Living the Unschooling Life

The Writer Who Hated to Write

Written By: Christine Yablonski - Feb• 10•13

We discovered unschooling while researching homeschooling methods. Our kids were attending public school but we were frustrated by various aspects of being a part of that system. We were truly focused on our daughter, who was in third grade at the time. Our son seemed to be doing fine in school. So fine, in fact, that at first we were only going to homeschool Kimi, leaving Shaun to complete his second year of a multi-age group classroom. Attending the Live & Learn Unschooling Conference in Peabody that summer changed our minds and we removed Shaun from public school, too.

It was nearly a year later that Shaun began to tell us about some of his experiences while in school. He sometimes felt completely overwhelmed in the classroom. He would see the perfect penmanship letters posted on the walls around the room and worry because he wasn’t able to write them as perfectly. He would be given writing assignments and couldn’t get his thoughts down on paper as fast as they bubbled up inside his head, so he thought there was something wrong with him. Sometimes, he cried, but he would hide it from everyone. If asked if he was okay he would reply that he was just tired. We had no idea that he had placed unrealistic expectations of perfection upon himself and that he was quietly crushing his own spirit.

We joined a homeschool co-op, which had many interesting study groups and activities. I always let my pick and choose for themselves, including the option to not go to anything, and sometimes Shaun chose not to go to anything. I wanted him to participate in groups because he was getting something out of the experience, not just because I thought he would benefit from it. For, as I’ve written so many times before, if anyone is not engaged in the thing they are doing, they are not going to learn anything new from it. Retained learning comes from intrinsic motivation to pay attention to the experience. So Shaun joined LEGO Mindstorms, and an ecology group that included composting with worms, and a math/logic  games group, and a geography games group (yes, the gaming groups were mine). Groups he ignored – anything with writing.

One semester, one of the moms led a group called “Create A World”, a huge project that had the kids each creating his or her own new “world”. Each week the discussed aspects of what makes a world, such is the climates, the transportation infrastructures, the foods, the industries, etc. Shaun loved this class. One of the wonderful things that the mom did was to help write things down for Shaun when he had a lot to write. He had no problem labeling things on drawings, but if he had to write many sentences he, again, would feel frustrated that his mind speed and his hand speed didn’t synch up. So the mom, with no fuss, would write it down for him, helping him write without writing.

The following semester this same mom led a “Creative Writing” group. Shaun signed up. I spoke with him about it, making sure he understood that this was going to be different from Create A World – this was going to be writing, a lot! He understood and went to his group. After a couple of weeks Shaun showed me some of his writing. The stories were cute – mostly pulled from his life experience with his family. One thing stood out – it wasn’t literally written by him – it was a grown up’s penmanship. The mom was taking dictation from Shaun and any of the other kids who wanted help. She was making the group about getting their stories out, not about putting pencil to paper. How the story got recorded was so less important than getting their stories recorded. What an amazing thing! I am so grateful to her and her approach to creative writing with children. She helped Shaun find the confidence to be creative and to tell his stories. I seriously doubt this would have happened if he remained in public school.

Shaun needed the time and the support to find his own way of being creative, of telling his stories, without the pressure or constraints that exist within a standard classroom setting. If I had made him practice writing, or spelling, or grammar I believe he would have been driven further away from story writing. Unfortunately, in public schools, when children are assessed as having academic weaknesses, those “weaknesses” become the things they are made to spend more time and effort upon, so as to bring them up to their peers’ level, sometimes by taking time away from the things they are good at and enjoy doing. From an academic standpoint of meeting standards, I suppose this makes sense, but from a humanistic standpoint it’s awful. The attempt to create “well-rounded” people ends up meaning that school systems can, and often do, limit kids’ opportunities to engage in things they enjoy and demonstrate strong aptitudes because they want the kids to develop skills in things that they do not enjoy or struggle to do. As an adult, I choose to spend my time doing things I like and that I am good at. Yes, I still challenge myself to learn new things – but I get to choose what those things are, and I get to choose when the thing is no longer worth my time or effort. Somehow kids do not get this same right. We think we are helping them broaden their world by making them do new or difficult things when in fact we are limiting it and possibly frustrating them to the point that when they finally can choose, they will choose to never, ever do those things again.

