News From Hawkhill Acres

Unschooling is tricky to do, especially if you’re a nudger. I confess that I nudge my two kids too often, trying to steer them in the direction I think they should go in. Even worse, once in awhile, I say something that just isn’t so, with absolutely nothing to back it up and sound like I really know what I’m talking about when I don’t. (I blame it on growing up during the Nixon administration, but it could be the current political climate also.It all filters down.)

I had one of those lapses last weekend, when I flat-out told my daughter that she’ll never get a good grasp of math if she always uses a calculator. “You have to learn the processes first,” I pontificated, “Using a calculator is fine once you know how to do math without one, but you shouldn’t need it to do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I want to see you using a pencil and paper or we may have to re-think this whole unschooling thing.” (Boy, I’m a jerk, sometimes, especially before I’ve had my coffee on Saturday morning.)

Well, I had my coffee and brightened up and reminded myself and my daughter that unschooling is a philosophy and not a method and we’re not going to just drop it because I get crabby and everything was okie-fine again. But in the back of my mind, the worry that DD will always be math-challenged niggled like when you think you’ve left the coffeepot on and you’re at work. You don’t want to leave and check and look silly, but you wonder if your house will burn down if you don’t and then you’ll look ridiculous for ignoring your worries.

Yesterday morning, DD was using the laptop and I came upstairs to have lunch to find the table covered with sheets of paper. And the papers were covered with calculations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. I think there may even have been a fraction or two in there and maybe a percent sign, looking more like a smiley face, but a percent sign nonetheless.

DD had decided that she wants to get some Neopets on Ebay. She wanted to know how long it would take her to save up for them and couldn’t find the calculator. She knew I was working and didn’t want to disturb me and her brother didn’t know where it was either, so she was forced to figure it out on paper or wait. She’s not a waiter. Hummingbirds could take her correspondence course if they find themselves slowing down. So she figured it out on paper, including shipping and how many weeks allowance it would take to get each auction that was offered.

I was impressed. I was also aware of how stupid it had been to tell her that she needed to stop using a calculator. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using tools, which is why I’m typing this on a keyboard instead of on a typewriter, or chipping it into a stone tablet or cutting reeds to make a papyrus scroll with. Although, actually, those are all writing tools also, just not as efficient or fast or as conducive to reaching a large audience as a computer hooked to the Internet is.

In my case, rather than learning to print with a pencil, I learned to write with a pen, because I really liked pens and manuscript, rather than print. However, when I went to first grade, my teacher took away my pen, told me to stop writing and made me print with a pencil, something I did very poorly and with much muttering under my breath.”You have to walk before you can crawl,” I remember her saying, “You have to learn to print correctly with a pencil, before you can write with a pen.” A statement that was right up there with my “You have to learn to do math before you can use a calculator” pronouncement and just as untrue. I already knew how to write, as she could plainly see, but she was willing to ignore that to prove a point. (Probably voted for Nixon, too.)

So what else do I know that isn’t true, I wonder? Well, I do remember telling my son that he had to get a real language course and stop fooling around trying to learn more than one language at a time. And I believe it was me who also said to him, “And if you’d spend more time on learning and less time on computer games, you’ll be a lot more prepared for Real Life, which is where you’re going to be living in a few years, not on Silk Road.”

Silk Road for those of you who don’t know, is a free multiplayer fantasy game where you can join guilds, fight other people and horrible creatures and interact with people from all over the world. (A bit like Wall Street, but not so cut-throat and more fun.) And, with a pair of headphones, a microphone and a free X-Wire software download you can actually talk to the other players.Maybe this is why my son now speaks much better Italian than his highly-touted Italian course taught him. He’s also learning basic Portugese, French and Greek conversation and even some Chinese, Japanese and a language that we can’t figure out what it is, although it may be one of the Arabic languages.Or possibly Norse.

In order to play the game, he also uses his math skills, social skills, logic and reasoning, spatial skills, map and computer skills. Yesterday, he asked to borrow my book on HTML programming, something he’s never shown any interest in, because he needs to figure out how to change the blog where he displays his art, because someone on Silk Road told him what he could do to make it look better.

I guess the bottom line on unschooling is that it’s the unschooler who initiates learning, rather than a teacher or parent. That doesn’t mean that I can never offer a suggestion or tell my kids about something I think is really keen. But it does mean that I need to remember that they know more about what they want and need to learn than I do. That’s a really hard lesson to learn, especially when you’re a maven like I am. I love learning and researching and I get enthusiastic about things and want my kids and friends to get as involved as I am in things and that’s just not going to happen sometimes.

But, I’m a willow; I can bend. I’m unschooling right along with my kids and the rest of the world. (Some people don’t know that, but it’s what everyone does when they graduate or leave school. Unschoolers just do it instead of going to school, is all.) I will remind myself everyday that learning is much easier when people are happy, rather than bored. I’ll try to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter what method they use, as long as they accomplish what they want to do.

Most of all, I’ll try to remember that my kids can get where they want to go in life without my heavyhanded steering. Gentle guidance and keeping them safe is okay. Thinking that I always know better than they do, because I’ve had more experience, isn’t okay. It’s my experience that I’ve had, not theirs. Unschooling is “letting” them learn, not “making” them learn, as if you can make anyone learn if they don’t want to. I still can’t print and I don’t really care, but I love to write and I have a huge pen collection which gives me much joy.