Week With No Classes/Making Friends

Jerry's solution to the Not-Wanting-To-Go-To-Classes dilemma was to take a week off of all classes. So we dropped all classes for last week and yesterday Jerry said he'd like to keep it that way--except for drawing. He still wants to continue drawing.

One of the reasons I had signed him up for all those classes in the beginning (granted this was before "Unschooling" became a part of my vocabulary) was so he could meet other kids. I really worry about him making friends. The drawing class is taught at our house by a tutor so there are no other kids. We go to homeschool park day every other week and book club once a month, but that doesn't give him much of a chance to get to know anyone too well--it takes him a while to warm up to people. He likes one boy in particular from park day, but it's been hard to set up play dates for the two of them because the boy's family is really busy. So with no classes, save drawing, it's going to be hard for him to make friends with other homeschooled kids and he's not really interested in maintaining his friendship with the one good friend he had in school.

Thankfully he's still got his one very best friend. But I do wish he had more...

Commitments & Taking Children Seriously

I've been thinking that to someone who is new to unschooling, my question about honoring commitments might be confusing. In mainstream parenting if your child commits to a team sport or a lesson, he's committed. He sees it through. End of story. If someone had asked me for advice on my current situation four months ago I would have said, "The child said he wanted to take the class, you're paying for it, he needs to learn that commitments should be honored and get his butt to class."

But that was before I discovered the unschooling lifestyle and Taking Children Seriously. Now I look at things differently, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain where I'm coming from for those of you who are new to these ideas. I'm still pretty new to them myself, but I'll do my best to explain the philosophy of Taking Children Seriously as I understand it today, on day 84 of our unschooling adventure.

As far as I can tell, it's all about treating my child the way I want to be treated. It sounds ridiculously simple but it changes everything. Just think of all the things you might do or say during the course of a day that minimize your child's wishes in favor of accomplishing your own goals. Now imagine taking those wishes seriously and really trying to make adjustments for them. Actually, I'm envisioning my niece and her frequent desire to dump all the liquids in my sister's refrigerator onto the floor, as I write this. Okay, stop imagining that. To be honest, if you have a toddler, I have to tell you right now that I have no idea how this works with toddlers. If I had known about this philosophy when my son was young I would have tried it and I would have loads of advice for you, but I had never even imagined such a way of life existed back then. I mean, I was into attachment parenting and the family bed and all that but this is a whole new ball game. (For real life experiences in Taking Children Seriously with toddlers and younger kids try the Parenting Pit and Happy@Home.)

Anyway, I digress.

Let's move on to commitments since I can't seem to explain Taking Children Seriously very well and for some reason their website is down so I can't even cut and paste an explanation for you. [The Taking Children Seriously site is back up! Click here for a link.]

How will a child learn to honor his commitments if he is never forced to honor them? Well, how did you learn to honor your commitments? It's unlikely that you honor commitments today because you were forced to honor them as a child. I don't even think honoring commitments is a lesson that can be learned (or taught), now that I think about it. Sure, you can drill a sense of duty into a person but what does that accomplish, really? And is a sense of duty something we want to cultivate in our children? For me the answer is no. You can always tell when a person is doing something out of duty because most often there's no joy in it. I want Jerry to approach his commitments with joy--not duty.

And here's another thing I know about Taking Children Seriously. It requires that you always expect the best of your child. For example, if Jerry commits to doing something and suddenly doesn't want to go, I need to expect that he has valid reasons for wanting to bail out. I should not leap to the conclusion that he doesn't want to follow through because he's lazy. That one little alteration in thinking makes a really big difference.

Okay, since I'm having trouble explaining where I'm coming from here I'm going to fall back on Rue Kream, author of my favorite unschooling book to date, Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life. I've been trying to adhere to this list, from the back of her book, lately.

Fifteen things I wish adults would not imply to children
by Rue Kream

1. I don't trust you.
2. You don't try hard enough.
3. I can boss you around because I'm bigger.
4. Adults know everything.
5. You don't know what you're capable of.
6. Possessions are more important to me than you are.
7. You should believe what I believe.
8. Your feelings are not important.
9. It's okay to ignore kids.
10. I don't have time for you.
11. You have to earn my love.
12. I want to change you.
13. You owe me respect.
14. I know what's best for you.
15. You're not a whole person.