So, why am I writing this story now? Because my son, who hated to write, is now writing his own story. Last night, after much secretive hinting, self-published the first draft of the first entry of his story  Chronicles of Alaria . Which means, not only is he writing, but he is willing to share it “rough” for feedback from others. That’s a very brave thing to do no matter what your creation is – because opening up something you have made to judgement can leave you feeling quite vulnerable. Yet he is willing to do it. My son, the boy who refused to write, is now a writer.

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Feeding Each Other

Written By: Christine Yablonski - Jan• 02•13

Would you like me to make you something to eat? Would you like to try some of this?

These are words, in oh, so many countless variations, that I have uttered over the years to my children. Early on we recognized that children’s tummies don’t follow the same schedule as grown up tummies, so we fed the children whenever they were hungry – even if it wasn’t when we were, or when the other was. That meant being clever and paying attention to patterns so that we could anticipate when hunger was going to strike. As the little ones became ever increasingly bigger ones, their eating habits became correspondingly predictable.

Less predictable was what they would eat. Just as I would bulk buy the latest thing they just couldn’t get enough of, they would stop eating it, having moved on to a new favorite. I little frustrating, yes, but I was also grateful that their palates were constantly evolving and that they were open to trying unfamiliar foods as they freely experimented with what tasted good. For our family sushi became as commonplace as pasta, and uncommon foods such as escargot, grilled kangaroo, sweetbreads, and shawarma have entertaining stories connected to the memories of ingesting and (usually!) enjoying them.

Always, always, the preparing and sharing of food was a connection for our family, even at its most basic, subconscious level. I made this for you. I accept this from you. Food is nourishment. I nourish you with my food, with my love. Grow. Be healthy. Feel loved.

Now my kids are hardly kids anymore. My daughter is an adult and my son stands as tall as one. They continue to eat mostly on their own schedules. They also have vastly different food preferences. Kimi is a vegetarian while Shaun is an omnivore with strong carnivorous tendencies. Family meals are made up of several different dishes to accommodate all of our tastes, and enough is cooked to provide leftovers for at least a day or so. Plus, my kids are starting to cook for themselves. Shaun still mostly is tweaking packaged foods – adding extra seasonings or liquids while he heats something up, or he makes pasta. Kimi, on the other hand, has been exploring the precise art of baking and, now, the more adventurous whimsy of cooking. She’s inventing her own dishes, trying out combinations of ingredients to find the right balance of flavors.

And now my daughter offers me some of her food – food that she has prepared.

Would you like me to make you something to eat? Would you like to try some of this?

Now, we can feed each other.

 

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There’s No Place Like Home(steading)!

Written By: Christine Yablonski - Dec• 09•12

We bought a sweet nearly-100-year-old house a few months ago and have set out to homestead our little piece of urban heaven. This is the front yard.

 

This is the back of the house (try to ignore my son up there on the roof – this post isn’t about why he’s up there). I’m standing near the very back border of our property taking this photo.

All in all, we’re living on 0.17 acres, which is a bit smaller than the 1 acre property we owned in MA! One of the tricks for us now is how to use what land we have efficiently and, just as important to me, beautifully. One of the first things we came to realize is that we should not be in a rush to make any big decisions. It’s far smarter to wait and see, to learn about our property, how the sunlight moves across it during the different seasons, where the microclimates are and what what they offer us for variety, and understand the rhythms of our own lives in this new place. It’s not easy for me to wait – I’ve drawn up on graphing paper about a half dozen different plans for the backyard alone! – but wait I shall.

So, I’ve been starting small and, since it’s been fall (and I’m somewhat patiently waiting before I do stuff outside), focusing on indoor activities. For instance, cooking from scratch has become fun again! I have more room and a much more sensible kitchen layout than I did in our rental home (where we lived for nearly a year before buying this house). We are now walking distance from a Whole Foods, a real honest-to-goodness butcher shop, and a bakery, plus there is a cool service in town that delivers fresh produce from local organic farms to your home once per week. It suddenly has become very easy to cook and eat “in season” and from locally produced farms and other businesses (have I mentioned the beer…or the chocolate…or the ice cream? Maybe later…).

This month, though, I decided to start spreading my wings and trying new things. After researching online and polling friends, I purchased a grain mill and a soy/seed/nut milk maker. I’m going to try to cut costs and avoid mass-food production issues by making my own flours and cow milk alternatives, after I use up my current supplies squirreled away in my pantry.

