tiny "origamis" and decorate herself with them. She would make a potion with the glue, and use the paper to wrap up her sorted stacks of coins, in case she might one day want to take them to the store, and then it might be handy to have them sorted (this happened, today). Maybe she'd just glue the squares one on top of the other, on the back of her own hand, and call it a wart. It's not a project; it's just what she's doing: exploring. I feel that one of my most important responsibilities as a parent and teacher is to avoid squashing that creativity with my own ideas and expectations.

So what if people ask for help to reach a specific end-result? With some things like origami I've created an example, following directions, and then experimented with it, to see how I could create my own unique product, thereby giving students the freedom to be unique, as well. I'm just like they are: experimenting with somebody else's technique. Often the outcomes of my experiments aren't what I've hoped for, and this is part of the journey. Other times I supply a range of alternatives, and suggest that perhaps a combination of these methods or materials might yield interesting results. Then we all get to experimenting, together.

It isn't ever up to me, as the teacher (or parent) to know the answers, because how could I possibly know everything? Then the best thing students could strive for is to know what I know, and really, that would be unfortunate. I'm just not that knowledgeable. I sincerely hope that every person I teach reaches his/her own personal goals that have nothing to do with me. My 8-year-old son already understands much more than I do about physics -- thank goodness! But that doesn't stop me from taking his journey with him. What I know is how to say "wow -- show me how that pneumatic thingy you designed works!" My role as a teacher (as I see it) is to help people find their own creativity and desire to learn. That's it! Sometimes it seems there will never be an end to the adults who come to my classes, wanting me to impart my artist-skills to them, and to whom I hope I have instead opened a door to finding their own skills. (Not to mention the many skills and much wisdom that I glean from them...)


Unschooling Outtake: Or what if, in her free reign of art-making, my 6-year-old decides to cut up my precious handmade clothing, paint books with jam, or decorate my furniture and dishes with acrylic paint or glued on "fairy-paintings"? Well, then... I cry. Oh well. Lesson in guarding/respecting personal property -- check!

More reading (because really, everybody should):
Robert Schirrmacher, Ph.D: Child-Centered Art vs. Teacher-Directed Projects

Susan Striker's book, Young at Art (I haven't read this, but it looks good)

Tom Anderson: Art Education for Life

Crosspost from our regular family blog: What the kids are up to, these days:

Rhiannon is busy being her usual inspired self, getting ready for her birthday party (it was postponed, due to her parents' flu, and bad weather) and otherwise entertaining herself with heaps of little useful tidbits: plans, drawings, stickers to sell for money, songs and dances to perform, worksheets of wizard-making, math practice and dot-to-dots for grownups to complete, and her latest greatest pastime: handwritten stories. I shall transcribe one for you:

a sdoree abowt bers
hie I'm a ber I liv in the forist and I liv in the laks
I sdoMP arouwnd in the forist and I SPlash and swiM in the woter
I [heart] Too sdoMP and swiM the mowst
and this is Mee dwing wan av mie favrit things
[drawing of bear stomping in water]

Tal is also up to his usual business: lots of digging in his 'mine', which now has a large vertical shaft at the entrance about 4 feet deep, which is ostensibly in order to find precious stones, but actually turns up wildlife, instead (beetles, frogs, and a salamander). He's re-interested in his violin, since beginning some mentoring with our local violin-maker, and he's constantly exploring physics, biology, and chemistry, again. It seems amazing to me that, without my coercion, the kids follow their own desires quite naturally, and end up in the right places, mostly of their own devices. I help Tal with his internet searches, and to put some search results together into understanding, but mostly his scientific journeys are already beyond my scope of knowledge, so I just follow him on his way. Today we found a little scrap of paper with some detailed technical drawings on it (not at all unusual), and asked him what it was. Well... of course! It was different types of hydraulic systems he had invented! Nothing is more natural, of course. We have hundreds of scraps of paper like this.

Benefits of Unschooling

Every time I see something like this, I delight in the fact that, although our adventures haven't taken us this far, yet, we have allowed ourselves the possibility to be wild, in our choice to unschool the kids. Check out this father and son team who sent a video camera into space. So inspiring!

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/10/homemade_spacecraft.html

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Trials and Tribulations: Proud to be Homelearners!!!

Oh these past few weeks have been difficult, and I promised myself I wouldn't make this blog all about how great it is to be homelearners. I promised myself I'd be real about it, no matter how much criticism may come my way for the choices we've made.

My kids are being ostracized because we're homelearners.

Yes. It's true. It's the number one concern most people have when they find out we're homelearners: "Well how will they develop any social skills?" Some say it with alarm in their faces; others say it with a tone of gentle warning, others imply a deep emotional concern. All of them mean well. And I always assure people that my kids are doing just fine; that they participate in a weekly class for homelearners on the island, and also a few classes with their peers. And of course they have many play dates. Some people tell me they spend too much time together; it's not natural, or they'll grow to hate each other, or they'll resent me for it, etc.

So now, here we are, feeling like the last ones picked for the team. The team is running away and we don't qualify.

