Re-Entry & A Few Small Repairs

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Back from spring ARGH, the twice-yearly unschooler gathering in the mountains of east Tennessee. A smaller group this time, fewer families, less frenetic, with plenty of time and space to wander and think and porch-sit and play.

Making telephone wire jewelry at Spring ARGH

ARGH stands for Autodidactic Radical Gathering of Homeschoolers. Kind of a mouthful. But it makes for a memorable acronym. And memorable gatherings.

We’ve been to five ARGHs so far. I like to imagine that we’ll just keep going, growing old among these people who are our spirit sisters and brothers, our found family.

Returning from a gathering or a conference always entails a period of re-acclimation. I’m tired from the long drive, and sad to leave people with whom I feel such a sense of ease, knowing it will be months before I see them again. Once home, I find myself at loose ends for days, not sure which threads to pick up from my daily life, and which to leave alone. Before I left I made a list of new projects I want to work on, but now I look at the list and can’t muster the energy to begin any of them.

Re-entry takes time. I believe I will give myself some.

And while I have you here…

A broken link, now fixed: the Kindle version of 101 Reasons has been unavailable for a couple of weeks, due to an oversight on my part. A failure to click one last page after doing an edit left my poor li’l book in Kindle-limbo. I’ve now clicked, so it’s available once again. Still 2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a free app for your pc or ipad or whatever device you want to use from the Kindle store, and you can also find the book at Smashwords in a bunch of formats, including a simple pdf.

Thanks for being patient.

That’s all for now.

The Garden I Aspire To

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We’re between thunderstorms here in the USA midwest, and the yard growth — some of it grass-like, most of it weed-like — is tall and lush and astonishingly green. It’s also getting a little out of hand, and I can’t seem to find a moment to mow it down before another swell of dark clouds appears overhead.

The garden I aspire to. Not the garden I have. Not even close.

For years I’ve been trying to shrink the mowing area of my yard. I’ve put in perennial beds and planted shrubs and such, and a tree here and there. But at the rate I’m going it’ll take a decade or more to eliminate the parts that need to be mowed.

Part of my slow progress is due to the fact that I’m a terrible gardener. I let my perennial beds get overrun with whatever wants to grow there alongside the lavender and coneflower and sedum and spiderwort, and the next thing I know, my beds are back to being a yard in need of mowing.

I was somewhat better at vegetables. But vegetables come with their own set of problems, ones I’m simply not interested in solving.

When I first moved to the midwest I had a cabin on four acres. At the time I thought I was the kind of person who would like having a garden. There were raised beds already in place, and I built a couple more, and filled them with herbs and tomatoes and peppers and garlic and collards and broccoli and whatever else came to mind. And it was all pleasant and manageable until I encountered the humidity of a midwest summer. And hornworms and cutworms. And cabbage moths that laid their eggs all over the broccoli. And the deer and rabbits that ate the cucumber and snap pea vines down to nubs.

Every summer for years I faced those hornworms, cutworms, cabbage moths, deer, rabbits, and that god-awful humidity. And then one spring I was too busy with work to plant any vegetables. And I ended up having a very nice summer for a change.

Wanting to be someone who likes gardening is not enough. Wanting to like something, or feeling like I ought to like something, is not the same as actually liking it. Seems obvious, but it took me a lot of years to be okay with the fact that growing vegetables is not my thing, even though I really, really wanted it to be my thing.  Or one of my things.

Now I leave the growing of edibles to others. I’m happy to support them with cash money at the farmers market and the co-op. The mowing and the perennial beds, however, are still mine to figure out. But guess what. I don’t have to figure them out today, because the thunder is rolling in once more, and I can hear the drops of rain just beginning to hit the roof.

Deschooling Our Stories

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My feed reader is my personal daily news. Everything in it is something I find stimulating enough to invite into my life on a regular basis. It’s the stuff I want to read.

The stuff I don’t want to read but others think I ought to read  – stuff about Libya and Scott Walker and the federal budget, for example — seeps in on its own, so it’s not like I don’t have a clue what’s going on. I just don’t let it on my feed.  It takes some vigilance to avoid becoming a sponge for all the crap put out into the world.

Anyway, two thoughts came together in my mind as I read through this morning’s feed. One had to do with deschooling, the other with stories.

The deschooling thing came up on Sandra Dodd’s daily blog, Just Add Light and Stir, which I love for the very reason that it’s so often a launching pad for ideas and connections.  In  today’s post she writes, “Deschooling is needed much more by parents than by children.”

Indeed. We’re the ones who were immersed in the school experience from the time we were small. We’re the ones who have lived for decades in a culture where school is so firmly entrenched.  Even unschooler parents who were raised outside of the school system aren’t impervious to the dominant schooly culture.  Stuff gets in, it gets absorbed, and when it presents itself in our lives, and in our thinking, we have to have the presence of mind to, as Sandra puts it, “wrestle with it, encapsulate it, and forget it.”

Which leads me to this notion of  stories.

Stories are the essence of our lives. We all have them. We all have a personal story and a meta story, the first comprised of the things we tell ourselves about who we are and how we got that way, the second about what the world is like and how it got that way.  In my reading this morning I was reminded that our stories and our schooling are intimately entwined.

The launch point was a Dear Sugar column at the Rumpus, in which Sugar was deconstructing someone’s interpretation of events and inviting them to change the story they were telling themselves about their situation. As I read, I scribbled in my journal that one thing unschooling asks of us is that we reconsider our stories.

For example:

One story our culture tells is that kids don’t know anything.  I’ll never forget the interviewer on that Good Morning America unschooling segment laughing at a teen unschooler who described an unsatisfying school experience, saying, “You were in second grade! What did you know?”

Another story our culture tells is that there is a specific body of knowledge all kids need to master within a certain time frame, and that body of knowledge can only be delivered through school.

