There Is A Perfect Title For This But I Can't Use It

So now that my tracker tells me that a good many people are getting to this blog due to my being listed as a source for Attachment Parenting information on some kind of health care site...I'm feeling a bit labeled and pigeonholed and like I should have some sort of posting standard to live up to - interesting and informative posts about how we parent, how we educate, and whether or not you can feed sardines to your babies.  But I just can't be any kind of standard for anybody.  And believe me, you don't want me to be.  That would be what we like to call "setting the bar pretty dang low, folks."

So - I am relieving myself of the pressure to inform you - it isn't my fault if you came here expecting to see a certain something and you're seeing something else, instead.  I'm just here to anonymously go blabbedy blab blab blab about whatever the heck happens to come out when I channel Erma Bombeck (I wish) or just unleash the floodgates of my subconsciousness or consciousness or the bottomless pit of angst and anxiety that, as a parent, I am required to carry around.  So are you ready?  We're starting off with Valentine's Day.

Jeff cooked the family a turkey dinner.  But first he had to kill the turkey.  Seriously.  We had four turkeys running around here for the past 6 months (now we have only 3) wreaking havoc and unceremoniously pooping on Everything and let me tell you, these bad boys can make some medium-to-large-dog-sized poop.  They also make a lot of noise....of the high-pitched gobble gobble gobble variety.

They are free range and they roost on the roof of the garage at night - sitting up there, outlined by the moon like some kind of feathery gargoyles.  On the occasions where the temps have dropped into the 20's, Jeff and the boys have had to climb on the roof (fun if it's icy) to chase them around, catch them, and toss them down to waiting hands to be carried into the warm hen house with the smarter variety of fowl, the chickens.  And let me tell you, when you reach the evolutionary low point of being dumber than a chicken, it is time to be eaten.

I still feel badly about it, though.  I've never been much for killing - even bugs and such.  Kind of turns my stomach.  But I refuse to be one of those people who is clueless as to where her food comes from or harbors some kind of illusion that there are happy places somewhere where animals are raised in blissful environments right up until the time they are painlessly and humanely killed and sanitarily packaged for my convenience.

I can honestly say that our turkey really was strutting around here happy as a peacock right up until the moment he was humanely slaughtered.  Ugh. That sounds like an oxymoron.  And I seriously doubt that he now appreciates the fact that I was relatively nice to him and concerned about his comfort before having him murdered.

But the time had come to have him murdered.  It really had.  Love had been in the air amongst the turkeys and it was causing some awkward moments among Ellie's piano students.  Ellie's piano kids are forced to come through our back door because we have an electric fence up around the front yard (welcome to guantanimo!) because the dogs have trampled the yard again and I'm trying to keep them off of it so yeah....Company and Piano Students tromp around to the back door where they quietly knock and then patiently wait until someone happens to walk past the door and see them standing there. 

Lately, we can tell when the piano students arrive because the turkeys tend to get all excited about Company and they run up to the Company and startle the Company and then the Company begins to run and the turkeys are all like, "Holy shit! Something's chasing us!" and then they also hysterically begin to run, thereby creating the illusion that they are chasing the Company with intent to murder and maim or at the very least, peck some eyes out.  This makes the Company scream, and the turkeys begin gobbling while they run, which the Company misinterprets as some kind of Turkey War Cry and so they begin to scream louder and run faster and this further alarms the already alarmed turkeys so they begin half-flying and screeching which sends the Company into quite the frantic fit.  Really.  You should come visit. 

So this traumatic conglomeration lands itself at the back door where it all settles down because there's nowhere left to run and then the "please let us in" begins on the part of both the Company and the turkeys.  The turkeys freaking love to look in our back door, the other side of which they are convinced contains more turkeys, because they are very enamoured of their own reflections.  But lately, love has been in the air for the turkeys, so they have begun umm...courting.  Often they do this while waiting with Company at our back door.

So picture this:  Little piano students standing at the back door holding their music while patiently waiting for someone, anyone at all, to walk past the door and notice them.  Turkeys are in the background, furiously courting.  Now add one more thing to the scene.  Two more things, actually.  Ranger and Napoleon, also known as Sir Humpalot.  Napoleon is awaiting a trip to the vet.  But in the meantime, he has fallen in love with Ranger, our Entirely Too Submissive Favorite Dog.  Ranger is currently spending most of his time hiding from or trying to get away from Sir Humpalot, which is perfectly understandable under the circumstances.  So when Company or Piano Students come and begin the Great Turkey Run, he joins in with the hopes of making a mad dash in through the back door to get away from Napoleon.  But while he and the turkeys and the piano students wait at the back door, well, they have some time on their hands, see?

