Unschooling Swimming and the San Francisco Bay

 Daize, the 11 year-old, swam from the beach to the end of a pier in the San Francisco Bay today! She can now officially swim in the ocean, and since she was not the one kid that got to take swimming lessons pre-pandemic, that also means that she can officially swim at all!

The whole swimming thing has been a very incremental, very unschooling sort of process. Before the pandemic struck, we were able to cycle one kid through swimming class, the now nine year-old Mota. Meanwhile, because of the one adult per kid requirement, the other two kids, Daize and Tawnse, had to wait—and then pandemic. And that meant, thanks to my lungs, we quit going inside swimming pools. But, all was not lost.

Now imagine you're a kid whose dad developed pulmonary embolisms after catching something that looked a lot like SARS-CoV1, then, years later, lost two feet of his intestine because clotting; who also has a grandmother and aunt who had/have Type 1 diabetes. https://t.co/gUoSOqcJ6A

— antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) September 1, 2022

We needed some degree of water safety. The easiest thing to do was simply to not get into the water. That wasn’t going to happen. The second easiest thing was to think through getting into the water. We practiced and practiced—role played really—”What do you do if you wind up in the water?”

“Stand up!”

Kinda simple really, especially if there aren’t any pools around, and the pandemic had robbed us of those. Because of the pandemic, we were confined to lakes with sloping shores, shallow streams, and well, the San Francisco Bay.

Thankfully, the first place “Stand up!” was practiced wasn’t the Bay. It was a lake in Montana. Six year-old Tawnse was swinging on a rope over the lake, lost her grip, and plunged on in. You know what though? She stood up. She was incensed, some might say enraged by falling into the lake when she didn’t want to, but she stood up.

We talked about learning to swim. She decided she wasn’t ready yet.

Then, earlier this year, seven year-old Tawnse fell smack into the water while playing on the beach of the Bay. This time when she popped back up she wasn’t enraged, she was delighted. “Here! This is where I want to learn to swim!”

The location was primo. We weren’t indoors. Furthermore, where we swim, there’s generally no one else on the beach at all. And so, that’s where the gang have been learning to swim.

As I said, it’s all very incremental, very unschooling, Tawnse is starting to take her first hesitant strokes about six months later. Mota knows how to swim, so he has no real sense of urgency. He's getting used to the cold water of the Bay slowly as he goes. 

Daize though! She finally picked up floating while laying out flat Monday. She’d been practicing breast stroke and freestyle before that, but things were moving slowly. The floating thing turned out to be the secret. Once she was floating flat, I mentioned that she should try a scissor kick with that, and off she went!

How long did it take her after that to get to the end of the pier? About ten minutes. Again, as unschooling usually is with us, she approached the problem incrementally. She went a third of the way down the pier and back, then two-thirds and back, and then swam out to the end! On the way back she tried the one-arm-at-a-time backstroke I’d mentioned a dozen or so times. Her speed pretty much doubled. She’s off and running!

Sure, this is taking months rather than weeks, but with unschooling, one thing we have is time.