Today, Jessica, Peter, Michael and Theo came to visit before their move to Ireland. They're relocating from San Francisco, which is close, to Dublin, which is far. When they left, the boys drug out the big map of the world, in order to see where Michael is going. Tonight, we'll have potatoes and cabbage, we'll talk about the Irish portion of our heritage, and we'll get a sense of Ireland.
This sort of conversation happens at our table all the time. We live in a marina, and people are constantly coming in from somewhere interesting or leaving to go somewhere interesting. The big world map gets taken out a lot. I've gotten into the habit of pointing out who we know, where they are, what they're eating, and what the language spoken there sounds like. It's not comprehensive, but it's enough to be intriguing.
Right now, the marina is swarming with folks heading from all over the place to join the Baja Ha-Ha cruising rally down the coast to Mexico. Mexico! Oh, the food! Oh, the language! Oh, the music! Mexico is easy, because of the proximity. Easier than the Galapagos, anyway. The boys are already vaguely familiar with the Spanish language because of their exploits in Puerto Rico with Dora. And Mexican food is an integral part of our eating anyway; one of the many bonuses of being Californian. But that's what provided the bridge for them to realize that as you speak Spanish in Mexico and Puerto Rico, there are other languages in other places that you speak when you go there. We've had all kinds of fun playing around with Tahitian, Fijian, and Hawaiian. Especially Hawaiian; the language sounds like a waterfall, and we've found several excellent Hawaiian Rap bands that the boys love listening to. Nothing like dancing with your language lessons, and knowing at least how to say "please" and "thank you" everywhere you go.
Jim and Juanita, who sailed here from Maine (technically three seas away, even though it's the same country), live one dock away from us and will be sailing the South Pacific in three months. We've talked about how you eat there (fruit, fruit, fruit, and fish), and since Jim is big into food and boat cookery, we've talked about dehydrators versus blenders, ovens versus pressure cookers, and fishing poles versus traps. It's on the schedule for the boys and I to make our own solar cooker.
Jeff, the guy docked right behind us, is heading for the Galapagos in November. Because of him, we're watching endless rounds of nature shows on Netflix, about the finches and the lizards and Darwin. And of course, finding the island and the route on the map.
Next week, Jason is flying to Seattle to join up with our pal Toast, to sail their boat down here to San Francisco Bay. They've just finished a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island, and the boys are just bursting with questions to ask Toast's three daughters, who are friends of theirs. The boys have never been anyplace like Vancouver Island, nor have they seen orcas or humpbacks in the water next to the boat, as Toast's family has.
A few weeks ago our friend Zen stopped by. He's planning to voyage across the Pacific to Japan. We've already spent a bunch of time talking about Japan, but the boys hadn't really understood that we could sail there. So this engendered a conversation where we talked about being able to sail to all the places on the map that touch the blue. And that of course leads to being able to read the names of the places in brown and green that touch the blue places.
And that right there, my friends, is what Geography in the School of the World looks like. There won't be a test, but there will certainly be dessert when we're finished. And probably dancing.
My three kids and I live in a community of 9 homes that were all built at the same time. Actually, we built them, all of us....nine families, together....all at the same time. It took us ten months and plenty of blood, sweat, and tears; but we did it, together.
It's Labor Day weekend. The last hurrah for those on a school schedule. Today, we held a yard sale to sell the last of the power tools that we now no longer need because we are done building our homes. There are 12 kids living in these 9 homes, so of course we sold cookies and lemonade as well. We baked and wrapped and squeezed and made cardboard signs most of the afternoon yesterday and the kids set up their bake sale tables, while the adults organized the tools, the random boxes of nails, the extension ladders and hard hats, and that dang shop-vac that we've all been tripping over in the shed. There was so much excitement in the air. We moved into our homes back in December, and many of us needed to majorly hibernate for a few months after such a huge project. So now, when we get together for a potluck or an outdoor project, there is a familiar energy. Something like picking up that old guitar again and remembering how to play.
