No Techno Vaca

Jerry says he doesn't need a "techno vaca" now that he's rediscovered his creativity. But if we were doing the "techno vaca," JJ pointed out that it would be better to look at what he enjoys doing, rather than focus on what he's leaving out. Good advice! Jerry was feeling down mainly because his interests have been very focused lately (on video games) but it seems all that's required to make him feel better--and he's already started doing this on his own--is to revisit his other interests. In the last couple days he's gotten out his legos again (they're covering every inch of the playroom floor!), he's started making a movie on the computer, he's been painting his Munnies, he's rediscovered Line Rider (an old favorite) and he's spent far less time in front of the television. And he did it all on his own!

I think we're beginning to reap the rewards of allowing him to make his own choices in regards to screen time. It's been a challenge. For my husband and I, that is. Going from the anti-technology Waldorf philosophy we'd adopted over the five years Jerry was in school to the radical unschooling philosophy of unlimited screen time was a pretty big jump--kind of like jumping off a cliff, blind-folded, with our hands tied behind our backs and trusting that Jerry would remember to put the trampoline at the bottom. It's taken a lot of trust and a lot of going against our previously held notions about television, computers and video games and what role they should play in our child's life and the life of our family.

Even though Jerry has been loving his freedom, I'm beginning to see that it was a challenge for him as well. I think that's where the sadness came from the other day. But now that he's coming out of the all screen-time all the time mode (it helps, I think, that we're home again) and remembering that he has other interests, he may not be as glued to the screen as he has been these past few months (more than a few, actually!). Of course, now that I've typed this and will be sending it out to the world he's pretty much guaranteed to spend the next 72 hours with his eyes glued to the TV. Oh well. C'est la vie! 

But I do think I can finally see the light at the end of the video game playing/computer using/television watching tunnel. And I see a blue sky. And birds flying. And a rainbow! And what's that? Oh. It's a computer. And a Wii remote.  And, oh, there's a PlayStation over there. But there are birds and the sky is blue. And I know I saw a rainbow. 

Unschoolers On Video Games

When my son was just a few months old we were visiting the pediatrician and the doctor reached over, laid his hand on top of mine, looked me in the eyes and said, "You're doing a good job." I was so relieved. I knew he probably said that to all the new mothers, but that didn't lighten the impact of his comment at all. I still get teary when I think of it. :)

The following links are the online equivalent to that steady hand and reassuring voice, only they're related to one aspect of parenting--the video game conundrum. To regulate or not to regulate, that is the question. And the answer from many unschoolers is a resounding "No."

I can just imagine many of these seasoned unschoolers shaking their heads at me as I create compromises and schedules for Jerry's video game use. I don't imagine them doing it in a mean or condescending way. I just see a wise, friendly face smiling at me with a look that says "Why are you putting yourself through this? Relax. Love your son. Everything will be okay." To tell you the truth, just imagining that compassionate face, exuding confidence in me and my ability to (eventually) get it right makes me feel better.

So here is a compilation of posts written by people who are much wiser than me. They haven't all taken the same route or come to the same conclusion, but they have examined their choices, kept an open mind, and made decisions that honor their children's interests and their own feelings.

"Sex, Lies & Video Games" was written by Sheri at matteroffaith.com. Be sure to read the comments because both Sheri and her husband responded to a question I left in the comments section and their answers are really helpful.

The Great Video Game Experiment from Swiss Army Wife details what one mother learned from letting her son have thirty days of unlimited video games.

Tammy Takahashi over at Just Enough, and Nothing More is a veritable fountain of wisdom. You can read her take on video games and other all consuming interests in her post entitled "My Kid Will Play Video Games All Day!". While you're at it you should check out Tammy's 5 Deschooling Tips (for Homeschoolers).

This is a post called Is Your Love for Your Kids Controlling? over at Cocking a Snook. The title pretty much says it all. Be sure to check the comments of this posting (the one you're reading now--on my blog) because JJ and Nance from Cocking a Snook had some really helpful things to say.

There are more links that I'd like to include here but I think it's time for me to get off the computer. I'll come back and add them later.

