Copasetic Flow

Tonight, a few brief notes on what unschooling isn’t.  I don’t mean to be unctuous, but here goes anyway.  I see—a lot—that unschooling kids never learn anything what with all the sitting around doing nothing, and eating candy all the time.  I believe these statements are mostly in reaction to ‘radical’ unschoolers who say things like, “The kids eat whatever they want, and pursue their own interests.” These sorts of statements are true, but not necessarily in the way they’re taken.  Yup, some unschoolers eat  whatever they want.  Why, oh why, would that be candy though?  First, you have to ask yourself, where’d they get this candy?  If there’s no candy in the house, they’d have to go outside to get it, and that contradicts the other ‘unschooling premise’, ‘they do nothing all the time.’ Let me break it down simply.  Unschoolers don’t sit around and eat candy all day for two reasons.  The first reason is that an emotionally healthy p...

 This blog has seemingly taken a departure from unschooling of late. I say 'seemingly' because at the end of the day, because of strewing, the gang's lives and mine are always twined together. So, if you watch what's going on—even with the recent slew of technical posts here—you can get an idea of what the gang's up to in unschooling. For example, they’ve been working on Morse code practice for the last several weeks. Code practice is related to radios—sure—but it’s also related to writing practice and learning typing. Anyway, I digress. I’d arrived at the conclusion that this blog no longer looked like an unschooling blog. I felt perhaps it would be interesting for me to write about the topic more intentionally, but hadn’t arrived at a way to get there when I sat down to read tech blogs this morning. About ten minutes later, I’d found the path back. The path, as much as anything, is a great illustration of how seemingly completely random unschooling and strewing li...

We unschool.  This blog talks all about what our unschooling family does on a day to day basis, but rarely, (at least recently), mentions unschooling.  But, a really cool thing happened last week, so here goes.  Five year-old No. 2 said he wanted to learn to read! Before I get into 2 and his desire to learn to read, I should perhaps point out what unschooling is, as well as what it is to us.  Unschooling is a schooling methodology wherein the curriculum is based on what the learner wants to learn.  The general idea is that kid’s live life, and as they express an interest in a subject, they’re assisted, (if they need assistance), in finding material with which to learn, and perhaps encouraged, (it depends on the particular interpretation of unschooling), and perhaps taught when and if they ask for help. While it might sound as if unschooling kids are dropped into an educational void, and told to swim, that’s not the case.  Parents ‘strew’ educational m...

Life skill testing?  Sounds like a bad idea, because, well, it is.  If you’re wondering what on Earth I’m talking about, it came up in yesterday’s post when I wondered if perhaps unschooling kids could hang out with vetted Directors of Tactical Ops, (DTOs aka nannies),  while traveling with their parents on work trips.  As a brief recap, I reasoned/hoped that kids could travel with their parents on business trips, hang out with local DTOs, and then explore the area with their parent over the weekend.  It’s not quite what’s known as World Schooling, where families travel the world freely instead of going to school.  It’s a middle ground.  From the kid’s point of view: Mom or Dad are travelling, there’s stuff I could experience, I’m going with them.  There were two issues though, one was vetting DTOs.  The other one, the one that led me to thoughts of life-skill testing was vetting kids, in order to qualify them to wander around towns with D...

 So, fellow unschooling folks, help me with a thing here, if you would, please? To me, one of the tenets of unschooling is that the people who are learning choose their method of learning. We’ve held to this over the years. For example, when the oldest kid, Daize—as always, an alias—who is now 9, thought that kindergarten in public school, might be her best way to learn, off she went. When she decided, four weeks later, that she had changed her mind, I spent the better part of a day taking public transit around San Francisco getting her unenrolled. So, like I say, we take this roll-your-own  aspect of unschooling seriously, but last week, the middle kid, aka Towser, aged 8, asked me a thing… He asked me to force him to read and write. And, what am I supposed to do with that? (This is where I need your help by the way.) Can Towser be forced when he doesn’t want to be forced? In a word, No! I know this because I learned it as part of my unschooling journey. Frankly, it would hav...

 You may have noticed the blog went fairly quiet this year. We didn’t quit unschooling with the pandemic, but our picture of unschooling sure did change a lot. I’ll write more about that soon, but first, let me point you at some of the thing we were doing while I wasn’t writing. The gang and I discovered a 1950’s radiosonde on the side of a mountain in New Mexico. We didn’t know what it was at first, but thanks to Dr. Alice Gorman, we were soon on our way to finding out via twitter @drspacejunk the kids and I found this half buried in the forest this morning. At first I thought remote weather station, but then it occurred to me white sand missile range is 60 miles away. Look like anything you've seen? 2nd picture is housing for first. pic.twitter.com/sExFRDzAoU — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) March 25, 2020 Dr. Gorman introduced us to a nearby space archaeologist at New Mexico State University, and we were off and running. A month or so later, the whole thing was written up at De...