Most of the tools sold by the middle of the afternoon. The bake sale was a huge success. The kids made enough money for us to plan an ice cream party later in the week. Macy (middle daughter, age 9) made nearly 6 bucks face painting. I think she only got up out of her chair twice in 6 hours. She was in heaven, and now we are all walking around with little flowers and pumpkins and rainbows on our cheeks. One of the highlights of the day was the potluck. Sunny played his guitar the kids played basketball and rode scooters and bikes and skateboards until well after dark. We ate and laughed and and sang, and the kids played some more. Friends and neighbors dropped by.
I was tired. The kids were winding down. I thought for sure we were saying our goodnights and on our way to bed. And then I looked up. The stars. I laid down on the sidewalk and stared. Wow. Every time I do this, I can't believe how long it has been since the last time I found time to do this. Absolutely breath taking. Within minutes, 6 kids (my three and three others) had joined me. Janey, my 11 year old saw her first shooting star. Is that really possible? I had a moment of guilt. Maybe we haven't been looking up often enough. She, however, was thrilled. Gus, our 5 year old neighbor, came racing over when he heard our collective ooohs and ahhhs. Janey tried explaining to him what a shooting star looked like. She finally settled on: "Just keep looking up. You'll know it when you see it."
We laid there, mostly in silence, broken only by the gasps and ponderings: How do the satellites not fall to Earth? Where is Orion's belt? Which planets can we see right now? Are stars hundreds, thousands, or millions of miles away? What's that cloudy stripe down the center? Will the sun ever be a shooting star? What would it be like if there was no sun? Could we still eat pork sausage if we had no plants? And my favorite, "Are we upside down?"
These are the moments in life when I am reminded of why I choose to be an unschooler. Our life is rich and full and the learning is spontaneous and relevent. It's Labor Day Weekend. There's not a school supply in sight. And I saw 4 shooting stars tonight.
Previously, I've posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can.
It did not occur to me, until I was sitting in a room with about 40 other corporate web content delivery professionals (a set of Kiss-of-Death adjectives if ever there were), at a recent gathering for sharing of information about using multimedia on websites, how thoroughly our assumptions are informed by the schooling we got. The point was to familiarize people with the technologies available, and give them some ideas for how to use them.
So how come, I'm sitting there wondering, less than 1/4 of the presentations actually used multimedia? See, corporate folks? Their attention is on keeping their jobs, and looking good for their management. Sort of like how kids in school want to impress the teacher. More and more, I'm convinced that they don't actually participate in the web beyond what's required in their daily work, the same way that schooled kids tend to do what's required for the grade, and not much more, and certainly not much different.
For example, one presentation stressed strongly how important it is to have good solid metadata in things like videos, because there's no text for a search engine to provide more context and/or relevancy through, so the tagging you give is pretty much all you get. People all over the room are nodding and smiling, like this is news.
Um, hello? Old news, folks. My son Rowan, who is five, understands metatagging. He knows how to start the laptop, launch a browser window, get to YouTube, and search for Tom & Jerry cartoons... in English. He also gets really upset when his searches return videos in other languages (although sometimes he thinks the Japanese ones are pretty funny...). He gets that lack of appropriate tagging is a usability problem, because that's what it is for him. Of course, he doesn't have the language to fully express all that the same way we do. But the fact is that as a consumer of multimedia content, his behavior and his reactions are utterly predictable, and at age five, he is already forming opinions about the technological acuity of the people who post such content.
You can remind people to tag their content, but if they are not consumers of such content, they won't really understand, as Rowan does, how insanely frustrating it is when it all goes pearshaped.
So then, later in the day, people are talking about using new media (whatever that is) to attract "the new developer"... you know, the youth who are driving things now. And I'm nodding, cause I totally agree. And then they start talking, heaven help me, about the Universities and speaking to college students! And in my head, I can see Rowan, already cruising the web, already conversant with how to click past annoying Flash intro pages, already becoming a savvy consumer of online technology. Considering the ugly brushes we've already had with minor forms of academia, (here and here), the very idea of my child going to college is ridiculous, and waiting to graduate from the Ivory Towers Of Ossified Thinking to become successful is laughable in the economy of today.
