Tag Archives: trust

belong

Posted on by
Reply

Maybe it’s the sunbeams I stared into through my camera lens yesterday, as our band gathered into the staging area, or the pollen in the air, or maybe I have something in my eye. Pretty sure I’m allergic to backlit sun-drenched brass sections looking like angels are bending from the sky to kiss their foreheads.

I had the privilege of chaperoning the NHS marching band to the Starlight Parade in Portland yesterday. I love our band. I love watching them embody something Glennon Doyle says: “We belong to each other.” I love watching them lift their chin to let a friend reach in and close the clasp at their throat or adjust the chin strap on their shako (that’s what the hats are called). “I trust you,” they say, exposing their vulnerable soft parts. “I can be trusted,” they say, with their helpful hands.

I loved looking into the eyes of each student with a squirt bottle in my hand and saying silently, “Trust me.”

“I trust you,” they say silently. They open their mouth.

We used to call it “baby bird style” when Quinn was in second grade and we’d squirt water into the open mouths of the kids on field trips. I realize/remember when I watch another band mom, Carol, hydrating them, that our mouths open, too. It is so human, so motherly. Here comes the airplane. Ever since we started squirting things in their mouth as babes in arms, from breasts or bottles, spoons or fingers, we’ve opened our mouth when we want them to open theirs. We are mirrors.

Speaking of they/them. Happy Pride. I know one reason the band room is home to many kids is that they don’t exactly fit the regularly sanctioned acceptable categories of high school. The band room is home to the neurodivergent, the nonbinary, the nonconforming. Which is why I like taking them to Portland, where the 2023 Starlight parade Grand Marshal is Poison Waters, a drag performer and social activist. I like the exhibit behind us in the parade being TriMet, the bus I rode to work while I was pregnant with Quinn, with the slogan All Are Welcome. I like the Portland crowd with their rainbow light sabers and their heart-shaped glasses and their clowns on bicycles and their llamas on leashes and their boy children in tutus and their girl children in dinosaur crocs and all their children dancing and wielding guns that fire nothing but bubbles.

I like that their band teacher introduced so many of the end-of-year awards at their spring concert using they/their as he talked about each student, however they identified. I like that they can be boys tucking ponytails up into shakos with bobby pins and girls with pixie cuts or pigtails and nonbinary young people being whoever they want to be.

I like how kids from a rural coastal town go to a city fair. When told to be in groups of no fewer than three, their threes adhered to each other like Velcro and grew into fifteens, wandering under huge, gnarled city trees, venturing together into the dust-mote-filled sunbeams to hop on carnival rides, then congregating again under the boughs to loan each other cash for slushies and elephant ears. I like how they belong to each other.

They all have doubts and fears and preoccupations. I know I did as a teenager. I want to tell them… I still have so many doubts and fears and preoccupations, most recently upon my return to being a band mom who barely sees my son. The last Starlight parade we attended, I had a sixth grader who lived with me half time. Since then, a pandemic pulled us apart. We are coming back together. We are still here. We are not the same. But we still belong to each other. The band room is still home. I want to tell them to keep reaching for what they love, and especially for the people they love.

A beautiful mural featuring a blue bird up at the top of a tall building on SW 2nd and Salmon caught my eye, and I felt sure it had not been there four years ago on the parade route. Sure enough, this painting, called Inheritance, was created just last year. In it, an elder’s hands offer a bowl to a younger set of hands. The bowl brims with fir cones, trilliums, and butterflies.

I want to tell them: Look up, little birds. Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up.

Also, there will be school bus fender benders, anxiety, garment bag chaos, missing shoes, forgotten backpacks, mood swings, vomit, blisters, dying phone batteries, and body odor.

There are enormous bands before us and behind us, with military-level discipline and polish and prestige, plumes spearing from their caps in waterfalls of sparkle and glitz. The band behind us filled at least four buses, maybe more. But I’ll take these kids, these coastal sardines packed into one bus, the ones who worked for their uniforms (the sophomores through graduating seniors remember the many nights they haunted the haunted house in 2019), with their proud plumes of blue feathers. I’ll take them and I’ll tell them silently with my eyes: Soar.