Our local homelearning support program has two options: the half-time program (2.5 days per week of classroom activity, to be supplemented at home), or the distance-education program, which offers us enough money to cover a couple of class-registrations for the year, if we're careful about what we choose, and 2 hours of classroom (art and play) experience with their distance-ed peers. This would be great, except that my two kids happen to have no peers in the distance-ed group. My oldest is 1.5 years younger than the youngest of the other distance-ed kids, and the gap just increases from there. What that means is that my kids have little contact with the other distance-ed kids. They visit mostly with the kids in the classroom program, because those kids are of similar ages. And in small groups, some of these kids are very close and friendly with mine. They've maintained some precious relationships with kids in both the regular public school, here, and with the classroom homelearners.

But it's with groups that the problems begin. These days, the play with groups of those kids seems to be becoming more and more adversarial. It's natural that those children will adhere to their school-group when it's available, but I would have liked for my kids to be included. Instead, they seem to be a separate little 2-person unit that cannot mix with the others. Even if they understand the game that's being played, the other kids often behave as if they're not there. At worst, we have experiences like yesterday, when my two kids were taken to the centre of a labyrinth by the others, labeled "the bad team", and shot at with "invisible arrows", while they were encouraged to defend themselves by throwing sticks back. My kids played along, came home totally wound up and ready to fight (they fought each other viciously and angrily all evening, which is extremely unusual). My kids had never experienced anything like this before, and it was a pretty difficult issue for us to deal with, partly because they don't understand that it was wrong. They told me they felt OK about being "the bad team"... but the emotional consequences of it were impossible to miss. It's just not OK with me, as a parent, to see any children villianized or victimized in that way.

Of course, we can't really expect 6-8-year-olds to understand about inclusion, so it's up to us parents to help out. I have been trying to find a way for my kids to join for an hour or two of the classroom kids' program, so that they can have that shared experience and take it with them into the rest of their lives, hopefully helping them to mesh with the group a little better. Unfortunately, some parents (I emphasize the some because I am aware that it is only a small number of the whole) would rather we didn't join. The biggest reason, as I understand it, is that parents do not want a class-size increase. It seems unfortunate, to me, since it's not a big deal to have two friends there for an hour or two, but I can understand how some might fear it's a slippery slope to having more homelearners want to join, if one day there were more homelearners of this age.

But this is what really irks me: Suddenly people go out of their way to remind me on a regular basis that we are not part of the group. Shortly after the labyrinth incident, yesterday, I stood with some friends (parents from our centre) watching our children at gym class. Most of the kids in the class are from the classroom program. And one parent - a friend and mother of kids who attend the classroom program - mentioned that the kids in the gym class were mostly kids from our centre, but there were also a few kids from the regular school, and a couple of homelearners. Are my kids not part of that centre, too? They think they are! I felt the way I think my kids might have felt in the middle of that labyrinth, and I stood frozen to the spot, unwilling to pick up sticks and throw them back. Then I just walked away into the forest.

In my heart I know that these comments come from a different perception about what our learning centre is: I think it's a resource and support centre for homeschoolers; others seem to increasingly see it as a sort of part-time alternative school. The word school would never describe what I see as the benefit of the centre. These people don't mean to be hurtful, but the ostracizing, as well as my perceived loss of what once was an ideal social support centre for our unschooled children does hurt.

I decided to look for mushrooms. I walked and walked and walked through the forest behind the mainstream public school that I attended as a child, remembering my childhood, and allowing myself to just feel. Feel without fighting. At last I came to the Alder grove, where I found a Jones bottle cap on the ground. I picked it up. It said "solutions will come to you while you are walking". Since no solution presented itself, I continued walking.

Through the Alder grove there is a little path onto a secluded bluff. This is where I spent most of my grade 5 and 6 lunch hours, hiding. I hid on this bluff, and nobody ever came. I often wondered if I just wandered away and never went back to school, would anybody think to look here? I picked huckleberries and salal, there, and considered them my private garden. I wrote poems in my head, and made sculptures out of sticks, rocks, and moss. The bluff is hardly changed, today. As I explored it, I found a few bits of lunch garbage, and a structure built of logs. Kids are still using this special place - maybe in groups or maybe alone; I don't know and it doesn't matter. No solutions came to me, but somehow the pieces of my feelings fell into place.

I've been agonizing over this for a long time, now. Teachers and some other parents have worked very hard to help me find ways to include my kids. I've thought of endless possible solutions, but all of them have flaws. It wasn't until tonight, when I emailed the message from the bottle cap to a friend, that I found my solution. In reply to my bottle cap story, she sent me this:

11-year-old Birke Baehr talks about "What's Wrong with our Food System" (just over 5 minutes long):




Thank you, Birke, for your wonderful speech. Thank you for having the guts to present it, and to decide to be a farmer - yes, we need farmers, but mostly we need children who have been allowed to follow their passions. Thank you for the person who cheered when Birke said he was homeschooled. Thank you for reminding me that sometimes parents follow our hearts because we just have to. And sometimes it is right for our children. What I realized when I watched this video was that I have forgotten to listen to my children. They are not telling me they're unhappy! It's me who's afraid that they'll end up on the bluff. I'm not afraid for them; I'm afraid for 10-year-old me. And sometime, I have to let that go.