My friend Brenna is an excellent potter, and one of the products she makes is bread cloches, unsealed lidded pots that you can bake bread in (think of it like a pizza stone that completely encloses your dough). I made a bread dough starter from the basic recipe in “Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day“, which gives you enough dough to bake several small loaves of bread over the course of a week or so. The family loves having fresh-baked bread and I love that it’s just the right size for our needs. I’m going to jump in my time machine and start making bagels, just like I used to when Phil and I lived in NYC oh, so many years ago. I also want to make fresh pasta using my milled flours.

I’m excited about all these food-oriented explorations. I’m trying to introduce only a couple at a time – just like when introducing new solids to a baby, you don’t want to overload the system!

I’m sure there will be goof-ups and frustrations – for example, I haven’t tried canning yet (!) – but I know that the self-sufficiency rewards will far out way them.

~ Joyful and optimistic greetings from our urban homestead to you!

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The Measure of a Learner

Written By: Christine Yablonski - Dec• 05•12

Moving to a new state means abiding by new homeschool regulations. Our previous method of reporting (via progress report) had to be replaced with a national standardized test. Kimi turned 18 before the end of our first academic year here, so that meant only Shaun had to be tested. I researched and ordered a popular one, the CAT, and chose the 9th grade level, since that would be the grade level Shaun would have just completed if he was still attending public school.

We were able to spread the testing over the course of a week, since there were 10 separate tests. I would read the instructions, set the timer, and Shaun would fill in the little circles on the answer sheet – his first experience with “fill in the circles”! Shaun had just completed 1st grade when we decided to unschool, so we were definitely curious about how he would compare with schooled kids his age. Curious, but not worried. Why? Because these tests are assessing factual knowledge that is connected to what the average public school student is taught – and what Shaun has experienced is different. For example, he hasn’t been exposed to the language of math, yet he works with numbers frequently – he just uses the tool without knowing the terminology. Yet I don’t see his learning experiences as deficient – he has seen and done things that many kids his age haven’t, which means they wouldn’t necessarily pass a test based upon Shaun’s “curriculum”. So, we joked about what kind of scores Shaun would get…

…and then we got the results. There is something called “grade equivalent” (GE), which means:

“an estimate of where the student is along a developmental continuum, not of where he should be place in the graded organization of the school. It may reflect the actual level of task difficulty a student can
consistently perform. Thus, if a student receives a grade equivalent of 7.8, that says that he is estimated to do, in that particular subject, what an average student in that grade (and month, assuming nine months in a traditional school calendar) would do if given the same questions.”

(P.S., Note the “he”, the text for explaining the test information only uses the male version of a student…hmmmm…)

On 6 out of 10 tests Shaun scored above 9 for GE: Reading Comprehension, Reading Vocabulary, Language Expression, Science, Social Studies, and Study Skills (this one makes me laugh!). So, what about math? Well…

…not surprisingly, his math scores were low, as compared with other 9th graders in public school. Math Computation was a GE of 3.8, so almost to the 4th grade equivalent. Interestingly, Math Conceptions and Calculation came in at a GE of 6.4 – remember, Shaun hasn’t had any formal math education since 1st grade, yet his math skills,without knowing the language of math and based upon what the school system thinks someone should know by this age, did develop. Additionally (ha!), his total battery score (which combines all of his math and language tests results) places him in the 50th national percentile (NP) and with a 9.8 GE. All of this without being made to learn any particular thing by us. All of this from him being able to spend time on things that interested him.

I’m sure many of you reading this are thinking: okay, so his language skills are good, but those math scores are scary! Why aren’t you worried?

I’ll tell you why :)

I’m not worried because Shaun not having the knowledge NOW doesn’t mean his is incapable of learning that knowledge later. Heck, look at his study skills score: 11.7 GE! That test measures the student’s ability to find, use, analyze, and organize various types of information found in books, dictionaries, libraries, reference sources, bibliographies, and graphs. So, you know, how to use new information in an intelligent and logical manner. Most of us, when having to do math that is too complicated to do in our heads, use other tools – things like calculators, charts, online conversion sites, and apps. We aren’t expected to know it cold. There are also multitudes (hee!) of free sites that explain how to compute something. Should Shaun decide he needs to understand more complicated math, we will have all sort of great resources to help him learn it, and I have complete faith in his ability to do so. In the meantime, instead of developing a math phobia, or sweating out hours upon hours, year after year on math lessons, he’s learned basic math skills all on his own because of how he’s needed to use math as a tool in his life.