educational priorities ~ a mamafesto ~ 2020 remix

Posted on by
1

Quinn recently attended a six-day online Dinosaur Discoveries camp and at the end earned the “Most Likely to Become Everyone’s Favorite College Professor” award. It launched a great conversation between Quinn and I about how online learning does not necessarily have to mean pushing a bunch of “submit” buttons to enable the instructors to assess his learning accomplishments. The instructors provided materials for him to immerse himself in, trusted that he was absorbing them, and then detected his absorption of said materials through conversations, group discussions, and other contributions (voluntarily written and presented). No grading or testing occurred. And yet, both Quinn and I felt the instructors had somehow managed to glean a lot about who he is as a learner and an individual simply through six days of connecting with him over meaningful curriculum, meaningful because it was chosen intentionally by Quinn.  As for the assessment of Quinn’s likelihood of becoming everyone’s favorite college professor, Quinn said, “I think it’s extremely accurate.”

In 2012, I sat down and wrote out my priorities for Quinn’s education, a valuable and worthwhile exercise that received a lot of positive feedback at that time, and that I have returned to at times when I’ve felt a need to check the calibration of my compass concerning Quinn’s education. Each time I’ve returned, I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well that list concerning my going-into-kindergarten five-year-old still fit, say, when he was transitioning from second grade at our living school to third grade in the public school, or when he was moving from there up into the middle school. These transition points pushed me to revisit my priorities for Quinn’s education more than the years in between, but when I did so, I found that what I valued for him at the beginning of his school years are the things I still value, and each time, it has helped me orient my efforts in advocating for his learning needs in each context in ways that aligned with those values.

2020 is a different year in every way, and it is exceptionally different in terms of how education is being and will be carried out. Quinn finished seventh grade pushing buttons on a computer screen, disconnected from his teachers and peers, isolating himself at his dad’s house in the woods. However, for the month it took for the school to transition into distance learning mode, he had a fresh chance to direct his own learning, and it was an oasis between the overscheduled school year to that point, and the button-pushing specter of school on a laptop that limped across the finish line. As we envision what his eighth grade year will be like, his last year before high school, it has been on my mind to revisit the priority list yet again. (Click here to read the original post.) With years of additional insights into how Quinn learns, I decided it would be a good time to do a fresh rewrite, although once again my revisit reconfirmed that everything on the list still resonates for me. The first priority, however, is the one that stopped me in my tracks this time: “Safety- A learning environment where physical safety is a no-brainer.” This cannot possibly be assured this coming school year with any physical presence in the school building. Though the language of that priority once centered around booster seats and sunscreen, the language of school safety has grotesquely mutated into how we can carry out active-shooter drills during a pandemic. Safety will always remain priority number one, and hence, this year will look very different from other recent years while Quinn has attended public school.

Still, I wanted to write this 2020 version from a place of naming what we want to move towards, vs. what we want to move away from. This is how I approached it in 2012 when I was feeling a visceral aversion to Quinn attending public school while he still needed quite a lot of social emotional support a good portion of the time. At that time, I tried to hone in on articulating the goals I have for his learning environment rather than just describing the outcomes I wanted to avoid; instead of focusing on how likely a differently-wired kindergartener is to be misunderstood in public school, I focused on working towards an organic learning environment where choice is central, the whole child is nourished. In 2020 I want to focus less on COVID-19 risk and more on crafting the best learning options for him given the circumstances. Still striving for an organic learning environment where choice is central, the whole person is nourished. The long-term goal is still and always a thriving lifelong learner.

Many things have changed in eight years, but so much has stayed the same. Most of what changed in this list is an organization of the original 12 separate items into 3 categories they seemed to gather into naturally: safety, connection, and self-direction. A disclaimer I would attach to this and all posts of mine: this is a description of my own values and is intended only as a means of articulating them for myself; if they resonate for you, that is a pleasant outcome we can enjoy, and if they do not, feel free not to let them slow you down as you scroll on by.

~Educational Priorities~

As Quinn’s mama my priorities for his educational experience are to surround him with nurturing environments and people and to protect and feed his love of learning. While I do not distinguish between learning and the rest of life, as I believe the two are inextricably linked, I will do my best to list my priorities for how I believe Quinn can best be supported so that he may thrive as a lifelong learner. I believe this will be achieved by prioritizing:

1. Safety

A learning environment where physical safety is a no-brainer. As drastically different as the content of this paragraph may be in 2020 than it was in 2012, the first sentence is the same first sentence. Physical needs must be met before learning needs can be fully realized. At Our Living School, we repeated a mantra concerning safety, “Our bodies are safe, our thoughts are safe, our feelings are safe, our work is safe,” and this is still a useful list.