This is not a me vs. the other parents situation. It's just part of my journey. We all do what's right for our kids. My friend has her kids in the classroom program, and I have mine in the distance ed program, and we both know that, for now, we're doing what's right for our families.

We came back today from an adults' ballet class, (which my kids are allowed to join for the barre segment), and from Tali's first private music mentoring session with our local violin-maker. We felt wonderful! Yesterday was really very difficult. Today was redeeming. This is where we are meant to be. Oh, of course we'll continue to try integrating the kids, more; I still think it's important. And hopefully in November the kids will be able to do a little bit of classroom activity with the program's excellent science teacher and some of their friends. That will be nice, if it works out. These difficulties with my kids being ostracized are not great, but I know they'll sort themselves out, over time. That's just what happens.

And if my kids do end up on the proverbial bluff? OK! It's part of who I am, and better for being acknowledged. We'll cross that bridge if we get to it. And solutions will come with walking. :--) (See previous post: Wandering Learning.)

Monday, September 20, 2010

Wandering Learning

You can click these photos to enlarge them!
My kids are like every other kid: infinitely amazing, if you just look at them with loving-parent eyes. :--)  They have their difficulties and their passions, though, and some things that they manage to totally impress people with.

Both kids are pretty passionate little scientists. They know more about how stuff works, local plant and animal species/habitat/ecosystems/reproduction, and the details of environmental concerns than many adults I know. This also encourages a rather advanced understanding of compassion, community and relationships, and, even more importantly, a sense of their importance in the world, and a feeling that there is an infinity of exciting universe to discover. In short: a passion for learning.

Guess why they have this? Because at least once a week for most of their lives (sometimes much more often) we walk in the forests. It's usually the same forest, even: the park beside our home. We just walk around, there, sometimes build forts, sometimes climb trees, sometimes look for wild food, sometimes are just on our way from one place to another... but always, always, we look at everything around us. And yes, I do know a bit about the forest ecology, myself... but not really enough. We make up names for the things we don't know, and look them up in our books, at home. We look at what various plants and animals, as well as earth, air, and watersystems are doing. We talk about what's happening, and sometimes get so inspired about our ideas that we go home and Google them for more information. We notice the year passing, not in distinct seasons, but in an endless parade of activity, and this is how we learn about the world.

Yesterday we went out mushrooming. We were on a quest for more of the delicious Chicken of the Woods we'd harvested the day before, but found none. So around and around the forest we tromped, scouring rotten logs for the delicious mushrooms, and instead finding centipedes, squirrels, frogs, birds (& vulture feathers!), tiny fish and skeeters in the now barely-flowing creek, another creek that is not yet flowing, again, but which we know is a wide, untraversable stream, all winter. We checked out the trees that have fallen this summer: two big ones. And talked about the different sounds they made (we heard them fall from our house), and talked about the interesting geometry of the other trees they took out in their falls, and how that could have happened. We also found mushrooms; far too many to look up and name, since there are apparently 2 or 3 times as many fungi as vascular plant species, in BC. But these are the few that took our fancy: yellow jelly fungus, artists' bracket and parchment fungi, all sorts of polypores, black-eyed parasols, toothed jellies (we think), acres of some unidentified parasol-like mushrooms, some tiny dark brown unidentified blobby life-form, and finally a bright pink bubblegum-like blob with milky droplets on it. It rather reminded us of a sea-slug! These photos are just from the few mushrooms we took home to identify (I didn't have my act together enough to bring the books or the camera with me, this time). Some other things we noticed on our walk were that most leaves really haven't turned, yet, but the licorice root is starting to be revived from all the rain (it dries out over the summer), spruce cones all over the ground, suddenly, some mushy poop (Was it deer poop? Why did the deer have diarrhea?), banana slugs are out in force right now, and seem to prefer certain types of mushrooms, most of which turned out to be edible, when we checked, and the interesting fact that the Run For the Ferry markers had been forgotten on the trail we followed, home. Oh -- and all that garbage! The dump road, which is the trail that runs through the park, used to be the road to the dump, and naturally is littered on either side (deep into the woods) with garbage of every description, but including a lot of broken glass and old rusty home equipment from 50 to 100 years ago. Interesting to explore, from a historical perspective (we thought the museum should have some of those things), but also we wondered at length why the GVRD didn't clean it up, when they made the park.

Is this going on a bit too long? That is how it is! Endless exploration! How can I possibly distill the learning and exploration we shared in 2 or 3 hours of walking down into one paragraph? I can't! Learning Happens. (I want us all to have t-shirts that say that...) In that one walk the four of us (Mama, Pappa, and 2 kids) made deep journeys in the areas of (to name just the major ones) geology, biology, geometry, physics, math, history, social studies, politics, ecology, and psychology (Why does this walk in the rain make us all so happy? What is it about being out here that is so good for our family? Are all people like this?)