I’m sure you can come up with lots of schooly stories you’ve absorbed over the years and have (perhaps) since rejected. But even when we overtly reject them, these stories can still inform our thinking, because stories are rooted in emotion, and emotion has such enduring  power. Stories we’ve absorbed about how things are can live for a long time in our subconscious, carried like a dormant virus.  This is one reason why we can so fully embrace life learning only to find ourselves suddenly worrying over the paper-math skills of our kids.

To deschool means to rewrite our stories.

Our kids can be a big help to us here. My unschooler daughter runs into schooly meta-stories all the time, but her personal story is a life-learning one, so she has less difficulty spotting the stories that don’t align with her own experience.  She recognizes their falseness right away.

Me, I suspect I’ll always be deschooling, uncoupling links made long ago. I still carry unfounded assumptions, and I continue to absorb unwanted stuff in my life, sponge-like, even when I’m vigilant.  My process of deschooling means I have to wring out the damn sponge, not just once, but again, and again, and again.

The One Where I Fix the Wonky Chicklet

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It’s strangely warm here, and humid, and a strangely warm and humid wind has been gusting for two days and nights, rattling that loose piece of siding up along the roof line that I’ve been meaning to tack back down, but given the fact that (1) mine is a two-story house, and (2) I don’t have a ladder,  it’ll probably be a while before I get to it.

So I was listening to that piece of aluminum siding bowing and flexing in the wind, sounding almost but not quite musical, doing some routine maintenance here on the site (since I’m not doing it on my actual house) and I discovered a bit of wonkiness that had somehow made its way onto my home page.

If you’ve tried to subscribe to the blog using that cute orange chicklet up there on the right, and found yourself faced with a useless page of text and code instead of a simple click-and-go page (and went, ugh, or wtf? or something), you have my apologies.

I’ve repaired the wonkiness.

You may now subscribe in peace.

Have a lovely Monday.

What About Socialization?

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As my unschooler daughter moves through her teens, I don’t get the “socialization” question as often as I used to. The things people ask now are more likely to be about college than about fitting in.

But “fitting in” still comes up from time to time, mostly in my own head, and sometimes in conversation between the two of us, as we look for interesting things to do in our community, and interesting people to do them with, and find ourselves feeling out of step rather more than we might like.

Shared experience is the basis of all relationship, and the most common shared experience in our culture is school.  When you don’t go to school, you have to build other experiential bridges.  Which we do.

But there’s another reason we’re often out of step.

Yup. Socialization.

People sometimes use that word as shorthand for “getting along with people.” It has the word “social” in it, which is a nice word, so you can see where the confusion comes in.  But socialization is really about something more than just getting along. It’s actually a softer (kinder, gentler) word for indoctrination, which sounds so sinister but describes pretty much the same process of inculcating norms and values and proper modes of behavior depending on one’s economic and social position.

Families inculcate norms. So does the culture at large. But the primary institution for inculcating the norms and values of the dominant culture is school.

What happens if you don’t go to school? You miss out on that indoctrination. And if you’re not inclined to reproduce it at home, what happens then?

What if you’re one of the weird ones who believes, for example, that learning is natural and need not be coerced, that kids are as deserving of freedom and respect as adults, that obedience is not a particularly admirable quality, that authority is circumstantial, not fixed, that cooperation often trumps competition, and that life is about more than earning money and acquiring stuff?

You realize — sooner or later — that you’re odd, that’s what.

And then you get on with the living of your (quirky, unconventional, wacky) odd life.

In a recent post, homeschooler parent Diane Flynn Keith takes on the socialization bugaboo and gives it a nice little twist in its knickers. Hell, yeah, people who don’t do school are odd. And we’re really happy to be that way.

Masters & Taskmasters

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Back in the 1970s polymath Herbert Simon floated the idea that true mastery of a subject or skill takes something like 10,000 hours or so of effort, which works out to about 10-12 years, given the normal demands of life.

Lots of people have had a go at that number over the years, and I suspect most would agree that it’s somewhat arbitrary, and subject to lots of provisos, depending on the skill or subject in question. I think, though, that the basic premise holds true: however you chose to define it, mastery takes time. And not just any old time, but nice chunks of uninterrupted time, so that a thought, an idea, an experiment, a hypothesis, an activity, a creative process gets its full due.

Thinking takes time. Playing takes time. Wondering, imagining, experimenting, coordinating, executing, these all take time.

This sort of time is one of the first victims of compulsory k-12 schooling.

School hinders mastery by favoring task-mastery, slicing and dicing the day in an assault on time that lasts for 13 years. Children grow up in a place where natural, fluid hours are replaced by predetermined blocks of minutes during which one must “get through” the required “material” in order to satisfy the curricular demands of the day.

The process provides an assembly-line accumulation of data and facts and figures and grades and test scores, but little opportunity for curious kids to wonder and explore and allow time to pass unnoticed while they build and create and try again, and mull and consider, and tease out subtleties and connections and subtexts and contexts. Little opportunity, in other words, to whittle away at those hours leading to the mastery of whatever it is they would be inclined to master in a more conducive environment.

Now let’s add the irony. A schooled kid in the U.S. spends anywhere from 10,000-15,000 hours in a classroom over the course of their k-12 schooling.

As Tom Waits might say, what are they doing in there?

School is Prison

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Classic Peter Gray:

“If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.”

“The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.”

and:

“Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and eager teachers, hears or reads about some “new theory” or “new findings” from psychology that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning. But none of it has worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in school they are not free. Joyful learning requires freedom.”

From Gray’s September, 2009 post in Psychology Today, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Worth every moment you’ll spend reading it, and following the links, and reading some more.

See more of Peter Gray at Freedom to Learn.