Shaun will be taking the tests next year and I talked with him about the math sections. Did he want to learn some of the techniques and language? Nope. He wants to see for himself if he picks up more math skills “just” by living his life. He’s basically testing himself on how he will test!

Here’s another way to explain my thinking. Two of his scores (Reading Vocabulary and Social Studies) placed him at 12.9+ GE – so, you know, post-high school. In fact, his Reading Vocabulary NP was 98! Does that mean that 98% of the kids his age in school are somehow lagging behind him in learning this subject? Does that mean all of these kids who scored below him aren’t as smart as him? If you recognize how simplistic and unrealistic it is to criticize these public schooled kids’ abilities then you should also recognize that you shouldn’t condemn unschooled kids abilities.

Which of these subjects are more important in life? Which ones lead to greater financial success? Job security? Happiness? Isn’t life WAY more complicated to break it down into individual subjects – as if social studies has nothing to do with reading comprehension which has nothing to do with science which has nothing to do with math computation which has nothing to do with logic. Life is too big to effectively be broken down into artificially separate learning categories. Likewise, it’s impossible to say what knowledge and skill sets will be the important ones for any particular person. Heck, I know people who changed careers after 20+ years of doing something – their required skill sets had to be re-set! Think back to 10 years ago, 20 years ago – what is it about our ways of life that have changed? What jobs and careers exist that didn’t? How has the economy affected purchasing decisions – home ownership, college loan debt, fair trade and organic food, “green” technologies, etc.

I would rather Shaun continue learning and exploring in his own way, where he has control over how he spends his time, where he has ownership of his own life. This way he can freely observe, understand and develop knowledge and skills that will help him figure out his path – for his future career and for his future hobbies. This freedom to learn, to self-educate, will be part of him for his entire life. He won’t “stop learning” just because he’s on summer vacation or has graduated. He won’t avoid doing any necessary hard work because he’s doing it for himself, not for a grade or for the approval from adults. That’s true learning and that’s what being educated should mean.

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Mountain Living

Written By: Christine Yablonski - Jun• 06•12

We live in a city nestled within the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far cry from the Boston suburbs where we used to live. We knew that the rugged beauty included the non-human inhabitants that, of course, have “always” lived here, far before people began to build, and expand, neighborhoods that criss-cross the hills and valleys. We’ve seen the bears.

Bears that were sunning themselves, sprawled across a gravel road that connects downtown with the parkway. It was exciting to see them, safe as we were within the confines of our minivan. They even passed the cute test when one, struggling to scramble up the steep slope next to us couldn’t help but waggle its little behind at us.

Last night I got the call from my daughter – come pick me up from downtown? She would walk if I wasn’t feeling up to it (I’m recovering from a cold, the lingering congestion keeping me periodically exhausted) but I replied that I’d pick her up at the park, where I had dropped her off earlier in the day.

Driving off from my house, I took the usual left turn, my headlights sweeping and illuminating the hill before me. The beams caught the motion – something, no, some things running across the road. A mama bear and her baby bear.

I slowed to look within the shrubbery through which they had passed, into the backyard of an unknown neighbor. Nothing. No sound. No movement detected.

I retrieved my daughter and as we returned to the road, we crawled past, radio silenced, windows down, hoping for a glimpse. All for naught. Our nocturnal visitors were now stealthy ninjas – off to explore other yards.

My son joined my daughter in taking out the garbage and recyclables, hoping in equal parts to see and not see any bears. They certainly shared a special crispness of energy and focus – fueled by the knowledge that things that go bump in the night were just a little bit closer than usual. Our close encounter with nature once again pulling us out of our business-as-usual activities and creating a now, a complete awareness of what is happening around us. A present.

The sun rises, and all looks as it did before. But is it? How do unusual life experiences affect us? Is there a transformation? A realization? An epiphany? Or is it smaller, quieter, staying small and safe within our minds until another experience connects with it, helping it grow in its significance? Will it be a bear or a woodchuck? Will it be a mountain or an anthill?

Time will tell…if you accept the invitation.

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