Today I was talking about making our required annual learning plans with our homelearners' support teacher at Island Discovery. We so don't fit the forms!! She knows this. This is pretty much routine frustration for unschooling families (and for our poor teacher, trying to work within a system that doesn't fit the families she's working with), but nevertheless it's a frustration I thought I'd write a bit about, here. Those forms make it seem as though all of our learning can be done by planning! No way! I want the school boards to understand what we're doing; I want them to know that today, while I discussed their ridiculous requirements for homelearners, my 8-year-old son who can't spell to save his life and flat-out refuses to accept traditional education, left the room where his sister was participating in a group activity for grade 1-4's, and stood upstairs near me, pressed between a door and a wall, listening to the class he dearly wanted to join: the older kids learning about the molecules that form DNA. Why does he know and care about DNA? From our walks in the forest.

This isn't really all that new or different; it's the way my mother has always taught preschool to 3 and 4 year olds; it's the way we all learn when we have forgotten our obligations, and are just following our hearts. But somehow we forget that we learn this way. In the rigid social and political systems we've created for ourselves, we forget that we love to learn. We think that learning is about acquiring a set of skills or knowledge; we think it's about being able to conform to accepted norms and becoming acceptable, contributing members of society. Then we spend our lives escaping from our jobs at nightclubs, movies, bars, on mountaintops, in books, dreams, and in front of televisions. We forget that, once, before we went to school, we were learning every day; everything was interesting, and we didn't even want to go to sleep at night, because there was so much to experience, still.

Unschooling certainly has its pitfalls. We live on one income, we are hopelessly ignorant about the trends and fads that other families are spending their energy on, the kids are sometimes ostracized from their school friends' lives when they cease to fit in, we're not used to crowds (though this is partly a rural thing, too), my kids' knowledge-base is definitely different than that of their peers, sometimes we're lonely... and most of all, we spend every day questioning ourselves and our choices -- wondering if we're doing the right thing; wondering if our kids will resent us for this choice; wondering if the government will pull the rug out from under us and we'll fall hard on our beloved forest floor, flailing on our backs like flipped beetles. But this, like most things, turns out to be about trust. We are trusting that this path will lead somewhere beautiful, and so far it has.

Tomorrow we are going to bake cinnamon buns and have a play with some other homelearning kids.

Thank you, universe, for that.

What doo-nin'?

...that phrase was how 2-year old Taliesin used to ask us what we were (or would be) doing.

This is basically just this year's laundry list of planned activities. I find it really hard to make this fit the intended curriculum areas of the school board, partly because there is SO much we all learn from our usual activities, not the least of which is just simply walking through the woods. Anyway. Here goes. The plan, so far:

  • Weekends: home with the family.Firewood, yard-work, music sessions, hikes, housework, etc.
  • Mondays: art/cooking/fun class with other homelearners; Annie's theatre school.
  • Tuesdays: Tali's theatre school; gym games with other kids.
  • Wednesdays: Mama's adult ballet (kids join for barre segment); music mentoring for Tali.
  • Thursdays: free day! town trips, forest walks, playing with friends, etc.
  • Fridays: activity with classroom homelearners (November/December), and once in a while kitchen junkets at night.
Somewhere in there we're going to start a weekly wild play group, open to other families to join us. Just for fun.

    That's the plan!!

    the eating slugs blog

    ...or so I obviously should have named it. Looking at the tracker, today, I see that by far the most common reason for coming to this blog is as a result of searching for info on eating slugs. Second? Other slug-related searches. Third? It's a toss up between no-TV, consumerism, and unschooling. In all my time, I've made only the following slug-related posts:
    Roasted Dusky Arion Slugs on my Feral Food blog
    Fried Banana Slugs on this blog (read the comment section, too)

    Really. That's it.

    Hey! Slugs are important! They are even an important food source for snakes, birds, and some other animals... and we happen to have LOTS of them. But really I wasn't trying to create a slug website, here.

    This begs the question: what do slugs have to do with unschooling?

    Huh?

    Post on this, shortly.

    Thursday, September 9, 2010

    Back-To-School Time!

    On our first year we went for a not-back-to-school beach party with other homelearners. This year no such party was organized... and we're edging a bit more into classroom life.

    I have decided that it will be helpful for the kids to have some more class-like time with their peers. Last year was great, with circus school, and a few local classes, too. But they didn't really manage to keep as tight with their friends as I would have liked them to. So this year they're going to join a couple of year-long programs: the local theatre school, and also (hopefully!) a once-per-week planned visit (maybe an hour or two) with the classroom kids at the program (who attend the homelearners' classroom program 2.5 days per week). Many of the classroom kids are also attending the theatre school, and both are really excellent programs. Tali will also (also hopefully, depending on whether we find the right teacher) begin mentoring with a violin player.

    I'm also joining our learning program's planning council, to help sort out some more inclusive options for full-time homelearners, like ourselves. I guess I want a bit more community around it all. We'll see how it all goes. Going to be a lot of work, I know, but obviously it's worth it.