I'd like to end this post with a bit of wisdom from Jerry--something he learned from watching Looney Toons this morning. "Mom, do you know why the roadrunner can run so fast?" he said. "It's because he has no limits. He just believes he can so he does."

Just so you know, I'm adding to this post as I find more information.

Added 11/14/07: Here's something I can't believe I missed before...Sandra Dodd has a whole page with links to articles about video games and their benefits. You'll find it here.

My Computer & Me (Or, Schedule? What Schedule?)

I was just reviewing some of my posts from last month and came across Let's Make A Deal (Or, Creating A Schedule). Two weeks later I can only say Ha! Ha! And double Ha!

Okay, we have a skeletal schedule due to the fact that J takes a few classes, so we do have to be at certain places at certain times. These are the bones:
Monday 4:00-6:00 Chess class
Tuesday 10:00-11:00 Drawing, 12:00-1:00 Japanese, 3:00-3:30 Trombone (It's a busy day!) After Trombone J usually goes to a friend's house to play.
Wednesday 1:00-2:00 Science class (just started this week)
Thursday 1:00 Park Day or Homeschool Book Club, depending on the day (One Thursday per month is free.)
Friday we are blissfully free of commitments.
Satuday J is taking a six week War Hammer Academy class at Games Workshop from 4:30-6:30.
Starting this Sunday he's also taking a six-week class called Kid Inventors at the Art Center in Pasadena.

Mornings are generally spent at the computer, but I'm really hoping this will change. I'm kind of waiting to see at what point J will decide he's had enough sitting on his butt staring at a screen. If he doesn't make that decision soon, though, I'm going to have to get clever about providing some other, more enticing, alternatives. Here's the problem, though. I'm spending my mornings at the computer, too. We sit at the kitchen table, in front of our own little laptops. I kind of like it. I probably shouldn't even admit to this in print because my husband asked me no less than six times this afternoon what we did today. I kept trying to evade the question, but he can be damn persistent. Oh well. The cat's out of the bag now.

What am I doing spending so much time on the computer? I'm reading about unschooling, of course. I'm reading blogs, mostly. I'm looking up articles. I'm putting books on hold at the library. (I maxed out my card today!) I'm posting to this blog. I'm hungry for information and reassurance and the internet seems the best place to find it. At the same time, though, I AM getting tired of sitting on my butt staring at a screen. It makes me feel kind of lumpy--like the blob.

So today, J and I had another computer discussion. We talked, again, about how the computer sucks our day away. He said he'd be a lot less likely to play on the computer if I weren't at my computer so much. (Rats!) So we're going to try a two hour maximum per day--for both of us. You may recall that in my Let's Make A Deal (Or, Creating A Schedule) posting I mentioned that our schedule would include no computer time at all during the week. Well, all I can say, once again, is Ha! The good intentions were there, but now they're cobbled between other, similarly good intentions, paving the way to the infernal regions.

We'll see. That's my mantra. We'll see. I've diverged so far from the Waldorf path we'd been on before that I'm beginning to get a little worried. But...we'll see. I'm trying to have an open mind. I'm questioning my beliefs and trying to find answers that are all my own. Heck, I even checked out a book called Don't Bother Me Mom--I'm Learning, about how computer and video games prepare children for success. I never would have even entertained this thought two months ago. Of course, I'm balancing that book out with another one called Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, which makes the opposite argument. We'll see....

I'm A Bloupie

Since I have yet to meet the friend I described to you in my last posting (apparently finding such a friend takes more than twelve hours), I've decided to become a blog groupie (a bloupie?) at The Parenting Pit. The guy that writes it, Arun, is exactly the friend I need right now--except that he lives a million miles away, or thereabouts.

His posting entitled An Unschooling Journey was really helpful.

Uh oh, gotta go. J is asking me to get off the computer (a little role reversal!) so I can watch him build a Space Marine.

The Computer (AKA A Thorn In My Side)

I'm going about this all wrong. That's what I was thinking when I reminded J about his idea to practice trombone and Japanese just before lunch. I suppose I would have felt completely different if he'd said "Okay," turned off the computer, and started practicing. That's not what happened. He was in the middle of a game and he didn't want to stop. I gently reminded him once more, then let it drop.