 Fronted adverbials have been a thing this week. A thing I didn’t even know existed until I saw  Anyone struggling with homeschooling should know that, despite having a PhD in Literature and having published 12 books, I only learned what a fronted adverbial was when my 8 year old's teacher said he doesn't use enough of them in his written work. — Dr. Carolyn Jess-Cooke/C.J. Cooke (@CJessCooke) January 13, 2021 The tweet caused a great deal of churn in the self-led, traditional education, and parenting spaces. Much of it deserved, and yet… It’s also a really good way to illustrate that unschooling allows space for everyone. I hadn’t heard of fronted adverbials before, but as someone who writes—I’ve had one book published, not dozens, but still—and someone who enjoys plunking around with learning languages, I was secretly jazzed about the whole thing. Fifteen years ago, I found it was easier for me to learn languages if I knew what the different parts of English’s grammar w...

Four year-old No. Three had a blast at her cooking class today!  That’s right.  I said it.  Unschooling kids take classes.  There’s a common misconception that unschooling kids sit quietly in their homes, learning everything through mere osmosis.  It’s no wonder—given this misconception—that many people think unschooling, ‘Just couldn’t work!’   The difference between kids that are unschooled and those who aren’t, well at least one of the differences, is that unschooling kids only attend the classes they want to. That single small difference in personal control makes for an amazingly large difference in how they interact with the class.  Three is delighted to be in her cooking class.  It’s all grins and giggle from the time she enters class until the time she leaves.  Don’t get the wrong idea though!  Grinning and giggling does not mean she’s goofing off.  Her attention is locked on the instructor’s every word.  She ...

"So, How do you measure outcomes?" The engineer meant well, when she asked the question and, to be fair, she'd never heard of unschooling.  Still, I had to double-clutch several times as the gears in my mind shifted to traditional schooling terminology.  The kids and I were at a small company in San Francisco where they were testing a new game package that was supposed to teach coding.  While the kids were testing, another engineer was asking me about the coding work we did at home.  I mentioned that the kids had been working through Google's CSFirst for the last several months.  This inspired the outcomes question. I went with the not so elegant, but oh so pragmatic initial response of, "What...?" Buying myself some time while I boggled at what the hell an outcome was... Wait, I had it!  That's right, other schooling methodologies measure what's 'taught' by 'testing' what the kid has learned compared to 'the expected outcom...

Having the kids able to help out with our everyday lives has been one of the huge perks of unschooling.  Rather than being off somewhere discussing life skills, or practicing life skills, or doing homework on life skills, the unschooling kid s here are out using their life skills as they develop them.  Lately, as the gang have been out and about, living their lives, they've also been able to help me out.  The 8, 6, and 4 year-old here have learned how to do shopping without me.  We started out with them collecting items in the same grocery store I was in to save time.  Now, we’re splitting up to hit different stores, and then meeting back at the bus stop.  The latest advantage I received from unschooling though had to do with my airport commute in LA.  First, I was surprised to find out public transit works in LA!  I"d heard the rumors that LA is a driving-only town, but they're just not true.  There aren’t as many routes as there are i...

A bit of a conflagration took place in the unschooling portion of twitter this week.  The discussion revolved around whether or not children have power and whether or not we as parents ‘have to’ coerce them. As an unschooling dad, I like to believe kids do have power.  I like to back off as much as I can, and I’ve discovered the more I back off, the better things go.  And, therein lies the rub, I think.  Yes, I do have power, both based on my size, my ‘status’ in society, and money.  Choosing not to use that power however is what improves my life and the kids’.  As an unschooling parent, I think the kids should be learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it.  I also think that the thought that I could coerce the kids into learning things by applying my power is wrong-headed.  Let’s take, for example six year-old No. Two’s efforts to read, or perhaps I’d be more accurate in phrasing it as his lack of effort to read.  Fo...

I hear it a lot on the internets, “Unschooling parents are a bunch of people who don’t do anything for their kids.”  Only occasionally is that statement true.  I’m here to point out though, that even when it is true it’s slightly inaccurate in it’s wording; it’s not that us unschooling parents don’t do anything, it’s that occasionally we won’t do anything, and when we won’t, it’s one of the best teaching techniques out there. Five year-old No. 2 has been quite clear with us, he’s not interested in being taught much of anything.  Counting?  Not really interested.  Reading?  Yeah, he’ll stand there, and listen to what you tell him the words are, but you can’t make him look at the letters.  He’s going to learn when he wants to learn. He does, however, love books  He flips through them page after page checking out the pictures, sometimes making up the stories for himself.  He also loves being able to do most things his older sib, 7 year-old...

 Read this article by the author of Timeless Learning  a book about changing traditional schools in ways that look remarkably reminiscent of unschooling. The author uses baseball as a metaphor, but... It's all about how we percieve tasks, how we learn, what our expectations might be, and how those expectations might have come to enter our psyches. It's about... well, you'll see.   As an unschooing parent, I frequently don't think about how schools can/should work because the two systems (traditional schooling and unschooling) are portrayed as different, ofthen orthogonal activities. However, two things lay at the base of each of these systems: relationships with kids and learning.  In unschooling there's still material to be presented, even if it's just strewing and/or talking with the kids to mine their own intrests. There are still expectations--even though unschooling tacitly eliminates them--because we're sill human and many of us, including me, grew up ...