Physical safety: Quinn’s physical safety is secured in his learning environment to enable him to focus on learning. The physical safety of educators must also be paramount. The presence of my learner in a school is possible only when teacher health and safety, and the health and safety of the families of those teachers, and the health and safety of other students and their families, can be ensured.

Mental safety: Quinn is in an environment where he can express his thoughts freely and knows his learning needs will be respected and supported.

Emotional safety: Quinn is able to feel, express, and care for his feelings.

Work safety: Whether it is what he was building out of blocks at five, or a research project he is getting ready to present at thirteen, the integrity of Quinn’s work will be honored.

2.Connection

I believe that a positive learning environment for Quinn will flourish when it grows from strong roots of connection and belonging. Several of the 2012 priorities focused on specific connections; between student and teacher, parent and teacher, student and peers, student and others of all ages. In 2020 I can see that these one-to-one connections are impossible to extricate from the web of community surrounding a learner, and while these individual bonds may stand out from the web when highlighting learning priorities, they all perform their roles in the best ways when the whole web is strong and stable. Strong connections will help Quinn develop empathy and compassion, and a realistic understanding of others’ realities. They will also help him self-reflect through relationship with others, and to continue to build healthy relationship skills.

Student-teacher connection: A bond between student and teacher ensures priority #1 through open communication and positive regard of one another. From connection flows the sense of nurturing, unconditional positive regard, and feeling of equal dignity that all humans deserve and require in order to do their best learning. I believe safety and equity for all other students is necessary for Quinn to experience the benefits of a connection to any teacher. If he can see that his peers of all identities and abilities are all being treated with that positive regard, then he will be able to trust that lighthouse when its beam is directed towards him.

Student-teacher-parent connection: Open channels of communication among those involved in Quinn’s learning endeavors allow for his strengths and areas needing extra support to be known so that all involved are attuned to his unique learning style. Parental involvement in learning is ongoing and meaningful.

Student-peer connection: The stronger the connections between Quinn and his learning community, the greater sense of belonging he will experience. Quinn feels ownership of his school as a place that is Home to him, with a positive sense of caring for his fellow students, who in turn care for him as part of their community. Values are instilled by the teachers towards this end, and extend outward to include his greater community, in which his school is an active participant. These values of community care are best realized by distance learning in 2020, protecting all learners and teachers, and finding creative ways to still foster belonging. Peer connections may take the form of online paleontology discussions and online D&D gaming sessions this year.

Connection to others of all ages: Quinn is connected with older teens and young adults who have skills he has yet to acquire to look up to, admire, and imitate, and kids who are younger, to keep things infused with imagination and wonder. He has involvement with people of all ages from the surrounding community, because the real world is a place where people of all ages interact, to everyone’s great good fortune. In 2020 we’ll have less in person interaction to be sure, but this will be good to keep in mind as a guiding principle, that while peer interactions are very important to developing teens, interactions with others of all ages matter as well, even if they have to be emails and video calls for a time. Grammy and Grampy, Mario and Luigi, I’m looking at you!

3. Self-Direction (trust)

The rest of the 2012 priorities group themselves comfortably under this heading. In 2012 I wrote about a whole-child approach, an emergent curriculum, a Yes environment with emphasis on play, developing an internal moral compass, and nurturing an intrinsic motivation to learn. In conversation with my teen about what works and does not work about schooling for him, we keep circling back to the need for choice. I want to strive towards a learning situation that prioritizes self-direction for the learner. (The heading contains parenthetical trust, because this path requires a large amount of it on the part of a parent supporting the self-directed learning journey of their youth.)

Whole-child or whole-teen approach: In my worldview, children come into the world as fully intact beings, destined to grow into their innate competence, as well as prosocial beings whose default desire is to cooperate, belong, and get along. Other worldviews exist in which children are born deficient or damaged, needing to be filled with knowledge and morals through a hierarchical top-down approach. My worldview encourages deep trust in the child’s inevitable trajectory towards competence, while the opposing one often requires proof through standardized testing or other means that they have reached competence.

I like a phrase coined by Marji Zintz that says, “attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the facts.” Giving kids the benefit of the doubt in their intentions and abilities empowers them to grow into their competence.

