Now that my son is six, the question of where he goes to school often comes up when I'm meeting another mother for the first time. Most of the time, people are very supportive when they hear that we're homeschooling, but they often declare flatly, "Personally, I could NEVER do that!" I imagine that they think that homeschooling my kids requires great personal sacrifice, and that I spend my nights researching curricula and preparing lesson plans, my days badgering my children into doing their schoolwork at the kitchen table.
If only they knew what a lazy homeschooler I am. While hardier parents are getting their kids out of bed and helping them get groomed, dressed, and fed before heading to school at ungodly early hours of the morning, I'm often lolling around with the kids reading Magic Tree House books before heading downstairs for a leisurely pancake breakfast. See? Lazy.
A few years ago, I never would have expected to be taking such a lackadaisical approach. I first heard the word "unschooling" years before I had children and years before I ever dreamed of homeschooling. I was teaching creative writing to a small group of preteen and teenaged homeschoolers. Before I met the group, I'd expected to feel sorry for the poor, sheltered little hothouse flowers. I'd ended up amazed by how confident, mature, and connected these kids were.
One day I heard some of them use the word "unschooling" to describe their families' approach. No set curriculum, no formal schedule, no prescribed timetable for when kids needed to master a subject: the kids simply pursued their passions and interests in as much depth as they wished.
I was scandalized. Is that allowed? I thought. How could kids possibly learn what they needed to know if allowed to do whatever they wanted?
I watched my students closely and had to acknowledge that most of them were stronger writers and critical thinkers than many college students I'd taught. They were learning all sorts of things just by living interesting lives out in the real world, freed from the constraints of school. Gradually, I began to accept unschooling a little more--but only as a clever trick by parents, a Trojan horse for sneaking learning past unsuspecting kids' city gates.
Jump ahead to a winter afternoon a few years later. My husband and I had decided to homeschool, and I was still laboring under the anxiety that a good homeschooling mom ought to be able to entice her children into doing wholesome, structured educational activities. My son was three, my daughter a baby. It was Dr. Seuss's birthday, and I'd decided that we should make cat-in-the-hat style hats out of paper bags and construction paper to "celebrate. "
My son balked, loudly and vociferously. I lashed out at him, disappointed and hurt that all my preparations had ended up in a fight. Was this, I thought, what homeschooling was going to be like at our house? If so, I didn't think I could do it.
Eventually, I started to relax. Instead of planning activities that I thought my children should be doing, I learned to put my energy into doing things with them that we all actually seemed to enjoy. I stopped worrying so much about what they might miss out on and began appreciating all the ways they were growing. I started noticing their ways of learning.
My son tends to absorb information through being read to and playing games, but he resists workbooks, crafts, or any sort of performing on cue to show what he knows. What he likes to do is go off on his own and figure out for himself how to use what he's been learning; many of his breakthroughs happen when I'm busy doing something else. Once, for instance, after a period of a few weeks when we'd been reading a lot of picture books about math and playing a lot of dice games together, he came running outside to the back yard where I was playing with my daughter. He waved a piece of paper at me and yelled joyfully, "Look at these equations I made!" He'd written simple equations like 1 + 2=3, 2 + 2=4 and so on. All correct.
"How did you learn to do that?" I asked him. I'd never sat down and formally taught him how to add or even to write equations that way, though he'd seen the symbols and numbers in books and sung numerous counting songs over the years.
He shrugged. "I figured it out from playing dice," he said. Since then, he's expanded on that beginning, learning all the major math operations from playing Monopoly and adding up his allowance to save up for Lego kits. When he does equations in his head, he reminds me of a monkey swinging effortlessly from branch to branch, rejoicing in sheer mental motion.
Over time, I have begun to trust that unschooling might be a very fine way for my particular children and me to learn together. I've stopped seeing unschooling as a stealth vehicle for sneaking knowledge into kids' brains and started seeing it instead as an opportunity to expand my own definition of how learning happens. I see it as a chance to give my children time: time to figure out how they learn best; time to explore the subjects that light their intellectual fires; time not to feel rushed into learning a skill before they're ready; time to play without feeling that their play has to lead anywhere particular just yet.
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