    A friend just mentioned something about "authentic selves". I feel good knowing that for all the sacrifices we make, financially, and sometimes even socially, we are nurturing our own and our children's authenticity. I know we waffle, change course, redirect and waffle again, and I know this will probably continue on throughout our lives. But it's about following our needs and dreams with conscience and care. It is indeed worth it.

    Friday, June 4, 2010

    Sir Ken Robinson

    Two-time speaker at Ted Talks.

    See what he has to say:


    Competition

    takes joy out of giving
    gift out of life
    life out of joy
    gives in to loss .losing
    loses dancing from moving
    movement from song
    song out of living
    gives value to 'wrong' .winning
    steals meaning from passion
    passion from love
    love from the losers
    gives in to loss
    my poetry sucks

    so I can't share it .afraid
    it's not good enough
    for wanting
    wanting is not enough .losing
    is all it's about
    when there's no need for gain .pain
    when there's no need for doubt .love
    in sharing our souls
    I lose the value of loss
    wanting to feel you
    sharing my failures
    my laugh
    my story
    my pain
    my losing
    wanting to hear you
    wanting
    again

    there is strength in giving without pride
    there is giving in loving without judgment
    there is love in witnessing frailty
    there is pride in knowing we love


    This week I had to check off my kids' abilities from the list of grade-appropriate learning outcomes, just to ensure they keep getting their homelearners' money - but this list of where they measure up doesn't say anything about who they are, their strengths or passions or abilities. Just places them somewhere on somebody's list. I just want them to sing because they want to, to learn what interests them, and to do what they feel is right instead of what they need to do to win. Winning doesn't feel very good when you have to turn and see the losers, behind you.

    This isn't about not valuing strengths, but celebrating them individually, as opposed to competing to be better than others. If we were all just working towards our own individual goals -- because we wanted to, and not because we were expected to, or because we wanted to be 'the best' -- then we would get there, I think, with a true feeling of accomplishment and gratitude for where we are. And community. 

    All people will always have aptitudes or difficulties in various things and I think it's important to celebrate our uniquenesses. But competition of any sort creates losers, where an atmosphere of sharing and support creates desire and confidence.

    Usually, when the topic of non-competitiveness or non-coercive learning, or even my choice not to test and grade my children comes up, I am warned that my children will need to learn to function in the "real world". My answer to this is that we already live in the real world, because the real world is the one we are creating every day. As more and more of us turn away from competition and judgment, towards support and celebration, I am more and more pleased to be a part of the real world.

    blog resurrection

    OK -- two years after supposedly ending this blog, I am still having people comment on it quite frequently (5 times this week!) and still get the gentle messages of disappointment from some people who wish it was still happening. Meanwhile I post random things about our progress on our other blog (phantomrickshaw.com), and on our local community forum, etc. So here it is... I'll put those thoughts here, again.

    (Well -- that was easy.)

    Sunday, July 20, 2008

    Blog shifts

    I'm debating what to do with this blog. Since deciding to pull out of the Learning Centre, we've really fallen into a lovely peaceful life, around here. It seems natural that everything our family does now belongs on one blog, and that this one was really the process of discovery of our year in public education.

    Sooo... at the moment all the posting is happening at our regular blog, and I think we'll just keep it that way. Eventually I hope we set it up to be able to receive comments, etc. and for easier posting (at the moment I have to do it all in html).

    I'll keep this blog here for a while; maybe I'll even use it as a place to post something else, eventually, or for a community blog. But definitely the action for now is going over to Dragonfly: Tales from the Phantom Rickshaw.

    Thursday, June 19, 2008

    Learning Happens!!!

    We're pulling out of the part-time program Tali's been attending. We're now officially full-time homelearners.

    YIPPEE!!!!

    I feel so free! This was a hard decision to make, but we've finally accepted the fact that we are, after all, radical unschoolers. And I guess we can stop denying it, now. Of course there's a huge variety of us radical people, but I don't think we're alone in our intentions. And somehow, just accepting the title gives us an enormous freedom.

    At the beginning of the year I had a very clear idea of how the year would work for us. I thought that the learning centre we joined would make our homelearning easy, we wouldn't have to report on our learning activities, and all the legalities would be handled for us -- that part was true. However, I also thought the 2ce/week learning group would be great for Tal's extreme shyness, and maybe he'd get over it. Oops.

    So I've learned that my son doesn't have a problem with shyness; he just doesn't like to be in groups of people unless he's known them for at least a few years! Funny that -- neither do I! It's not really a problem unless we try to make it go away. We realized in September that the classroom setting wasn't right for him, but we didn't want to drag him about from one program to another, or in and out of school. So we committed for the year, stuck it out, and are now completely certain that the program isn't right for him. Oh well -- it's an experience. And it's a good program; just for other people. And now we have much less reason to question our decision to be, as we seem to be called now, "full-time homelearners".

    Basically, as far as I understand it right now, this decision means that we'll be free to learn as a family however we'd like, but we'll keep in contact with (and take a weekly art class with !!) one of the teachers from the Learning Centre. Because of that connection, we'll not have to fully report on each activity we do; we can just report on the general progress of our children's learning, with guidance from the Learning Centre's teachers. Now that I've officially announced our intentions to the teachers, they've explained this much to me, and I'm quite relieved there won't be any of the weekly logs or record-keeping that seem to be the bane of so many other homelearners I've encountered!