After lunch (he didn't even turn it off to eat!) we went to Park Day. While J played, I read some more of The Unschooling Handbook. The book just confirmed my misgivings! This is the line that really got me. Author, Mary Griffith, is referring to the parents' decision to let their child quit taking lessons of one kind or another:

"It is important to listen carefully to your child, to help her evaluate the alternatives, and make sure she doesn't base her decision on others' wishes for her instead of her own best interests. Fortunately, because of their experience with choosing and evaluating their own learning activities, unschoolers usually find themselves well prepared to make such potentially life-changing decisions."

It's not that J wants to quit his lessons. He loves them. It's just that I'm freaking out about computer use, so he's not really getting any experience with "choosing and evaluating [his] own learning activities." I'm evaluating them for him and I'm not liking them--one of them, anyway.

So, I told myself to relax and it actually helped. We ended up having a terrific evening and the computer played a very minor roll, just a walk-on, really, in our activities. And I let J choose everything. Mostly. Okay, I may have (ever so subtly) suggested alternative activities whenever he neared the computer, but I only ever suggested anything once. Shock of all shocks, one of the suggestions happened to include putting something away and he thanked me for reminding him!

So the day had a happy ending, but this swinging pendulum is starting to wear me down. I need to mellow out. And I need to join that ISP. The woman wasn't there last week at chess--only her husband--and I really wanted to talk to her, so I put off joining until next week. I need for her to tell me everything will be okay!

I've had a couple nice comments on this blog over the past few days, though, and they've definitely helped. So, if any of you seasoned unschoolers have any words of wisdom, or if you'd like to do the online equivalent of grabbing me by the shoulders, looking me in the eye, and shouting "Mellow Out! It'll be okay!" Please feel free to do so. Actually, I take back the shouting part. A whisper might be better. I'm feeling kind of fragile.

Let's Make A Deal (Or, Creating A Schedule)

I think yesterday's post pretty much covered What I Learned from week one, so I won't add to it. Instead I'll tell you about my agreement with J. This morning, on day nine of deschooling, J and I talked about how we've been spending our time. We both agreed (mainly becasue I suggested it) that we seem to lose time when we spend the day in front of our laptops. In J's words, "time just doesn't exist" when we're at the computer. So, we made a list of things J might want to get done during the week (I did make a few suggestions) and J created a schedule for fitting them in.

Here's what he came up with:

Free time at the computer will occur in the morning, before lunch.

When I start to make lunch, J will turn off the computer and spend five minutes practicing Trombone, then five minutes reviewing Japanese. After lunch he'll do the same.

Afternoons are for fun activities. At the moment they include:

- Building a model of Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius, then making Mt. Vesuvius erupt.
- Playing with a marble roller coaster made from foam tubing. We saw this at NextFest--J loves it. Click here for instructions on how to make a marble coaster of your own.
- Creating a fountain with soda and pixie sticks or mentos.
- Building a fort in our backyard.
- Making a worm bin for vermicomposting. (This is actually my project, but J said he'd help.)

When I start dinner J will stop what he's doing and practice drawing. He's taking a weekly drawing lesson because he wants to learn how to draw manga.

After dinner we'll have free time for playing games (he's teaching me to play chess), reading, or watching DVDs together. (No computer!)

So, that's the agreement. We both signed the bottom to make it more official and I posted it in the kitchen.

We'll see how it goes. Technically, I don't think we're supposed to create schedules when we're deschooling, but my husband is clearly unhappy with the amount of time J has been spending on the computer, and I'm not exactly comfortable with it either. Going to the computer or watching television becomes a habit in the blink of an eye and I don't want J spending his time playing computer games just because it's the first thing that comes to mind. He has so many other interest, it seems like it should be okay for me to help him find ways to fit them into his daily life.

Will this schedule put a knot in our deschooling process? Will J even follow it? I guess I'll find out.