Rowan knows who Duke is, he knows what Flash animation is, and he knows to look for the blessed "skip this intro" buttons. He knows what HTML is, and I'm teaching him coding, a little bit at a time. I think about him encountering his first "Hello, World" and I cringe just a little bit. Just like it's absurd for a roomful of adults who don't even use multimedia to stand around talking about presenting it to people who are native users of it, it's absurd to think that someday some professor will be more competent to teach my child about the Cloud than he, who's been breathing it for years, is.
I'd like to really recommend that my colleagues and compatriots leave work early, go home... and watch their kids interact with the digital environment. They will learn far more from that exercise about the context of the Digital Native, and about the reality of content propagation for that audience, than they will by listening to a roomful of Digital Immigrants blather on about a sky they've never even really seen.
I've recently become a knitter. I suppose you could say I'm obsessed with it. I love everything about it, really. I love selecting yarns, I love looking at patterns, I love sitting and knitting. I think about knitting a lot, about what yarn might work with what pattern, whether I can do the pattern or whether it's too hard for me right now. I encounter many problems when I knit and I'm learning how to solve them. I love knitting and I love learning about knitting.
In a knitting book I was reading recently, I read about "process" verses "product" knitters. As you might guess, a process knitter really loves the process of knitting and is less concerned with the product - she might choose to knit something because it looks fun to knit, regardless of whether she would actually use or wear the item. A product knitter is more concerned with the end result and will forgo patterns for items she doesn't want. I'm a product knitter. I love to knit and learning is fun, but if I don't like the item, what is the point of making it?
A friend recently pointed to a similar attitude in my views about kids' arts and crafts. I have never been an arts and crafts mom. I hate those little "art projects" the kids make at Sunday school or elsewhere. The kids enjoy them, but I don't really see any point in a cotton ball covered "sheep." I see the utility of an activity to pass the time, but the item created? I realize that with kids' art "its the process, not the product." I understand that making the art is about developing dexterity and creating and expressing.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm a product person, is it inherent in my personality? It probably is, but I wonder how much school had to do with it. Learn something, take the test and get the grade, repeat. I was good at that and I liked it. Or maybe the reason I was successful in school is because I'm a product person. It does make me wonder about process people, I wonder if they tend not to be as successful with school because the product is less important to them.
One reason I love homeschooling is because the product aspect is removed in some regard. Even when there is an actual tangible product or project, doing it for the love of learning and not for a grade is a very different thing. So much of what I did for the first 20-odd years of my life was about getting someone else's approval. It's amazing to start doing things for no other reason than that you are intrigued by something. Really, why knit? I can buy lovely knitwear. I knit because I find the process interesting, because I like having my hands busy, because I like creating, because it's portable and easy to slip in here and there in a busy life of raising kids. Of course, first I have to find something I want to knit - but maybe I'm enjoying the process as much as the product.
Suzanne, 7, wanted to learn to knit, so I taught her the basic stitches and set her up with needles and yarn. I was just learning myself and I was very worried that my interest would be extinguished by her frequent pleas for help. I let her know that I would not be able to help her much because I had to learn myself. She tried, her stitches were really loose and not uniform and she kept dropping them off the needles. I tried to help her a little and I tried to figure out how to help her. Should I tell her she needed to keep the same number of stitches on her needles at all times or should I just let her knit away, dropping stitches and accidentally picking them up along the way? (I had a similar problem with teaching handwriting). I decided to ignore her - or rather, let her be. She gave up for awhile. But I kept knitting. I would get books from the library and read and knit and learn. After a few more months, Suzanne picked up the needles and yarn and tried again. She kept at it longer and put it down for awhile. I ignored her. She asked for library books on knitting and we got them. She read and practiced. Now, she can knit evenly. I'm so proud and impressed and relieved that my refusal to tutor her closely did not have an ill effect.
