Announcements, notes and transcripts of Sandra Dodd's unschooling chats
I'm exhausted.
By Wednesday, January 2, I should be sufficiently recovered to share some highlights.
Kirby will be here any minute, Joyce and Carl are here, the ALL Unschooling Symposium starts tomorrow..... I can't chat right now. :-)
Sorry I didn't say so sooner. I meant to.
December 19 we'll chat about sleep, naps, family bed and growing up to use alarm clocks to get to work.Let's talk about the benefits to families from game play. And as to learning, let's look at courtesy and etiquette, and at responsibility (page 155 in the book).
There's not a straight webpage link. If you want to read more than those pages in the book, this on Minecraft might be fun for you. It's about Minecraft bringing families closer together: http://sandradodd.com/videogames/minecraft
This is the book that doesn't end
Yes it goes on and on my friend...
(in case you don't know the tune, click here.)
(If you read it after Thrsday night, it will probably be all fixed up.)
Let's talk about TV, cartoons, maybe YouTube, but not movies!
Consider exploring some of the online information on the history of TV between now and Wednesday. Here are a few good ones, but there are many more:
MBC: Museum of Broadcast CommunicationsTeletronic: The Television History Site
November 28, we'll talk about movies and unschooling.
"Typical" is often not photographable. http://justaddlightandstir.blogspot.com/2012/11/unphotographable.html
THANKS, Marta for reminding me to send these announcements.
What are the elements of humor?
What would cause someone to describe another person as "humorless"?
What's the opposite of "lighten up"?
Page 128, Big Book of Unschooling Second-best resource, http://sandradodd.com/humor
Big Book, pages 126-127
The topic will be Experiences, and Building an Unschooling Nest. In the book, pages 123-124. For people without a book, peace/newview and sandradodd.com/nest.
Anyone wanting to go the chat room on the 17th (or any other time), please feel free to invite some other people and use the room.
In the book page 120 webpage http://sandradodd.com/strewing
No chat on October 17. I'll be at the Florida Unschooling Conference listening to Meredith Novak speak!
We have a compost pile, and it's kind of amazing how it seems at first that the food and leaves and sticks and banana peels and dog poop will never do anything but sit there looking like garbage, but when I stop watching it, it turns to solid black, rich dirt! I can't find any parts of the elements of which it's made. It's kind of like that with my kids. It took me a few years to quit watching them and trust that it would compost.
It did.
On my site, since I last wrote, are three new things on connections. Two at the bottom of this http://sandradodd.com/connections/example.html
and one halfway down here: http://sandradodd.com/connections/
This stuff is easy for those who have been reading and writing about unschooling for a while. Because it's not easy for others to understand, if you're new it will help you to be in the chat, and if you're not new, you can practice answering questions clearly on the spot!
That's fine, because the last thing I wrote in last week's chat was "Let's talk about games and logic and patterns"
Wednesday, September 12, regular time and place.
In the book the math section is pages 105-108. You might read at http://sandradodd.com/math, and maybe at the multiple intelligences page (sandradodd.com/intelligences) or just think (or ask friends or neighbors, spouse or children), about things that are mathematical that don't involve numbers. Think "visual" (kind of the same as thinking visually, perhaps, or not). If come up with something good, please try to find a link or a photo to bring to the chat. We can collect some examples. :-)
In The Big Book of Unschooling, pages 102-104 or on the website: http://sandradodd.com/strew/shakespeare
http://sandradodd.com/shakespeare/ (The part near Lawrence Fishburne is what's in the book on page 102 anyway.)
If you don't have a copy, you should get one! :-)
If you have a copy, read pages 98-101.
If you don't have a copy, read this: http://sandradodd.com/language/
Sandra Dodd: Next week, writing.There's a small writing section in the book, and there's this: sandradodd.com/writing
Sandra Dodd: People don't need to know how to read to be involved in some of the things that lead to writing.
Sandra Dodd: Verbal and physical both.
One way to think about writing, too, is for us to spend some of the time sharing about our own writing ability. What has helped outside of school? What makes writing better? How have you used writing lately, as a parent?
