First day of...something

I should actually probably title this the first day of everything.

There are moms that I've known online since June of 2006, when we all shared our baby experiences on a social networking site. We formed loose friendships and support groups and shared the stories and photos that marked our children's milestones—rolling over, first steps, first words. Now that we've reached the fall of their fifth year my facebook homepage is dotted with the pictures of their first days of kindergarten, and messages with their mom's pride and tear-filled announcements of this next step in life. This is a fun thing to witness, even knowing that, our own path being different, this is one milestone in which we won't be taking part. There will be no parting, either tearful or smiling, no last minute shopping, no nerve wracking adieu at the bus stop, or waiting on bated breath for its return. There will be no photo taken by the front door, or outside the school.

But if I was to choose a picture to commemorate this time, I think it would look something like this:

Can you find Calvin? I can't either, but I know he's there, and I caught glimpses of him often enough to keep worry at bay, tearing through the play structure with a multitude of other kids, while I sat at the picnic tables and chatted with their parents. They were homeschooling families, and they will make up some of our learning cohort through the years. We had gone to the park to meet them today, having heard great things about their group, and were immediately welcomed and instantly felt at home. Calvin had a great time with the kids, of all ages, and I feel that my balance has tipped back towards the confident side after spending some time talking with all those parents who have gone through, or are going through, exactly the tangles I'm trying to work out now. We'd arrived nervous and excited, we came home happy and exhausted. If we could mark any day as resembling a first day of school, I guess this would have been it, and I'm so glad we shared it together.

No plan

Somewhere, between the late swarms of mosquitoes that sounds like summer and the early changing of the trees that looks like fall, is the essence of now. Somewhere, between my longing for an extension of hot summer days, to spend at the lake or the pool, and my desire for the golden weekends of fall, to spend tailgating or raking leaves, is my ability to just be in the present. There is nothing more valuable than this moment right now, which outside of the cliche is painfully obvious given the myriad of things that pull at my time and demand my attention at any given moment. Take this minute, for instance. I have two books I am longing to read, laundry that needs to be put away, a variety of odd household chores to be done, and some hefty decisions to make about the coming year.

I hate hefty decisions—they always make my thoughts difficult to balance.

What they boil down to, though, and really they're not as hefty as they seem, is an inability to define the homeschoolers we'll be. Having decided that I need more of a structure to get through a week I sat down to peruse the Currclick site tonight, looking for unit studies (which are mostly on sale) to help me make a fall plan. Since he's so intrigued by penguins right now I asked him if he'd like to study Antarctica this week, and then I downloaded a unit study on exactly that. Could I have made my own? Probably. Do I really want someone else to have written a plan for our exploration of that continent? Mmmm...maybe not.

And the doubt creeps in.

But I kept going. With Thanksgiving right around the corner (just ask the commercial sector, which is already stocking for it) I sought a set of studies on US history and geography and downloaded those as well. Then I started looking at the Five in a Row book units I typed up, while borrowing the book from the library last winter, and started distributing those books throughout the fall months, coupling them with the activities in the unit studies.

Midway through writing that calendar I hit the brakes and quit with a big sigh.

I haven't fully given up on my desire to unschool, to let go and follow. I feel safer—more grounded—when I have a plan, but when I look at the studies and my calendar I see exactly what we wanted to avoid with home learning—a plan leaving just one way of doing things. We had wanted to provide many ways to reach a goal. In my ensuing panic I realize that I'm right back at square one, which is the point at which I have to decide what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Even leaving a door open, through which I can go to change my mind, I have to have a path to follow before I can even get started.

How much guidance to give? How much planning to do?

Of course I am the problem. Calvin is thriving in his learning environment, no matter what I throw at him, be it the FIAR book studies, an Itellego unit study, or a general freedom to seek answers on his own. Is a mixture okay? And where is the fine line between planting a seed of interest, nourishing it with information and encouragement, and letting it take root, and creating an interest that would not exist were it not for external pressures, i.e. planting a water lily in the desert and keeping it alive where it shouldn't be merely by excessive attentions? The answers have not been forthcoming, and lethargy (my own) is setting in.