Deschooling - Week One

Monday:
J started up the computer as soon as he got out of bed. I had agreed to buy him one game off the internet so we downloaded Fizzball. He played it all day.

There were brief moments when I surreptitiosly tried to interest him in something educational. When I'd told him we would be studying what interested him for the year (he was all for the idea, by the way, unlike my husband) he said there were two things he wanted to learn. 1.) How to draw manga and 2.) How to echolocate. Yes, as in dolphins, bats and clicking noises. All I can say is he's really into the "Gregor the Overlander" books by Suzanne Collins. Anyway, I sensed a learning opportunity (Hooray!) and ran with it. I went to the Los Angeles Public Library web site and put a few books on bats and echolocation on hold.

"Guess what?" I told J, "I found some books on bats and echolocation at the library. Pretty cool, huh?"

He rolled his eyes. "Mom, I don't care about bats. I just want to echolocate. Like Gregor."

Shot down from the get go. But I did not give up on my first attempt to teach him something he wanted to know. It did occur to me that "teaching" may not be what I should be doing as an unschooler. But teaching is really just sharing information, right? I figured I was safe. So, even though I was sure humans could not echolocate I decided to humor my son. I googled "humans" and "echolocate" and it turned out I was wrong. I found several stories (with video!) about a blind boy named Ben Underwood who uses clicking sounds to get around just like a sighted person. So J took some time off from Fizzball to watch some videos about Mr. Underwood. We tried a few experiments to see if we might possess a smidge of Underwood's talent. The results weren't especially promising but the experiments were a blast.

From 4:00 to 6:00 J had his first chess class. The teacher is a chess master. (He can recite, move by move, famous chess matches!) There were some really nice kids, many of them close to J's age, so I was glad for that. J seemed to like it even though he was the easiest kid to beat by far. Hopefully that will change, otherwise I'm afraid he'll get tired of chess pretty quickly.

I almost forgot to mention, it was at the chess class that I decided to join the ISP (the class was held in their building). While I was there the female half of the couple that runs the place recommended "The Unschooling Handbook" by Mary Griffith and "Discover Your Child's Learning Style" by Mariaemma Willis and Victoria Kindle. So I bought them both. She also praised me for figuring out in just three days what takes many people three years to learn. That felt good. Of course, she's already an unschooler so she's biased. But I'll take praise where I can get it.

Tuesday:
More computer time. If we looked up anything remotely educational I have no recollection of it. Mostly he sat at his laptop playing Fizzball while I sat across the table on my own laptop reading about unschooling.

At 3:00 J had his first private trombone lesson (he played last year at the Waldorf school) and loved his teacher. I hope this means he'll want to practice.

J went to his best friends house for the evening while I went to a book store to see Diana Gabaldon (author of the "Outlander" series).

Wednesday:
More computer time, of course. But J also set up an elaborate village, made of blocks, on his bedroom floor.
This was the playing board for a game his best friend made up called D & D. It's not the Dungeons and Dragons you're thinking of, though the boys have given it the same name. J decided to create his own version of the game, so we spent a few hours on his bedroom floor playing D & D which, much to my joy, included rolling dice and using addition and subtraction. Hooray! He was practicing math and having fun at the same time! We were unschooling! I was especially thrilled to learn that in order to kill the tiger living on the outskirts of the village, we would need to roll not double, or triple, but quadruple sixes. We could figure out the probability of rolling quadruple sixes! That's math! And it would be fun! If only I knew how to figure probability.

That afternoon J had a Japanese lesson. I'd found a tutor on Craigslist and had made arrangements for him to have a weekly lesson when I was planning for "school at home." He'd already had five years of Japanese at school and since he's interested in manga (he wants to learn to read the original Japanese text) I'm still counting this as unschooling. Besides, barring an extended stay in Japan, this is the only way he's going to learn it. I wanted him to learn Spanish too (he'd also had five years of Spanish at school) but I'm giving up on that for now--unless, of course, I can arrange for an extended stay in Mexico.

We went to see "Becoming Jane" with a friend of mine after Japanese. Lest you think J is so amiable that he willingly attends "girl movies" you should know--I bribed him.