Whole-child or whole-teen approaches to learning must acknowledge the following: Academics, while held at high priority, do not eclipse other important lessons. Some of the lessons/skills I value most, in no particular order, are:

  • social/emotional skills
  • healthy bodies
  • mindfulness practices
  • self-confidence
  • compassion
  • writing
  • relationship skills
  • empathy
  • communication
  • movement
  • sustainability
  • fine art
  • creative writing
  • world culture
  • cooking
  • sports
  • drama
  • reading
  • conflict resolution
  • scientific reasoning
  • practical life skills (everything from gardening to making things to voting)
  • being a citizen in a democracy
  • critical thinking
  • math
  • social justice
  • music
  • community-mindedness

Many of Quinn’s skills will be honed at home, e.g. woodworking with dada or sewing with mama, and at private (dance/music/art/sports/karate) lessons or through outside-of-school classes, so I apply this concept to Life in General as well as educational goals.)

binary hand-counting in the wilderness

Self-directed learning: I referred to this as emergent curriculum in 2012, while in 2020 the term self-direction feels more resonant for the same set of ideals around choice, maybe because it emphasizes his agency in bringing about what emerges. Quinn is able to learn what he is drawn to, and the purpose of teacher guidance is to help him create meaning for himself about what he learns. He is able to approach each component of academics as he is ready for it, in a way that he can absorb it efficiently because it’s meaningful to him. He has the freedom to opt in or out of lessons he feels compelled or uncompelled by, and there is plenty of enriching material for him to engage with and be challenged. Further, the lessons offered are set at a level that is most likely to compel him, given that they are based on his/the student body’s emerging interests/intrigues/questions/thoughts/votes. He sets his own balance of autonomous learning time to cooperative group learning. Quinn’s preparations for his life/career goals (college, trades, conservatory, world travel or whatever they may be) are in his own hands and he is confident in his ability to craft his own educational curriculum, one that will land him squarely where he desires to be, wearing a set of wings to take him far beyond.

Consent: As mama of a young man, I see it as one of my most important roles in his learning to make sure he is aware and competent around the concept of consent. By honoring Quinn’s integrity, boundaries, and self-direction in his learning, I am modeling consent. If Quinn’s stance on a given subject or learning objective is no, it means no. Often choice is seen as something a teacher “allows” a learner, but that still creates a top-down dynamic which, instead of preserving choices, in fact limits them; if one of the available options is not “no”, the choice is not freely chosen. There is an illusion of choice that is created when someone says, “I will let you choose” but then the power rests with the person “letting,” not with the person doing the choosing. Forcing someone to learn, to press the “submit” button, is one way that consent is overridden in young people routinely, and I strongly suspect it contributes to a culture where consent is undervalued. Where students experience teaching as something to be done to them, they learn not to honor their own signals, but instead become resigned to others’ demands on them. Instead, by being clear on his boundaries, Quinn is learning where he ends and other people begin, and not just knowing about it in theory, but practicing and embodying consent.

Yes Environment: Yes means yes! A Yes Environment means that opportunities, space and materials are available to him whenever he takes initiative to express and explore. When he reveals an interest, the tools and materials he needs to follow that line of inquiry appear in a timely manner so he can continue and take it as far as he wants, until he is satiated. If he is engrossed in dinosaurs today (/this week/this decade), books and activities (games, videos, camps, virtual museum tours, ecology simulations…) show up in following days based on that theme and are strewn in his path for him to gobble up. His teacher’s role is to observe what is sparking his interest and tend the flame, requiring an individualized approach and attentive observation. This is best achieved in small class sizes where curriculum can flex and adapt. Instead of “no” stance on deviations, a “how can we…?” approach is the default. A Yes environment also provides structured and unstructured time and space to play. Play is of extreme importance to learning, and not separate from learning. Play is learning. Beyond K-12, Quinn is encouraged and supported in his life goals and help is always available to guide him in the right direction to meet them.

Internal Moral Compass: Quinn gets to grapple with right and wrong based on his own inner knowing, as he practices and calibrates his internal compass. He receives lots of guidance, information, and suggestions to help him navigate territory that is new for him, but never force, coercion or bribery, rewards or punishments. In areas including but not limited to consent, it is increasingly important for him to make morally right choices when nobody is around to police him or direct him in the right decision. He will do that if he has been exercising this muscle all along and his moral compass is well-calibrated and strong.