    Rhiannon will still be in my Mum's preschool next year, but basically this frees us up to be happily involved with the preschool and also to fully pursue our own interests. We're already excited about having the opportunity to go in to town for a swim every week! It's things like that that I've really longed for, this year.

    So here we go, into the summer, finally free and easy, and learning wherever we go. :--)

    We've started a weekly art gathering, too. Once a week we get together with other people (all ages) and make art. So far we've done a rock balancing day at the beach and a huge plastic-bag kite/parachute project on the community school field (photo right). Next week will be tie-dying, and after that a full two months of mask-making, earth art, body-painting, papier-mache sculptures, lanterns, even field trips to the mines and meadows.

    It's all so wonderful. I feel like we're opening a new and beautiful chapter of an endless book. Since this is a bit of a personal blog, I'll be personal--also because it will explain the absence of posts, here. In the past couple of months I lost a very close friend over an odd misunderstanding, and experienced some awful backflashes while totally out of my element and while away from my husband. So... depression kicked in and the blog suffered. But out of the loss of my friend, especially, I've found a new feeling of detachment. It's not bad. I think it's a kind of zen. And I'm quite sure it's a very important change for our whole family. I do get way too emotional about things, and this calm I've found has tempered that quite a bit. So, while riding this current little flow, I'm very happy to open up to our lives and let the universe take us where it will.

    So here, as a bit of a photographic update, are various random images from the past month or so (top to bottom): Tal and Annie at Trout Lake, Tal rock-climbing by the grotto in Apodaca park, the lovely four-leafed-clover we found, Tal building Quadrilla with Grandpa (we LOVE Quadrilla!!), me with the plastic-bag-kite at the art gathering, Rhiannon at her ballet recital, Tal on our swing, and Rhiannon painting her papier-mache "water dragon".


    This is happiness!
    Learning happens!!
    Happy summer!!!

    Saturday, May 24, 2008

    More video from Plastic World

    BBC documents the plastic garbage gathered in 1/2 an hour on one beach on Midway in the central Pacific ocean: See video here.

    Friday, May 23, 2008

    Mothers Against Television Revisited...

    Further to my original post about TV (read it here), I want to link to this interesting article (and comment section) by Ali Hossaini: Don't Kill Your Television.

    Of course, I do like the Kill Your Television site, at www.turnoffyourtv.com. My brother has the Kill Your TV sticker on his stereo, which I think is a great location! But The whole notion of "killing" the TV is kind of against my philosophy. I want more of a personal decision to consume media (and anything else) consciously. Kill Your TV isn't as blind as the slogan seems, but they're still wearing the slogan. And as an artist I know well how important a shocking slogan is. Still... it's not my style.

    I'd also like to make it clear that MATV is not a card-carrying group of TV-killers. You don't ask permission to "join". It's just a movement of people making the decision to seek entertainment in real life as opposed to reality on TV. So if that means you have a TV in your house but only take it out for special events, or even choose to watch a particular program on a regular basis, that's OK. MATV is about being very aware of the media diet we consume and feed to our children, and taking social responsibility for our consumption. It's not the media's fault if we watch TV -- we're not slaves! It's our own decision, and whether we trash expensive new TV sets and forbid our children to watch TV at their friends' houses (they will anyway, of course), or keep 3 sets in our homes and watch them simultaneously 24 hours a day, we do it fully aware of the decision we've made. I hate to hear people mourn the fact that they watch so much TV; it's up to you to turn it off! And similarly, we can't stop our children from watching TV by forbidding it; we can only provide them with enough intelligence to look at it critically, see the value and the detriment in what they watch, and feel inspired.

    Edited to answer some questions people have been asking:

    No, I haven't read Jerry Mander's book, nor am I actually very knowledgeable at all about this whole issue, other than how it plays out in my own home. I'm always interested to hear your opinions, experiences and discoveries; don't hold back!!

    I am very aware that children who don't watch TV or play video games may want those things all the more. In my own home that's definitely happened; when we go somewhere with a TV on, they can't peel their eyes away from it, and, quite frankly, neither can I sometimes! They're also not desensitized to the violence or even the blaring assault of light and sound. I'm not actually sure that's a good thing, either; it's certainly caused them not to fit in in some of their social circles. They've actually been quite traumatized at times to hear the gruesome stories some of their very young friends tell. I once went out and rented Sleeping Beauty just so my kids would get some ever-so-slightly-violent pop-culture, but it was a huge failure; Tal said it wasn't nice, and he didn't like that they made the witch bad, and Annie just sobbed her way through the movie and ended up with nightmares. Regardless, I still whole heartedly believe that we're doing the right thing for our own family by keeping the TV and video games out of our house, especially in these early years. Here's why:

