Surprising changes

When my firstborn son was four and we decided not to enroll him in kindergarten that fall, I thought I could foresee the future. I knew unschoolers. I knew alternative education. I knew it could be really fun, and good. What happened over the next nineteen years surprised me. Because of unschooling, I changed. My husband changed. The way we interacted with the world and other people changed, all for the better. Our relationships with all three of our children surpassed any of our imaginings.

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The text was the written introduction to a talk I gave in 2009. There is no recording of that day, but this one, later the same same year, is similar: Transformations (sound file, photo, and notes there).

The photo is by David Jio, of a light too bright to see directly, and the more-detailed shadow/projection of what it really looks like. That light is has been in our front room for years. Sometimes a very intense thing can hardly be perceived directly, but the effects and afterimages can be examined.
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The world changes slowly

The world changes slowly, but it tends to stay changed! Flight was not possible before balloons. Food storage and transportation were difficult before canning and refrigeration. Without today’s wealth of books, videos and online information, home learning would be much more difficult. We can live in the light of our shared knowledge and ideas, in freedom and with confidence, at the cutting edge of education’s future.



SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo by Sandra Dodd; a hot air balloon visible out our back gate

A better way

When a parent is very needy, they might need extra help to get to the stable spot where they can parent their children thoughtfully. I don't know a better way than for them to move quickly toward unschooling.

SandraDodd.com/doit
photo by Sandra Dodd

Don't bring school home

From a newspaper article twelve years ago:

Whatever the long-term plans are, Dodd has some advice for those considering home-schooling or even the more radical step of unschooling:

"Don't rush. This is a hard but crucial piece of advice. Rush to take him out of school but don't rush to replace it with anything. Bring your child home, don't bring school home. You don't even have to bring their terminology and judgments home. You can start from scratch, brush off the labels, and find your son where he is. Forget school. Move to life."


SandraDodd.com/media/ABQjournal
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Cursive! Foiled Again

Years ago my granny complained that I didn't know how to use a fountain pen or milk a cow. I never learned to use a slide rule, either. I did learn to type on a manual typewriter with a blank keyboard. Things change. I don't know how to send text messages, though I do finally own a cellphone. My kids all are whizzes at it.

The quote above was written in 2007. I can text now, awkwardly.

Yesterday at the Apple store, getting a battery replaced in Holly's MacBook, the guy handed me a charge-card reader and said "Sign with your finger." Luckily, I've been playing Draw Something all week, and have been writing with my finger on an iPad, so I just did it. No stylus, but "sign with your finger."

SandraDodd.com/cursive
photo by Sandra Dodd
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When this first went out, it said "without a blank keyboard." I had fumbled the phrase when I first wrote it, and I fixed it on the webpage, but had pasted the original here. I guess I started to write "without the letters on the keys." In summer school, when I was fourteen, I took a typing class and got to 42 words per minute. I'm faster now, but can still type in the dark, without looking at what's on the keys. My current keyboard has the letters a, s and e worn through. They light up from below, at night. Others notice and ask how I can type, but I don't look at the keyboard.

So because of that, I worry about people who aren't "touch typists"—how can they type? Well, turns out they can type on miniature keyboards, with thumbs or index fingers; they can type from phone-number pads; they can type on flat screen pictures of keyboards, just as well as they can on "a real keyboard." My prediction of what they "need" to know how to do is as antiquated as my granny's was of me.

Sometimes more is better

Leah Rose wrote:

I've been thinking about that saying "All things in moderation." Next time someone says it to me, I think I might just ask them: "Do you mean we should have joy in moderation? Should we have peace in moderation? Kindness in moderation? Patience in moderation? Forgiveness? Compassion? Humility?"

Honestly, I used to think it sounded like a very wise and balanced philosophy. Now, the more I think about it the less sense it makes.

—Leah Rose

SandraDodd.com/focus
photo by Sandra Dodd

Sweetness in teens

Once upon a time, in 2006...

A story slightly involving allowance, but a snapshot of how kids who aren't desperate for money can act:

Two of Marty's friends were going to pick him up to go run around, but they ended up staying here. Then another friend came over to see all my kids. Then a friend of Kirby's from work came over. I hadn't met her before. She was nice. So my three (14, 17, 19) plus four more (17-21) were all having a great time laughing and looking at stuff on Kirby's computer and around our house, and Marty's big Lego Viking village, and so forth.

They decided to go out for ice cream and then to see "Over the Hedge." I asked Holly if she needed money, and she didn't. (She saves her allowance up.) Every other person there has a job. Outside of Kirby possibly having an interest in the girl from work, there were no couples. Two of those kids do have steady others, but didn't bring them over. So it was four teenaged girls, four teenaged boys, no romantic tension (unless Kirby and new-girl; didn't see any).

And here's the big success part. They asked Keith if he wanted to go. I didn't know they had, when Marty came and asked me if I wanted to go. So they would have taken me, or Keith, or both of us, with them.

We separately thanked them and declined and found out later they had asked us both. Pretty sweet!

We didn't "teach them" to invite their parents to the movies. One advantage of our not going was that then they could fit into the big van and didn't have to take two cars.

SandraDodd.com/math/allowance
photo by Sandra Dodd,
whose kids are not teens anymore, but are still sweet,
of a movie theater in Austin, unrelated except for the movie part
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