Intrinsic Motivation to Learn: His desire to learn comes from within, and that is honored in a way that maintains its integrity within rather than pulling it outside of him and replacing it with an external stimulus. Rewards and punishments are avoided in order to protect this intrinsic motivation to learn. Self-reflection around daily experiences, triumphs and disappointments will hold more meaning than grades, test scores, diagnoses, labels.

It is my belief that by prioritizing these values in Quinn’s education, Quinn will be set up to lead a fulfilling life. He will know himself well, always having been aligned with his own internal motivators, conscience, and self-knowledge. He will have confidence that he can achieve whatever he sets out to do, and will have obtained skills and knowledge that are required for that journey. He will know what it is like to be surrounded by supportive, encouraging people, and will recognize them in society. He will be attracted to workplaces with inclusive atmospheres and friendships featuring positive regard and nurturing. He will be unwilling to tolerate injustice because of his intimate experience of participating in a compassionate, justice-promoting community. He will know how to be respectful as well as to live in a way that inspires respect. He will know how to be flexible, how to think critically and creatively, and how to navigate real world situations because the real world is the place he will always have dwelled. He will be fully competent in making choices, as self-direction has been a key component of his entire educational experience- he will know that life is made up of choices, and he will be empowered to make them. These approaches to Quinn’s education will produce a strong, capable, caring, well-rounded, enthusiastic, empowered, joyful human being.

castles in the air

Posted on by
1

my bioregional swap partner (who also happens to be the creator of the bioregional swap) mary, sent me an amazing deck of cards. it is a set of 28 cards (number of days in a moon cycle) with photos that she took, and then passages written on the back of each one. she suggested bringing something to mind before drawing a card, not a yes or no question as if the deck is a magic 8 ball, but more of a topic or an area of your life you are pondering. the first one i drew was on the day i went and visited quinn’s teacher a week or so ago, to regroup and update each other and discuss my darling son. i held his education in my mind, and drew this:

0205132244

castles in the sky. image by mary good. (this is a photo of her photo- apologies for diminishing its quality)

then, one evening a few days later, the same day i had met with quinn’s counselor to regroup and update each other and discuss my darling son, i was reading an excerpt from walden, and this quote caught my attention:

“i learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…. if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them.”

~henry david thoreau, walden

so, quinn’s education is my castle in the air. i wrote my educational priorities for quinn at a time when i was newly open to the idea of quinn attending school. i have been an unschooler at heart throughout my parenting journey, but this school was an option because it would support my unschooling approach to quinn’s education, which can be said of very few schools. then once school began, we had some indications that quinn might not be ready for being at school full time, and we went back to kindergarten as usual- at home.

we also attempted to get him evaluated for asperger’s, though that evaluation has not been deemed necessary by the professionals currently at the helm of the evaluation ship. this past week, i have let go of needing to get him back to school in order to prove anything- about him, about myself. while i take very seriously what happened during his short school experience, i have finally decided it does not have to define our lives. we are unschoolers, and this was a stepping stone on the path back to ourselves.

0207131134a

unschool=building ewok log launching devices. we have a book on catapults on request from the library. kindergarten physics, baby.

being at home with quinn feels right. unschooling feels right.

discussing things with his teacher highlighted a few things for me… thoughts i’d already had, but have gained some clarity on after having them reflected back to me.

  1. going to school full time, without me, may not be the best thing for quinn, at least at this stage.
  2. going to school full time last fall may have happened too abruptly for quinn, who is known to be sensitive to all of life’s transitions. he hadn’t been in preschool like many kids have by the time they go into full-day kindergarten. his unease at this major transition time could have contributed in large part to his struggles.

my discussion with the teacher also held a pleasant surprise, when she shared her thoughts on welcoming the local homeschooling community at her school. she mentioned wanting to establish a program where on certain days homeschoolers and their parents could come and hang out at our living school. she talked about establishing such a program as soon as this coming school year (when, according to plan, she will also be adding 4th grade to her school as it grows and expands to ultimately include k-12). she referred to patchwork school in boulder, and their homeschool partnership, which she said is essentially half of their school, and what a cool set-up she thinks they have. you will see what i mean when you go click on that link, where you will find many thought-provoking ideas if you are like me and always thinking about this stuff. like this quote:

Why is freedom important? Because without it we are unable to develop an inner compass.  When we are allowed to be free, we are afforded the opportunity to look closely at ourselves and to self-actualize (be who we truly are).  When we create a free environment like the one at Patchwork, we are saying that we trust children.  We offer them freedom because we want them to practice choosing how to spend time and think about the world in a safe, supportive environment.  In essence, we want them to practice being free as a child before they are free as an adult.  As adults, we often don’t know what to do with our freedom, because for the first 18 years of our lives, it wasn’t a regular part of our reality.  Learning how to navigate one’s life early and often sets the groundwork for a confident and centered adulthood, reducing the likelihood that one will spend  early adulthood trying to “find themselves.”

the conversations with teacher and then counselor unlocked something for me, in terms of freeing me up to explore my long cherished notions of homeschooling quinn, while still addressing his potential needs for social experiences beyond what happens at home.

i’ve been stuck between the rock of money and the hard place of time, that so many parents are familiar with, trying to figure out either:

  1. how to come up with time to be at school with quinn to help him navigate what may be a tougher world for him to exist in than it might be for other kids, while working full time in order to pay for his tuition, or
  2. how to come up with the money to pay for this school, while not working full time so that i can have enough time to be there to help him navigate.

meanwhile, in my working life, there is nothing on the horizon requiring a master’s degree in marine science- and when i say horizon, speaking on a gut level here, i am talking a 3+ year drought in the funding for government/academic research. as in, the whole pile of people i know here in town who recently got laid off are going to be doing some branching out career-wise in the next few years if they are staying local. between teaching yoga, selling cloth diapers, and a potential nanny gig a few days a week (where quinn is welcome, and can easily bring along any projects he is working on) i think i can make ends meet while still waking up on weekday mornings and being mama, first and foremost. for the most part, i can do my various jobs with my sidekick along for the ride. all except yoga, which is mostly during times he is with his dad, and he spends the occasional hour and a half now and then with friends brushing up on his social graces while i teach. (we did attempt one evening yoga class where quinn sat on the sidelines listening to sparkle stories on headphones and coloring. i think his idea of being really really quiet and mine might converge a little more after another year or so. the best moment of the class was during savasana when he joined in the relaxation, lying on his own mat, and let out the biggest, noisiest yawn ever, which was of course met with giggles from other students in the class, a lot of whom are parents.)

if i am perfectly honest with myself, this is exactly the castle in the air i have been building all along. look, there it is. right where it should be. time to put the foundations under it, advancing confidently forward.

0213131103

the remainder of the kindergarten year, we will be working on building up our social network (even more than it already is.) we will continue to attend the happy river homeschool group that we already frequent. we will look into other homeschool groups in the area. we will sign up to be at our living school as homeschool partners whenever that program launches. we will be spending time at the pool so quinn can learn to swim. quinn has also expressed interest repeatedly in taking dance lessons, so we may look into starting that sometime in the next year or so.

0213131131a

i am looking into getting some math and reading curriculum, so any suggestions are welcome. it may sound counter-intuitive to have curriculum for unschooling, but i am an unschooler in the sense of we have choice in what we study- ruling out perfectly useful tools takes away some of the choices. i am generally not a big fan of out-of-context learning, so it will always be the kind of thing we use to supplement where our natural interests take us. take for example our bird “unit” that we are currently immersed in, thanks to a few really nice bird books passed our way- one with a nice section on paleo-ornithology (he likes to inform everyone that birds are dinosaurs), which led into practicing lowercase b’s and then writing b words on the bathroom sink with soap crayons. (bird burp. he had been having a little confusion among lowercase b and h.) soon we plan to head to my old lab to look at feathers under a microscope.

quinn is now officially reading, i used my mama intuition and a tip from another mama whose daughter needed a confidence boost when learning to read, and got some bob books. he read me the first and second books (out of the set of 20) without any help other than my hand putting his finger on each word and when he asked me what sound it made, i asked him back. really all i did was provide a warm body to read next to, which is why i think homeschooling is our thing- it’s much more side by side than face to face or lecturer to class. one of the things he struggled with in school was being able to hear someone who is speaking to him face to face, and his teacher had the sensitivity to notice that he tends to hear her if she talks to him from the side or behind his ear. some brand new not-yet-memorized material of a simple nature has proven to be just what he needed to boost his confidence.

0207131129

and really, the bedrock underneath the foundation here is the mama-son trust  we have been building and nurturing all along. and we have been learning-all-the-time, well, all the time.