After the movie we discovered a comic/anime store where we rented four anime DVDs. So that night we both watched Dragon Drive and S-cry-ed.

Thursday:
Computer and anime DVDs in the morning. Homeschool book club at the park during the afternoon. We also talked about the Big Bang and Einstein's "cosomoloical constant" which Einstein regarded as the biggest blunder of his career. I was reading an article about it in a magazine and learned that Einstein announced this mistake at the Mt. Wilson Observatory which happens to be fairly close to our house. As I was researching a visit to Mt. Wilson I learned that our own Griffith Park Observatory was having a Public Star Party (a monthly gathering when the public can look through their 12" telescope) the following day. So I bought tickets.

That night J tagged along to my writer's critique group and watched the last anime DVD while I met with my fellow scribes.

Friday:
We went to the Wired NextFest at the LA Convention Center. I had to drag J away from the computer to get there but he ended up loving it. J frequently says he wants to be an inventor and this place was an inventor's paradise. As an added bonus we ran into a group of kids from our homeschool group.

That night J went to his best friend's house while WG and I went out for dinner to celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary. I talked about unschooling and he listened patiently. He didn't say yes. But, he didn't say no.

Saturday:
Computer, which annoyed WG. Then we went to the observatory and saw the moon and Jupiter (plus four of its moons) through the telescope. I thought it was really cool. J seemed to have a good time but later said it was boring.

Sunday:
I declared Sunday a screen-free day. I know it goes against the rules of deschooling to impose restrictions and all that, but I figure we all have to live with ourselves and I just don't feel good about all that computer use. I imagined we'd do lots of fun things at home together, but then J got invited to go back to NextFest with his friend. So J left, WG went to work, and I had a pleasant (much needed) afternoon alone. It was heavenly.

Coming Soon...
My thoughts on week one.

What Happened Next (part 2)

I left off yesterday with number four on the list of What Happened Next. My poor husband ended up sounding a bit curmudgeonly (or entirely sane, depending on your attitude toward learning), so I'll go back and try to explain where he was coming from.

1. I told my husband about my plan to unschool our son and he said (though he later denied it) "Well, I just don't want him having fun all the time." Even though my husband (I'll call him WG) tried to deny this comment, he really is concerned that J will spend his days having fun and end up not learning anything. Anyone that's been through thirteen years of school knows that "fun" is not a regular part of the curriculum, so I understand his concern. However, even though unschooling is probably best practiced when both parents are of the same mind, I'm forging ahead with my plan. I have asked WG to trust me and he has, sort of, agreed. He didn't actually come right out and say he agreed, but he didn't say he didn't trust me so I'm taking that as a yes. I'm also thinking I might ask him to refrain from asking "What did you do today?" It's way too much pressure.



2. I decided to join an Independent Study Program (ISP) with leanings toward unschooling. At first, I thought I wouldn't join because it costs a couple hundred dollars a year and I'm quite capable of doing my own paperwork and taking care of the legalities of homeschooling, which are the main sevices they provide. Now that I'm unschooling, though, I really think I'll need their other service--helpful advice. The couple that runs this program unschooled their two children. Both of their kids went to college, are leading happy, presumably fullfilling, lives and neither of them was killed at sixteen as result of their parents decision to unschool. Phew!



3. My grandmother bought J his own laptop. This put my commitment to "deschooling" to the test at once. Naturally, all he wanted to do was play on his new computer. This was about as far as you can get from what usually goes on in our house. Let me put this into perspective for you. J spent the last five years at a Waldorf school. Waldorf schools advocate a strict ban on technology for all children. Our family never adhered too stricly to this idea (I hate being told what to do) but we did limit J's time in front of the computer and television to two hours on the weekends. He has never before been free to choose how much time he spent on the world wide web or gaping at the "idiot box." For the first week, since the computer was new and since I'd heard about "deschooling," I decided to give him the freedom to use it at will. I'll tell you how that went later when I get to our first week of "deschooling." For now, I'll just say he's no fool. J took full advantage of my change of heart. He was one happy boy.