    • The time we don't spend watching screens is spent in other ways, which I'm not sure we'd find time for, otherwise. I obviously can't list the ways, because they are as varied as our imaginations... but we are never bored.
    • The kids are very critical viewers. Especially Tal, as he grows older: Any ad he sees is quickly analyzed: What are they selling? Why? Do I like that? Do I like the way they are trying to get me to buy it? What assumptions are they making about me? Do I like those assumptions? Mind you, he's also the product of a graphic designer and a programmer.
    • Most importantly, from my perspective, our family is growing slightly independent of pop culture, and this gives my kids the freedom to truly grow their own way. I mean that I think they have more opportunity to become aware of their own individual natures before having to live in the context of media and the greater world community. Of course, if they're interested in things that are screen-related, I'm willing to go down that road, and at some point it will be very necessary for them to grow into the media culture we live in and learn to be at ease, there. I just think that's not the most important thing at this young age; there will be plenty of time for that, later. So for now they're totally busy just discovering the immensely large, complicated, and interesting world around them. We're quite happy this way!

    Monday, May 5, 2008

    May day!

    We arranged to have both the preschool class and Tali's homeschool program come to our house for May Day, this year. Both events (yes; in one day; it was busy but fabulous!) were wonderful!!

    Of course, as usual, I can't show you much because all my photos contain children whose parents I've not asked for photo-posting permission. Nevertheless, here is some of what we did:

    The maypole! It had 20 ribbons, this year: an outer circle of 10 arranged to represent the solar year (red for the solstices, pale-green/deep-purple paired for the equinoxes, and rich yellow for the cross-quarter days) and 10 more inside in an array of various colours. We danced and undanced the pole with the 3-year-olds in the morning, and then danced it in a more complicated pattern and weaving with the older kids in the afternoon.


    My Mum brought the preschool children's fish windsocks and they ran around with them on the extremely blustery day in the field. This is my Mum, who follows childrens inspirations to create a beautiful, adventurous, developmentally appropriate and yet uninhibited child-led preschool experience. See the joy and beauty in my Mum? That is my opinion of what learning should be. Thank you for making it a reality, Mum!! Afterward you see Annie running with her lovely windsock creation.



    With Tali's learning group we also sang some circle songs, did a spiral dance, and made a mandala with lovely bits of plants and stones they'd found on their walk, here. To the right (the south stone of our circle) you see oven mitts atop the cauldron of hot apple cider, freshly off the May fire.

    Saturday, May 3, 2008

    response to Rachel's comment on "more subversion"

    I don't actually think there are conspiracies, particularly. Well... of course there are; it's inevitable, but not on the grand-scale that many people are suggesting. I think it's actually a tragic shift in our global culture from local to global. And in losing our local awareness and concern, we get swept off into the desire for money, possessions and power. We forget about the importance and simplicity of true happiness. Happiness isn't just at home, it's inside -- inside where there are no shops, no responsibilities, no ladders to climb. It's so simple we've forgotten how to find it.

    I actually don't know anything about the reptilian theory, but I wonder if the real villain isn't something much more elusive and awful. It's heartless because it's unconscious: it's our own blindness; our own detachment from our souls. And I find it terribly sad.

    I do believe that "we're in a lot of trouble", but I think it's because we've lost the collective desire to create our own happiness. And many people are trying very hard to change that, to inspire others to be impassioned, etc. but too many are just looking to blame, which of course gets us nowhere. Looking for someone to blame (as in a conspiracy theory) is just as sad as looking for someone to make us happy, to entertain us, etc. What we once did as a species to create our own peace and happiness, we now look to have served to us. But that's impossible.

    A large part of the reason we're unschooling is to keep our kids out of the consumerist social scene that inhabits any large group of varied people (like school). We don't want them to lose touch with their inner peace and personal desire for happiness. We don't want them to forget the importance and greatness of their own self-designed morality and thought-patterns. Schools have many advantages, and we certainly cannot create that kind of social learning here at home, or with the small groups we associate with. But I hope that allowing the children to lead their own learning and social lives gives them the personal awareness and strength to be whoever they were born to be, without the hindrance of having to measure up or conform to a global culture that is (in my opinion) losing touch with its soul.

    Friday, May 2, 2008

    more subversion

    I suspect the unschooling blog is not exactly the right place to put this; these videos are quite beyond the children at this point. But it's a significant part of our interest, so it's all learning, right? If you never had time to watch Zeitgeist (though you still should; it's wonderful), then these little youtubes are pretty good, too. :--)
    I don't necessarily believe that everything is controlled by the handful of people suggested in Zeitgeist; I think it's controlled by all of us... but too many have been drowned in the wash of consumerism; too many are lost in the struggle to be at the top of the money tree. And it's not making us happy.

    Short Version of Zeitgeist:


    Video after the "We're in a lot of trouble" video:


    Money and the Federal Reserve:

    Tuesday, April 22, 2008

    Wild Food: Miner's Lettuce, Fiddleheads and Cattail Shoots

    First a couple of photos of our earthwalk (Tali's and my weekly trek out to pick up Rhiannon from preschool). We noted that the skunk cabbage, now at the tail-end of it's bloom, is shooting its leaves up -- look how tall!