Below is something Colleen Prieto wrote a while back, and you might also want to read at sandradodd.com/reading, sometime before the chat, though the real text is pages 86-93 of The Big Book of Unschooling. If you click that "Big Book" link, you will see a book cover made by Holly Dodd, who learned to read on her own, and a photo of Robbie Prieto, who learned to read on his own, reading The Big Book of Unschooling. How's that for full circle?
[Colleen, on Always Learning, in response to someone who was insisting that labels given in school could be easily overcome as long as someone was “morally grounded” and “forgiving” as an adult… ]The way I think of that, it doesn't have to do with being "morally grounded" and "forgiving."
My husband grew up going to Catholic school, as the public schools in the inner city where he lived were (in his parents' opinion) too dangerous. The "instruction" he was given in reading was, from his accounts, quite detrimental instead of helpful. The kids in his school were drilled, tested, and forced to follow a phonics program. Phonics never made much sense to him (allowed to learn to read on his own, I'm guessing he'd read like my 8 year old does - from patterns and memorization and not using phonics) and he struggled with reading from the start. He ended up receiving extra 1:1 "remedial reading support instruction" (his school's version of a label was to put you in the "remedial" category). To this day he'll tell me "I really hate reading" and he says it often takes him 2 or 3 times reading through something before he really gets the meaning, which he also credits back to his schools' emphasis on phonics instead of comprehension and understanding.
Contrast this to my son's experiences with reading - where he grew up surrounded by print, words, books, computers, games, etc. He discovered words and reading on his own, based on his own desires and interests. He's 8 now and reads fluently - however he also doesn't hesitate to ask for help when he finds a word he doesn't know. And when he asks for help, my husband and I don't tell him "sound it out" - we tell him what the word is and he usually responds "oh - cool!" and then bounces on to finish whatever he's reading through. There has been no shame, no drills, no tests, and no instruction involved in his relationship with words – and so his relationship is a good one!
I am fairly certain that no amount of forgiveness or ambition could overcome my husband's experience with "reading instruction" and what that experience has done with his interest in and his ability to interact with printed words. His ambition led him to a college degree in engineering and a career that he enjoys - but it did not lead him to a point where all those phonics drills, remedial classes, etc. no longer affect him. If he forgave the teachers and the system for being what they were, would he become a happier, better reader? Nope. But our son benefits from his dad's school experiences, since "I don't want my son to learn to read the way I did!" gives yet more support to our decision to unschool :-)
Think of tie-ins between art and history, politics, music, materials, relationships, manufacturing, shipping, sales, food, hair, clothing, automotive sales, manufacture, presentation, restoration, paint jobs, furniture, appliances, dishes, carpet/curtains/upholstery, beds and bedding.... Pages 84, 85 Big Book of Unschooling!
Last week's chat was the first for a couple of months (I was in Europe) but now I'm home. The transcript of last week's chat is here: Wonder
Here's some music I saw in Lyon, France. I used a photo of the band for Just Add Light the other day: Get Witnesses
I guess it's kind of acoustic street punk ska something. Kids were dancing behind them, too.
Here was another recent music-related Just Add Light: Too much of "too much"
The topic of this Wednesday's unschooling chat will be Wonder.
http://sandradodd.com/wonder has some inspiring reminders, and if you have time to read it, there is a new link there to an very brief article on awe.
Noon my time, 7:00 p.m. in England, various other times in other places, though we should all try to be there for the same two hours. :-)
UNRELATED TO AWE: Tuesday is Learn Nothing Day.
The link from Deb came in a small discussion of this photo, which I had posted in the wrong place. (Link to that below.)
http://www.facebook.com/groups/303347574750/permalink/10150973603564751/
Still, some chat (for you, if you want) and some fish and chips (for me, and maybe for some of you).
Wednesday, a special deal before I start travelling again (to The Netherlands Wednesday the 27th, and back to the UK July 4 which is also a Wednesday).
GRATUITOUS PHOTO:
Little red Corvette, Arizona plates, on a children's ride at a lakeside park in Switzerland.