So, those are all things I'm trying hard not to imply to Jerry. And by not implying those things I'm taking him seriously. By taking him seriously I'm setting a fine example of what it means to commit to someone (Jerry) or something (parenting) out of love, rather than duty. And that's how I'm teaching him to honor his commitments.*

Sheri, at SwissArmyWife, recently posted something on a similar topic: the Golden Rule. If we apply it to each other shouldn't we apply it to our children too? You can read her post by clicking here.

*I hope you can tell by now that what I mean when I say I'm "doing" something is that I'm STRIVING to do it. I'm not saying I do it all the time. That's my goal, but I'm human and I'm new to this so I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, have this nailed down. I just wanted to make that clear. :)

On Commitments

So, I've been saying yes more. I've been honoring Jerry's feelings and interests and that's all fine and good, but a pattern is emerging that I'm not exactly happy with. He's bailing out on his classes at the last minute. It's not that he wants to stop taking the classes. He insists he wants to take them. But there have been more than a few days in the last couple months when Jerry has made a commitment to attend a class and just before we leave, or the teacher arrives, or we're about to walk in the door he doesn't feel like going.

Ever since the "chess incident", whenever he's said he doesn't want to go to a class I've said okay--well, mostly. The other day he didn't want to go to trombone and I said he had to, but he went along without a fuss. He's bailing out a lot lately, though.

Remember the circus class I mentioned I've been going to? Well, he finally said he wanted to join, I signed him up, and then TWICE (not once) on the morning of class--after I'd committed to paying for his lesson--he didn't want to go. Both times I let him stay home. He did finally join me this week but only after a discussion on the importance of honoring his commitments and not taking advantage of people (me) who are paying for classes because he says he wants to take them.

Just this morning his drawing teacher was due to arrive and suddenly he didn't want to have drawing class. At first I said I would take the class instead because we'd have to pay for it whether she taught him or not but then I realized I needed to drop my car off at the mechanic's, so I said he'd have to have the lesson whether he wanted it or not.

So, basically, I'm struggling with the boundary between letting Jerry make his own choices and requiring that he honor his commitments. I'm definitely against wasting time on something just because you started it. If a book, a movie, or a class I'm taking is bad I drop it. Life is too precious to be wasted on bad art and boring teachers. And I did let Jerry drop an expensive series of classes recently because he didn't like it (and there were no refunds!). So I'm not coming at this from an "honor your commitments even if they make you want to gouge your eyes out" point of view. But when we pay for Jerry to take drawing or trombone or go to circus class because he says he wants to do those things it's not so easy for me to let it slide when he wants to stay home instead.

I'm not really sure what the solution is. This morning after drawing his teacher asked if we wanted to meet next week or the following week and I left it up to Jerry completely. At least that way there is no question about who made the commitment. Maybe part of the solution, then, is to make sure he recognizes that he is the one in control. He's making the choice to schedule the lesson, therefore he is the one in charge of honoring that commitment.

I don't know. I still don't know exactly how to balance out letting Jerry make his own choices and making sure I'm not wasting a lot of money on classes he doesn't attend.

Hmmm.....I'm not too sure about this one.

Now I have to mention something completely unrelated to this post. My cat, Charlie (the black and white one) got in the shower with me today! Yes, he actually stood on the floor of the shower and let the water run down his back. He kept his head under the shower liner so it wouldn't get wet but the rest of him was soaked by the time he finally jumped out. Isn't that funny?!

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....

San Francisco Here We Come

I managed to relax and let J do his thing today. The days are so much more pleasant when I do this. I'm learning.

J did spend lots of time on the computer, but he also watched television, helped with some things around the house, put together a cabinet I bought for his room, and played with his marble coaster. I did quietly mention to him that if he's not interested in practicing for his lessons (drawing, chess, Japanese, and trombone--all at his own request) perhaps we should cut some out. We're spending over $400 a month! But he said he wants to keep doing them all. So I'm just going to back off and see if he starts to practice on his own.

Right now he's over at a friends house while I pack for the weekend. The three of us are flying to San Francisco for a computer-free, three day weekend. I'll be back in touch on Tuesday!

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. And.....we're back! Here are some photos from our trip:


The Autumn Moon Festival in Chinatown.



J (in the green hat) is watching a guy carve his name in Chinese characters onto a stamp.

More to come.....

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.