 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 (@...

I have now seen posts about ‘home education’ for three to seven year-olds. And, I’m guessing that people are now calling ‘kids are home during a pandemic and the school system has mandated that learning will happen remotely via the internet’ home education instead of homeschooling and maybe that’s going to help with the confusion, but in case it’s not, indulge me in describing what homeschooling looked like for the kids here between 0 and 3. First, it felt really weird, calling what we were doing homeschooling and even stranger still calling it unschooling, because, well, the kids were just living life. It wasn’t really ‘schooling’ at all. I constantly felt like a poser saying we were doing any kind of schooling. I mean, were we really schooling? The kids were just doing their thing while I was around. But looking back from here, it seems to me that what we were doing was the epitome of unschooling The kids were just doing their thing. As infants, they were hanging out in the baby wrap...

Unschooling has become a bit of a breeze for us in the last few weeks.  We put in our work: we have socialization opportunities setup for the kids, we have places for them to go, things for them to do, adventures for them to have, and learning resources for them to work with if they’d like.   It’s taken me probably two weeks to realize that we’re in this state.  The hardest thing for me at the moment is to learn to just sit back and relax now. So, along those lines, let me tell you about an awesome unschooling ‘learning’ that’s been taking place for about the last month.  Six year-old No. Two and I got to spend three days camping in Hawaii last month.  While we were there, Two watched people head out on kayaks to the nearby island, Chinaman’s Hat, as well as just to toodle around with no destination, or perhaps to go fishing.  He desperately wanted to go on a kayak, but there was a problem, he didn’t know how to swim.  I explained to him there w...

Unschooling?  How did my last post have anything to do with unschooling?  As soon as I saw the title on the screen, I cringed.  The benefits of binary math, check, anything to do with unschooling?  Nada. As it turns out, I’d started in the middle of the story.  Our six year-old, No. 1, and I started heading towards binary math—in more proper unschooling form—because she wandered into the room one day and said, “Dad, I want to learn what you do at work.” All I do at work is test machines whose sole job it is to move ones and zeroes around: microprocessors and other digital devices also known as computer chips in the vernacular.  So, since one and zero are pretty simple concepts, and as it turns out, the logic gate building blocks of digital devices are also really simple, off we went! The first thing we need to nail down were the handful of logic gates I encounter.  What’s a logic gate you ask?  It’s just an electrical embodiment of...

Two of the unschooling gang, 8 year-old No. One and six year-old No. Two went to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Property Use and Transportation Committee, (that’ a mouthfull!) meeting today!  Four year-old No. Three would have attended, but she was feeling a little bit under the weather. We’ve been planning to do this for months. We’d—all of us—like to ask to have a Free Play Proclamation passed by our mayor and the board of supervisors.  The proclamation is a document, drafted by the LetGrow free-range play organization, saying that yes, kids will play outside, yes they will be without their parents, yes they will be OK. First though, we figured we should meet our supervisor, and get a feel for how supervisors’ meetings went. That’s the plan we set out for ourselves months ago, but we didn’t act on it.  Our need was high, but not compelling. Until last week. That’s when one of our friends congratulated us on the new playground update we were about to r...

 I maintain that as an unschooling parent, I don’t teach, I facilitate. I try really hard to live by those words. One of the reason is the fringe benefits I reap by not ‘teaching’. Let me stop here  for a moment to summarize ahead of time. The point I’d like to make is that you don’t have to know the things to help someone else learn the things. Even better, frequently I find myself learning very cool new things I didn’t know before. Unschooling works, and it benefits everyone! Everything else below is rambling about math. Here we go! The kids and I have been talking about number bases for a few years now. Starting off in base two arithmetic—binary. It was an easy way to look at concepts without worrying about memorization. The addition and multiplication tables for that base have only four entries a piece. There’s not too much you have to memorize when the only numbers you have to work with are one and zero. A few years into this odyssey, the kids and I started looking into r...

As I've been writing about our fun with unschooling, and parenting in general, I've also been reading a lot of excellent homeschooling, and parenting blogs.  If you to would like to "Read more about it," here's my reading list so far: Stories of an Unschooling Family This blog features the adventures, and thoughts of Sue Elvis and her family as they navigate Australian home schooling.  In addition to interesting posts, Sue has produced a series of videos where she lays out her thoughts on homeschooling with a mellow, happy tone.  Sue updates regularly, so the blog is a good source of both information, and support in our familiy’s endeavors. Mom of All Capes The educational adventures of a family with three daughters.  The posts here are about a conventionally schooled family.  They range from parenting, to schooling, to occasional thoughts on politics.  The posts are fun to read, just as long as they need to be, and raise interesting poi...