Which is not to say that I am devoid of excitement about this process. Quite the opposite, really. I sent messages out today to two different local homeschooling groups and we will meet them at the end of this week and the beginning of the next. We've made a new nature table and study center upstairs in our office/learning room, we've re-organized and re-shelved the books, and I still have that calendar I started earlier today. Maybe, as the mosquitoes leave and the trees turn, I'll use it. Maybe I won't.

I can't close this one up neatly. I want to be honest in sharing about our journey, and right now my head is swimming and I feel a little unbalanced and lost, so all I can offer are my thoughts, without a logical conclusion. My guess is that, as much as I desire a plan and a clear, distinct goal, only time will really tell me how our path will go. We'll get there, though, even if we get a little lost along the way.

Missing the bus

All around us kids are getting ready to start school. Sales on clothing and school necessities of which I have taken only very small advantage (glue and glue sticks to be exact), and a certain tension on the streets that says the kids know their days of freedom are coming to an end. In the homeschooling communities there is a certain push going on as well. Some have taken the summer off and will begin again with lessons in a week or two, while others of us are just taking stock of the situation, prompted by some innate sense that new beginnings belong to the fall. This is actually our first year of what I would call deliberate homeschooling. Which is to say that this is the first year that Calvin will not go to school, or this is the first year that he would go to school if we weren't homeschooling.

I remember after Calvin was born that the first night home with him was the scariest; they'd let us take this little thing home and we were now entirely responsible for his welfare—us, and only us, because, be it freedom or abandonment, nobody was checking in. Now, in a few weeks, when the school bus rolls through the neighborhood and Calvin fails to get on it, we will do it all over again. Michigan law allows parents to teach if they so choose and requires neither notification nor regular assessement, so nobody, neither teacher nor truancy officer, will be checking in. It's an awesome feeling. There will be no significant difference in our own home (aside from the change we're effecting in our ideology), but like the moms who will for the first time put their child on a bus, or drop him off at a school door, there is a certain poignancy for me in this particular fall; It's a finality that marks the passage of time, a rite of childhood, even without its physical manifestation.

We are doing some things differently this year. For one thing, we are trying to connect with one or more of the great homeschooling groups in the Ann Arbor area, something I'm hoping we can do in the next couple of weeks. We are also talking about how we can introduce some organization without curtailing creativity and we might start with daily suggestions of things to do, lists created by Calvin, of course. I do have in my hand the skills assessment sheets for both kindergarten and first grade and that may or may not make a difference in what guidance I give (or don't give) throughout the year. And in general we're just taking stock, both physically (like taking down, sorting, and re-shelving all of our books, sorting crayons, organizing craft products) and mentally (by reading books of encouragement and guidance).

So when the bus comes to our neighborhood in a few weeks, we'll be ready...to not get on it.

Waking up

"It is never too late to wake up from a nightmare" *

This morning I was surfacing from sleep gently, listening to the sounds of the world waking around me, and in those moments of drifting in and out of dreams I found myself smack dab in the middle of a terrible, terrible nightmare: a family vacation, a misstep off a very high dock over very deep water, and I was desperately trying to rescue my son from sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Just writing this brings back the feeling of desperation and helplessness that I tried to shake immediately upon waking. So why on earth would I rehash it here? Because it started me thinking. It's true that lately I've felt like I was drowning—drowning in a sea of things that need to be put away, of chores that are getting away, of things that must be done versus things I want to do, of missteps and frustrating moments. That nightmare? It might just be a wakeup call: something isn't working.

Of course, I've known that something wasn't working for a few weeks now. Be it the heat, the late nights, the age, I've mentioned before that we've all hit a wall as far as congeniality goes. Calvin is wonderful. He's sensitive, he's motivated, he's interested, he's bright, and in the past few weeks he's also started to show himself as strong willed. Now a strong will is a great thing, but without thinking about it my initial reaction was to demand compliance, and that made me grouchy, that made him grouchy, that made all of us grouchy. It was a vicious circle. Then I wrote a week or two ago about trying a more definitive weekly plan as a way of handling this, and honestly it's been going just fine. Peace is returning, but defnitive and authoritarian just isn't the path we wanted to take. It's not even the path we were on just a few months ago. It's hard to tell where we took the wrong turn, and the change in direction happened so gradually I think we didn't even notice it right away, but now it's time to find our way back.