Even though I don't think I'm a good teacher, I'm always encouraged to see that my children can learn with what little I can give them. I can provide them with materials and resources. I can give them minimal instruction, but I can't give them a lot of oversight for fear that I will smother their learning under my perfectionism (just as I was afraid that my learning would be smothered by constant distraction and pleas for help). Since I can't quite let go of my perfectionism, the best I can do is step back and let them be. But maybe as a result of my knitting, I'll learn to loosen up a bit.
I'd like to direct your attention to this article in the Washington Post, "Pearls Before Breakfast." That article illustrates to me that public school in America is absolutely successful at what it sets out to do, and that the vast majority of us are the natural products of our training.
In the three-quarters of an hour that he played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
"He" is Joshua Bell, arguably one of the best violinists of all time, and what he played was a sampling of some of the best music ever written for violin. He played for free, on his Stradivarius violin, posing as just another busker at rush hour, to see if beauty could transcend context.
These people, these passersby, are largely government workers. The world does not end if they're ten or fifteen minutes late, but we are so conditioned by the bell ringing to be in our seats on time or face the direst consequences the bureaucracy can throw at us, that we no longer are even able to stop for beauty. We have a time clock to punch, and that is the all-important priority in the morning. We have to be in our seats on time, and twelve years of public school indoctrination has drilled that into our habits so completely, that as adults, we're still doing it, and allowing it to be done to us. "Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?" asks the article.
In this case, the opportunity cost to these people of this habitual behavior was to miss out on something irreplaceable. Something that they will never see again, was determined by their force of habit, to be less worthy than being to work on time.
In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
In the subsequent article, it was determined that most of the passersby didn't even recognize the music for what it was. We don't listen to music outside our own very narrow preference range, usually. There's no benefit to it. We listen to whatever the radio's playing, with no time or appreciation or attention for whatever isn't. It was noted that at least one person rushing by couldn't even hear what was being played, due to his iPod. It's especially true of urban dwellers, but as a culture we're increasingly surrounding ourselves with us-ness, and cutting ourselves off from the experiences that could illuminate, expand, or challenge us. Which is hardly surprising, since we've spent twelve years being told to read the book and only the book, and answer questions only on the material the teacher deems important and that therefore by extension anything else is either wrong or irrelevant. If it was important, I would have been taught it somewhere along my educational career, right? So if I don't know what it is, it must not matter.
Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.
Our need to rush on to the next thing, to keep our schedules, to ignore the fascinating things happening all around us isn't inherent, it's trained. Trained by years of having just 50 minutes per class, then ten minutes to rush to the next thing, sit down, settle down, focus on the next checkbox until the next bell. We are not born this way.
A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand. "I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs. "Evan is very smart!"
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
...But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
Those children knew what over a thousand adults passing by had been conditioned to ignore; that something fantastic was happening, something worthy of attention. And their parents, who were on a time crunch (for what? We'll never know) physically blocked that spark of curiosity, that urge of their child's, to explore what they were hearing. At three years old, Evan got the message that schedules and time crunches and whatever he was going to be being taught that day was more important than hearing the art coming from a man who can command $1000 a minute for his talent, who was sharing that talent for free, in exchange for nothing more than a temporary, almost fractional pause, in the daily grind.
Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.
Something fundamental, something primal and critical and necessary has been crushed out of the American people. Is it unreasonable for me to think that we are behaving just like well-trained monkeys? Twelve years of steady conditioning is not inconsiderable. It takes far less than that to achieve results with rats. Have we become a juggernaut of widget-crankers, incapable of spending even scant minutes on glory?
We can do better, we must do better, and as parents making the choice to step away both from the training and the scheduling, we are making our stand against the pressure to mindlessly conform. We have the opportunity to model for our children that art both great and small is happening all around us all the time, and that these transcendent, transitional moments of grace are available to be captured in the soul. As fortune favors the prepared, creating a life that allows for effervescent moments to be experienced, I think, is something that is a calling.