Published by
Joanne on
March 1, 2010
A few months ago, a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism contacted me and asked if they could interview me about unschooling for research they were doing. Here are her questions, and my answers.
1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting?
For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning that truly means something to an individual. Learning has nothing to do with passing or failing, dividing the world up into subjects or taking a standardized test. That’s not learning.
Education is not telling students that it’s June 1 and today is the day you need to learn about dolphins. Also, when you’re done “learning”, you’re going to be tested to see if you can regurgitate all the facts back. And if you do, bingo!…you’ve learned!
For me, seeing the learning in everything and not dividing the world up into educational and not educational has been very helpful. In Guerrilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn she says;
“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again. School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”
2) And what are the unexpected benefits you find along the way?
For my children, one of the unexpected benefits is how they (especially my youngest) are starting to question things more. They’re interested in knowing things. They’re curious. They’re starting to see that learning is not something you do just to pass a test. For me, an unexpected benefit was how much I would change through this journey.
3) How has homeschooling helped your children blossom?
Unschooling is allowing them to be free and they’re blossoming in that freedom. They’re starting to become more sure of themselves, which isn’t hard to do when you’re not in school. There’s nobody telling them that they’re failures so their confidence in themselves is soaring. They are starting to see that life is not sectioned into educational and not educational and that they’re interests take them places that school could never dream of.
**originally posted in 2007**
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Published by
Joanne on
September 16, 2009
“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that child is someone today.”
- Stacia Tauscher
**originally posted in 2006 **
We were hanging out with our homeschooling friends one afternoon and my daughter Jacqueline was sitting on one of the picnic tables, finishing a story (Princess Barbie) she had started a few days before.
I was having a conversation with another homeschooling mom and she asked what Jacqueline was doing. When I told her she said
something to the effect of “Maybe she’ll be a writer when she grows up”. To which I replied, “She already is a writer”. She paused (and you could see the light bulb going off) as she thought about that, and said “Yes! She is a writer”.
That little shift in thinking has been very helpful to me in unschooling my kids. What she’s doing now is valid and important, not because it may help her when she becomes an adult, not because she may choose that as her career, but because it brings her joy and makes her happy now, right now. She is not an “adult in the making”. She’s exactly where she should be.
So without further ado, here is Jacqueline’s story. She is already working on her second one, which I’ll post when she’d done.
Princess Barbie
by Jacqueline Anne (a 7 year old unschooler)
2006
I love being a princess.” Said Barbie.
Barbie’s tutor came in and said “Princess the queen sent for you”. “Where is she?” said Barbie. “In the throne room” said Ken. Barbie went to the Throne room.
There the queen sat. “Come my dear” said the queen. Barbie hugged the queen. Barbie was surprise to see royal page.
Soon Barbie was heading back to her room when she heard a cry. It was the royal page yelling invader!
“Invader?” asked the princess.
“Yes” said the royal page. “We must hide” said royal page.
So they hid. The invaders lost. They were safe.
The Royal page was nice.
The End.
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Published by
Joanne on
September 16, 2009
** originally posted in 2007 **
We picked this origami book up at the library, dug out a pack of paper that we bought on clearance and Billy sat down with the girls to try it out. None of them had ever done it before so they chose an easy one to start with, which happened to be a frog. Billy’s in the black one, Jacqueline’s is green and Shawna’s is blue.
They’re trying to see whose frog can hop the farthest. Looks like Shawna won. 
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Published by
Joanne on
June 30, 2009
**originally posted in 2007**
My nine year old daughter wants to be an astronaut and she’s passionate about astronomy and space. I’ve learned more about the solar system from her than I ever did in in all my years in school.
A few months ago, she and my husband (I call them the two space cadets -lol) were watching Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and there’s a scene where they were using math concepts to figure out how to bring the capsule back to Earth. Jacqueline asked Billy to pause the movie at a scene that showed the paper they were writing on so she could get a good look at it. She wanted to know what they were doing and what type of math that was.
This started an ongoing discussion about algebra and calculus and since then she’s been asking Billy to explain it to her. He told her that he would look around for a book because he needed to brush up on it himself before he could explain it to her.
That was a couple of months ago and because of other issues going on in our life, he hadn’t gotten around to buying the book yet.
Taking matters into her own hands, (my mother always said – when there’s a will, there’s a way) Jacqueline spotted an algebra text book in a used book store and bought it with her own money.
The other night she asked Billy to read her a bedtime story and when he walked into her room, there she was…all cozy in bed with Sally, the bear she created at Build-A-Bear. She handed Billy the book she had selected…yup, the algebra textbook. She also had a notebook so she could jot down notes.
I couldn’t resist a picture.
Have I mentioned how much I love unschooling recently?
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Published by
Joanne on
June 28, 2009
Kelly Lovejoy posted this on an unschooling e-mail list a while back. She was answering someone’s question, which was;
“What exactly is unschooling? I thought it was another name for homeschooling”.
All poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles.
All unschooling is homeschooling, but all homeschooling isn’t unschooling.
Unschooling is legally a type of homeschooling.
Unschoolers don’t “school-at-home” nor do we gives tests or grades.
Unschooling accepts all learning as valid. Everything is connected. You never know when one thing will lead to or connect with another! Unschoolers know they *do* and will keep searching for those connections.
Unschooling is natural learning. Humans are hard-wired to learn-we crave it and seek it out. When you believe that, you’re half-way to understanding how it works.
Unschooling is understanding the difference between teaching and learning. That’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome before you can “get” unschooling. (I can *teach* you everything *I* know about unschooling, but unless you’re willing to *learn* it, I’m wasting my time and your time.)
All children can unschool.
Many parents can’t.
Unschooling requires a “paradigm shift” to make it work. And it works best when you (the parent) are an active learner. And curious and thoughtful and enthusiastic and interested and interesting.
It’s about trust and respect and patience.
It helps if you can step OUT of the box. If you’re OK going against the flow and standing up for yourself (or at least your child).
**originally posted in 2006**
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