So Ellie recently told me, "We have to kill those turkeys and get Napoleon fixed.  They're traumatizing my students.  It's like Fornication Farm around here."  (This would have made a cool blog post title - but can you imagine the types of people the Google Gods would send my way?)

One male turkey down (called a tom) and one to go.   And Napoleon has an Appointment.  Fornication Farm should settle down here pretty quickly....although the bull seems to have been getting frisky in the fields, at least he isn't doing it at my back door. 

We spent V-Day at a friend's house where our Odyssey of the Mind teams met (an elementary team and a high school team) for a combined party and work session.  I haven't mentioned Odyssey of the Mind very much, lately.  Usually this time of year I am just going all bonkers with it.  But this year I'm merely co-coaching and woot!  Not a lot of pressure.  My co-coach is probably reading this right now and hating me....

In addition to listening to our little guys finish up their script (I had to type it for them and they are hilarious), we also watched them work on their Rube Goldberg machine. Our Odyssey teams have done really well with these contraptions in the past, and this year is no exception.  And the high school team is also doing an amazing job, although they are doing the Classics problem this year....no technical things like Rube Goldberg machines or sit-n-spin cars....the Classics problem is a much tougher problem to compete in because more teams take it on, and also a lot of them are very artistic and dramatic and stupendous and yeah...just tough competition compared to the more technical categories.  But truthfully, I'm not up to another trip to the World Tournament this year - I'm just not.  So it is all good and the kids are having a great time, which is all that matters.

My friend over at Shaggy Boys recently posted something about her son's soccer team winning the state championship, and how they are a team of homeschooled kids competing against mostly smallish private schools....and the differences she's noticed about the teams as far as how the homeschoolers relate to their siblings and families compared with the school kids.  I must say, yesterday as I sat in my friend's living room watching a large group of kids ranging in age from 5 to 16, play together....I was reminded of how lucky we are that we homeschool.  Seriously, the 16-year-olds were quite happy to chase around the little kids, and they were gracious in allowing the pre-teens in on their games and discussions.  Nobody was telling them to do this, or trying to facilitate it in any way - this is simply the way their lives work - people of all ages living and playing and working together.  Which is pretty much the way it works in the Real World.  When you get a job they don't have a special room for the 30-year-olds to sit in their cubicles, do they?  There isn't a floor on the building for the 40-year-olds....your boss might be younger or older than you....your generations might be different...your knowledge affected by your life's experiences up to that point....all different....all fitting together like pieces of a puzzle to create a big picture.

That is the way the world works - and so it always amazes me when people ask me if I'm concerned that by homeschooling, I'm not preparing my kids for the Real World.  School doesn't simulate a real world by a long shot - and thank goodness for that.

Oh! Look what happened!  I did a homeschooling blog post after all. I wish I could some kind of quirky ending where I tie the homeschooling philosphy in with the turkey sex, but I'm just not feeling it....hmm...nope, still got nothin'. So - we'll just end.  Like just totally end.  As in I'll stop typing and it will all be over.  Without any cutesy wrap-up or thoughtful anything.  Just. Stop. Typing.  Like an awkward goodbye....awkard....goodbye.
 

School of Sardines - Back in Session?

Even though we don't have a school year where we stop and start our learning (it is like breathing, after all), many of the activities we participate in tend to follow the school year. So we still have the feeling of "starting school"...dance lessons, music lessons, Odyssey of the Mind, Girl Scouts....

So, what does that look like for us? First of all, let me explain a little bit about unschooling. Does it mean the kids run wild all day long in total mayhem? Sometimes. Does it mean vegging out in front of the television or video games all day long? Occasionally. But for the most part, it just looks like normal life. If I were to peek in the boys' room right now I'd see (by the sounds of it) one boy having a sword fight, living out whatever little scene he's just created in his miniature LEGO world...and a teenager obliviously reading in his loft bed, unconscious of the battle being played out beneath him. Both of these things are learning. Both are engaging. Both are getting creative juices flowing.

If I were to peek in Ellie's room right now, unschooling will find her looking very much like a school kid - as she pours over a Critical Thinking textbook, taking notes, iPod buds in her ears...she is a 10th-grader taking two college courses through community college.

If I were to peek in the little kids' room (based on fleeting images I've had from my sedentary spot in my chair) - there is an active game of dress-up going on. Camille is now singing LOUDLY - Jasper is wearing his PJ's and a hard hat, with a mask literally taped to his face.


Typical school day for us. And yet, somehow, the three older ones all learned to read and are voracious readers. They all have fields of expertise based on intense interests in things of which I know absolutely nothing about. They are interested in their community and the world around them and will often silently whip past me on their way to examine the globe...."What are you looking for?" I'll ask. "Bolivia..." they'll absentmindedly answer, obviously lost in their own thoughts....or recently I've heard, "Georgia...or Russia...or Afghanistan..." And yet, people still ask me how I know they're learning anything. How did I know I was learning anything? I received a report card with relatively good grades, yet I know not a fraction of what was on those ancient tests I obviously passed. Was that learning?