If things continue as they are this week, I should be able to be in the chatroom Wednesday. Noon at my house is 7:00 UK. Julie will deliver Adam to Beaver Scouts and bring fish'n'chips back for them to watch the England/Ukaraine game. My part in all that is just to stay out of the way and help eat the fish. I can do that.
I have some thing on my blog to read if you're bored. http://sandradodd.blogspot.com If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.
Page 82 of The Big Book of Unschooling or at http://sandradodd.com/science/
The chatroom can be used anytime by any group of unschoolers who want to go in there. And if people want to keep the Wednesday routine, please feel free to show up there! I won't be there for a while, though, because...
I'll be in airplanes every Wednesday for a month straight.
July 18, a Wednesday, I'm returning to Albuquerque.
July 25 I'll try to be in the chatroom, on time, and without a topic from the book. We can talk then about chats, and the summer, and what people have been doing.
Those who went to school often think they "know geography" but it might be lists of countries, and maps, in their heads. "Geo" does mean world," and "graph" does mean writing or drawing or maps. What else ties in with geography in the real world?
Bring a story or an idea.
Geography is featured on page 81 of The Big Book of Unschooling or at http://sandradodd.com/geography/
If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.
Subjects
Kirby was five and not going to go to school that year when I decided to keep the whole idea of a structured curriculum divided into subjects secret from him for a while. So we carefully and purposefully avoided using these terms: science, history, math.
He was too young for us to need to avoid terms such as "social studies" (which doesn't come up outside of school anyway) or "grammar," but I was prepared to rethink my list of terms to avoid as he got older, if he continued to stay home.
By the time his brother and sister were unschooling, some of those "names of subjects" (in school parlance) had been discovered on TV shows about school, or in jokes or songs. Don't know much about history; don't know much biology… By then, though, I was ready with confident answers, and we were all sure natural learning could work.
If you can avoid using school terminology, it will be helpful in many different ways that you will figure out if you don't already see them.SandraDodd.com/subjects
Choices
In May, 1987, when Kirby was a baby, I was at an SCA/medievalist campout. A friend was being knighted the next day, and I went to his vigil. He told me that he was worried about his duty, as a knight, to set a good example, and that his camp wasn't very nice, nor very authentic to period. I told him it had taken years for our camp to become more elaborate and more period, and that he could improve his gradually, too.
We talked about replacing dishes, or benches, or lanterns, as better ones were found, and not try to replace everything at once.
I suggested that when he got a new tent, if his choices were nylon or canvas, to get canvas; if the choice was brown or orange, choose brown. "Always make the more medieval choice," I said.
I went back to my own camp and shared this idea with Keith and my friend Jeff (who were in that context Gunwaldt and Artan), and it was passed on to all my husband's squires and my students from then on.
Meanwhile, back in my regular life, I had two more children and as they started making their own choices, the idea of making the better choice was a good tool. I added to that the idea that until one has thought of at least two options, it's impossible to make a choice.
The concept has been helpful with unschooling and with mindful parenting, and first came forth in that area of thought in August 2002, at the HSC conference when Richard Prystowsky and I did a joint talk called "Peaceful Parenting." I recommended that people think of two things to do and make the more peaceful choice.
Although this tool is useful in the moment, its best use is for incremental change. If my best choice used to be to yell or hit, and I yelled, then the next time I thought about it, hitting wasn't even going to begin to be one of my choices. Would I yell or wait? Or yell or speak quietly? Yell or leave the room? Maybe leave out the yelling, and choose between "speak quietly" or "breathe before speaking."
Some critics of this advice say children will never decide if they have unlimited choices. No one has "unlimited choices," but compared to children in traditional culture, a parent has a huge range of choices. More often than not they don't choose, because they don't even stop to think. They just react in familiar ways, thoughtlessly. They do the first thing they think of and say "I had to do that, because…" and they fill in the blank with something justifiable. It's not mindful parenting.
A person can choose to have choices. A person can choose not to choose; still a choice, but they think of it as "no choice" or "have to."
SandraDodd.com/choices