This is a hard thing to write about. It's hard to admit to making mistakes, to being lost, to taking wrong turns, but I've always maintained that I have the right to change my mind, and it's time to do that now. On a recommendation from an unschooling mom I greatly respect I've started reading a new book: "Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves" by Naomi Aldort. I'm only one chapter in and already I can see the difference I want to make, the change I want to be. It won't happen overnight, but I believe we can go from being the authoritarian parents we've become, to being the teachers and partners in learning that we once were and still want to be. I'll be spending the next few days on the first chapter of Aldort's book, moving from "reacting" in situations, to sharing in them, and then on from there. I guess you could call this our newest journey, a journey back to the family we knew we wanted but somehow stepped away from, and I want to share some of that journey here, in case our experience can motivate someone else the way that other moms have motivated me.

*from Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, by Naomi Aldort

Re: structure

After I posted last week about needing to introduce more structure into our learning lives I received a concerned email from my mom.

Hey,
Do you mean that with homeschooling you "teach" the same all year round and have no unstructured months where you learn as you go ?  
mom

and it became clear to me that a) I have a tendency to assume my language is universal, when really not everyone knows what I mean when I mean it, and b) I have no idea what I'm doing and sometimes I post without thinking things through clearly. I answered that there just isn't a yes or no answer to that question. The long answer is probably a little philosophical, a little ideological, a little opinionated, so read on if you want.

One of the reasons we are homeschooling is that we believe learning should occur all year long, so yes, we learn (and "teach," I suppose, although I tend to think of it more as "learning together") all year round. The current public school method is based on an archaic system developed during the industrial age and the subsequent push for educational reform (link). At that time kids needed a safe place to go (and to be trained to do, not think) during the days (while their parents were doing, not thinking). Before the reform urban schools were an eleven month process (and rural schools were in during the summer and winter, but out during the spring and fall planting and harvesting seasons). But there was no air conditioning, and cities were hot and dirty during the summer, so after the reform public school was out during the summer months. The winter/summer learning discrepancy is an artificially imposed one, and that is part of the process that makes learning the enemy; By confining learning to a schoolroom and a school day and a school year we take away its authenticity, and if we, in all earnestness, ask kids to accept that bit of inauthenticity from us, how can we expect them to treat any of our other "lessons" with a respect that is due only to truth?

Then, about that dangerous "structure" word I should probably have been more clear, because when I say structure I don't mean sitting at a table doing math, reading, social studies, etc. for x many hours in a day. And I don't mean doing the same thing day in and day out all year long. But some people really benefit from knowing what to expect, and what is expected of them. Without some kind of structure I lose my patience more, and I think Calvin pushes buttons more when that starts happening. So what structure means to me is having a plan, even if it's a loose one. It does means that Calvin can expect to have quiet reading time every day (usually right after lunch when we're sleepy anyway), and he knows that he's expected to practice, or at least play, the piano every day, and complete at least three journal entries every week, more if he so desires. And by "structure" I also don't mean inflexibility, and it certainly doesn't preclude learning as we go. More likely it embraces it, giving us landmarks around which we create our chosen paths of learning. In fact, it's the matter of adapting those landmarks to what we "learn as we go" that gives them their authenticity, and enriches the things we explore.

We will never stop discussing and investigating the things we come across in life because that's just the way we live. Calvin is suddenly showing an interest in dinosaurs, following a great program at the library this morning. So we checked out books while we were there (for the reading time that we know we have at home), we made a plan to visit the museum next week, and maybe the zoo, and we made a list of things we wanted to know, and talked about where to find the information. We will write about what we're learning (in the journals we keep each week). If during that time he loses interest, or we discover something else he wants to learn about instead, we'll talk about whether we finish the dinosaur plan first, or change directions, but the usual landmarks will remain—the journal, the quiet reading time, the piano, etc. And again, as I've mentioned before, our homeschooling method is still under construction, and probably will be for all of its life, and I reserve the right to change my mind.