Their school friends labored over summer reading lists assigned by teachers. My kids were perplexed. Why was this seen as a problem? "Don't you like to read?" they'd ask. Their friends were like, "Yes, we like to read. But these books are awful..." and then they'd go on to list some of my kids' favorite books. One of Ellie's friends was assigned The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. "Wow!" I thought to myself. "What an awesome assignment!" I was impressed. It is a favorite of mine and Ellie's. But her friend was hating it because he a)HAD to read it and b) was forced to write a paragraph summing up each chapter. blah. We have no summer reading lists, here. We have a house full of books, and kids who find reading to be very entertaining. No summation paragraphs required.

How does Unschooling differ from regular Homeschooling? Well, that distinction isn't always made and certainly isn't always needed. In the beginning of the movement (60's and 70's) all homeschooling was unschooling. Unschooling was a product of the anti-establishment movement. A few families began pulling their kids out of government-sponsored schools to teach them at home. They didn't try to emulate the schools at home. They learned through various methods, and on their own timetable. In the 80's, Christian fundamentalists began pulling their kids out of schools in large numbers. The Homeschooling Movement came out of hiding as these numbers swelled, and capitalism being what it is, a huge industry cropped up to meet the needs of these families. Suddenly, you could buy everything a regular classroom had, and do "school at home". So homeschooling was more and more a smaller and more personal version of "school", and unschooling, learning through living and interaction with the community, became a faction of homeschooling.

Today these two groups often overlap each other, families mostly are pretty fluid year to year in what they use as their needs change, and a large number of families wouldn't even begin to know how to fit themselves into any kind of slot.

Unschoolers will have times when you cannot tell they are unschooling...looking at their day might reveal structure, textbooks, workbooks....but it is what you can't see that identifies them as unschoolers; the motivation. Sometimes a family turns to schooling due to a child's request to "try it". Because it is a natural consequence of the child's curiosity and desire to explore, using full-fledged curriculum in this case would be total unschooling. Sometimes the appearance of schooling is the result of pursuing specific goals. For example, Ellie wants to go to college, and she's pretty sure she wants to go to a really good college. So her life right now is revolving around meeting admittance requirements for several small liberal arts schools. This means textbooks, preparing for the SAT, etc.

Unschooling is simply child-led learning - on the child's own time table. What if a child doesn't want to learn the "necessary" things? Well, then they aren't necessary. People learn BEST the things that are necessary. Jules found it necessary to read to play the computer games he wanted to play. So at 9, he began to read. Joel found it necessary to write legibly to fill out the Odyssey of the Mind forms he needed to hand in last year, so he focused on handwriting for a month and has beautiful handwriting. He is almost 14 - but obviously, until now, legible handwriting simply hadn't been necessary. But how will they see the need for things like algebra, you might ask. Well, for most of us algebra really isn't necessary, is it? However, if you want to go to college, it is necessary in order to gain admittance. So you take it, because it is necessary for you to reach your goals. Ellie has just started algebra II not because she is interested in it, but because she realizes it is necessary. Since she has not been forced to memorize and regurgitate unnecessary and irrelevant information throughout her entire education, this is not a big deal. She is not numb to it. And because she is totally unfamiliar with the "memorize it and spit it back out" method of learning, she is actually trying to learn it - because that is the only way she has ever learned anything.

Jeff and I practice Attachment Parenting. Attachment Parenting implies physical attachment (baby-wearing, breastfeeding, co-sleeping) but it also about responding to the needs, both physical and emotional, of children and respecting that those needs will be different for each child. The idea is that when you totally meet the needs of a child, the result will be a very self-confident and independent teenager/young person/adult. With our family, this seems to be working out very well. Unschooling our children is an extension of Attachment Parenting. Just as we didn't question whether or not a child was hungry or sleepy and trusted that they knew that way better than we did (whether the clock said they should be or not) - we don't question what they need or want to learn. Who says you have to learn the layers of the Earth's crust during a certain year, or memorize the steps to the scientific method? Isn't more relevant to know that there are layers and there is something called the scientific method and why? And where to find the information when it becomes relevant?

There is too much knowledge in the Universe for someone to sit down and map it all out very neatly on a timeline and decide to "teach" it. You simply can't get it all to fit! Even if you lived to be 200 years old, you could never learn everything. So to the "Aren't you afraid you're going to leave holes in their educations" question...I say this: We all have holes in our educations, obviously. The danger is having a society where everyone has the same holes.

Well, back to school! I have important things to oversee...must go find the little fishies, first.

Sardine Mama