    And Tal became one with the moss, growing a green beard in his glory...



    Wild Green Omelet
    OK -- not totally wild; the eggs were farmed and the milk was store-bought... but we rejoiced, anyway! As you may have read on our other blog, our ducks recently started laying! What better reason for an omelet?!
    We just gathered what we found on the way home from preschool, today, which happened to be the following:

    • Siberian Miner's Lettuce leaves and buds -- this is just before they bloom, so the leaves are still rich, dark and juicy. They have a very distinct taste, somewhat similar to spinach (and many of the same vitamins as spinach, I believe). One of our May Day traditions is to pick a heap (with lots of flowers) and eat a big salad of it for Beltane dinner.
    • Lady Fern Fiddleheads -- just in time! They're nearly all open! We just take a few at a time; something in my vague memory tells me that fiddleheads are not healthy if eaten in large quantities, so we don't. I'm really going to have to research that one!
    • Cattail Shoots -- yummy, soft and starchy, they're also really beautiful in cross-section! They're just beginning here in the pond. We also harvested some roots to make cattail flour but then, as wild-fooding with kids goes... we lost them somewhere between the pond and home. Oops.
    Stir-fried the fiddleheads and chopped cattail shoots a little, then added miners lettuce, and duck-eggs with a bit of milk and a dash of salt. Duck eggs are much more viscous than chicken eggs; they make a much denser omelet. But yum!

    Wednesday, April 16, 2008

    plastic world

    Remember the consumerism movie I posted earlier (The Story of Stuff)?
    Here's a little video-series to go along with it, thanks to Thomas Morton:
    Garbage Island

    Thursday, April 10, 2008

    psst

    Tal is dancing again... with all his heart!

    little ramble on learning

    Today I went to Tal's learning group and sang some songs with them for their current Canada study. We sang two songs about our island, spent time looking at a map of the island and where we all lived, etc. Then we did some Katajjak (Inuit throat singing), and played some rhythm instruments. Then we moved on to look at mining in Canada, and sang the Hard Rock Miner. The whole thing was supposed to take less than 1/2 an hour, but because the kids were so enthusiastic and involved, took nearly an hour. Because it's an open classroom, that wasn't such a big deal; I was able to just let the learning and enthusiasm of the group carry the time, and I think it was really successful. I haven't taught kids in years (since Tal was a baby) and I left feeling totally fulfilled and thrilled, myself.

    We sing a lot at home, but Tal is often reluctant to join in, and certainly won't do it in public, although he has plenty of opportunity. Once, recently, I was singing something on the way into his school and he blushed and told me to stop singing before somebody heard me! Today he actually seemed happy to have me there, and... he sang along!! So after we left I thanked him for welcoming me into his morning and letting me do my thing. His response was an enthusiastic "thank you for coming to sing with us, Mama!!" I just about cried. My teaching has come full circle and the joy I find teaching other people's children has made its way back to my own!

    So now for some more thoughts on learning. The following are various viewpoints I've come across in the past few years. The last one is my own belief, but I'm throwing them all out for the sake of contemplation; I think this is very interesting.
    1. We learn at an ever slowing rate from birth onwards, so that the first few years are the richest, and it slowly curves off until we reach middle age, at which point the curve either levels off or heads down again (ack?!).
    2. We learn at a relatively steady rate throughout our lives, ending up wise and learned.
    3. We learn at an exponentially increasing rate throughout our lives, as new learning builds upon prior knowledge/experience... so that the richest "learning years" are in our old age.
    4. We learn here and there and everywhere, gathering as we go and forgetting things that are less important or less used.
    5. Learning needs a new name. Call it "growing". We're always growing, always changing, and our personal collection of feeling and memory grows, changes, evaporates or is stored for future retrieval in an amorphous, patternless flow that may roughly follow the flow of our lives. There is no more or less "learning" theres always constant change.
    *And if we consider past life experience to be a part of learning (for those children who remember past lives, it most certainly is!), how does that affect all of the above?

    So if I'm right at all in my belief, why do we "learn" in "school", and then in "university", and then, for the most part, begin life applying the skills we learned without considering further education? Of course it's black and white; I realize that. But I do believe that many of us subconsciously see our learning leveling off at the end of our "formal schooling". So do we then also subconsciously close our minds to further learning? And why is it that so many people have to venture out after finishing highschool or university for "self-discovery" adventures? Why weren't they given the opportunity to discover themselves earlier? Why don't we accept our children for the open, creative, natural forces of change that they are, and rejoice in the opportunity to share our growing with them?

    I'm often criticized for underestimating the school system and the enormous effort that is put out by parents and teachers to provide a rich and varied environment for our children's education. I certainly have been critical of some common teaching methods, and our family has made a pointed choice to opt out of mainstream education. But as more of our friends become more involved in the mainstream education, I hear of a lot of parents and teachers who do seem to hold the same values we do, and to try to apply those in that "mainstream" education. Yay! And for my part, I'm ever so glad to be welcomed into my children's lives -- I'm growing well, these days!