66% quality of life improvement

Posted on by
5

actually i have no idea how to quantify it, but there is some wonderful change-for-the-better in the works in coparenting land. as mentioned, there have been quite a few changes lately in our lives, and lately the daily transition times (change is our theme!) have been a bit more bumpy. since quinn was around 2, we have had multiple transitions a day between mama and dada. starting out, we had mama droppping off on work days, then stopping in to nurse down for naptime, then picking up at 5pm, 5 days a week, and a sunday evening drop off and pick up for dada time. we reduced my work schedule to four ten hour days a week when quinn was around 3, and sometime after that my presence at lunch/naptime was no longer needed. still, right up until this week there were transitions twice a day, six days a week. lately, wherever quinn is, or whoever he is with, is where/whom he doesn’t want to leave, and there has been a lot of resistance and some rugged, drawn out, pick ups and drop offs.

we’ve also been talking about re-initiating more overnights with dada. we did have a once-every-other-week thing going for a while, but that waned to nearly zero since my ten day research trip in june. summer is like that, it gets hectic. so overnights work into the new plan as well.

i was hesitant to introduce more change at this time, but i think it actually amounts to greater stability for quinn and in the bigger picture, results in less change to deal with on a daily basis. since it seems he has been experiencing the daily change as upheaval to some extent, this seems like a good time to alleviate some of that.

so, we just went from twelve transitions a week…. to FOUR. (66% higher quality of life, shazam!) quinn will have 2 overnights per week with dada, and we’ve scootched his normal evening times with dada (on some of mama’s non-work days) over to the days he’s already with dada. so he will have longer continuous stretches with both of us, without changing how much waking time he has already been spending apiece. he’ll now have two stretches with each of us per week, rather than two per day. and i will only have to see coparent 4 times in a week, and if you’ve been following along, you probably understand that that is a happy thing for me.

not least of the benefits, is that i will have one night a week now (thursday) where i have alone time when there are things i can participate in as if i have a social life. things like yoga class, music jam at the barn, and i think there might even be a tai chi class on thursdays, something i’ve been wanting to check out. my evenings alone up until now have been wednesday and sunday, which for whatever reason, happen to both be nights when all the sidewalks are rolled up in newport. not that thursday has some amazing rocking scene going on, but at least there’s yoga.

i find it interesting to note the feedback i’ve received on our new schedule. most of it is congratulatory, of course, but so many responses seem to fall into either the “tripping on the past” or “future tripping” categories. i have been feeling so “in the flow” and frankly, brilliant, coming up with this schedule that keeps so much the same for quinn yet is fundamentally better for all involved. and hearing things about how it would have been great if i’d come up with it sooner, or hopes that i’ve covered with coparent that it’s not just for while he has a girlfriend, and other sorts of what-if future scenarios, is sort of a bummer. when i analyze it for myself, it is happening at just the right time and season of our lives. yes, it’s true, this does simplify coparent’s life in a way that might grant him longer chunks of quality time with gf, but i think he’s pretty clear that i’m trying to simplify my own and quinn’s life as my main motivating factors. and if gf time is one of coparent’s motivating factors, then, well, that makes sense. but he has also expressed feeling bad that i have to do all the driving (wanting to reduce that burden) and also has quinn’s best interest at heart. he can see the struggle it has been for quinn, and quinn’s parents, at all the pick ups and drop offs, and he can see how this is going to relieve so much of that. and as for “why didn’t i think of this sooner?” up until this age, i’ve felt pretty strongly that seeing both of his parents on most days was highly beneficial for 2 and 3 year old quinn, in developing his attachment relationships with each of us. now that he is four and a half, he has a little more of a grasp of the days of the week and also a firmly established trust in the fact that mama always comes back, and that he will see dada again very soon. this is the right time, but not before. (for us. with all of this, i would never want anyone else to think they should be doing coparenting the way we are, if it doesn’t feel right… wee disclaimer there.)

i said in that recent coparenting post that we are writing our own manual… to be sure, standard “dissolution with children” legal scenarios offer guidelines for how to adjust parenting time schedules as the child reaches certain ages and milestones, so i’m not completely reinventing the wheel here. i appreciate our way, because we are able to lovingly personalize it to quinn’s unique timing and personality and milestones, rather than a format prepared by legal minds based on average families. and the fact that we are able to cooperatively come up with win-win solutions between two people between whom “it didn’t go so well” (as my therapist would say with a wry smirk) and leave all the legal adversarial stuff out of it, is where i think we’re deviating from the norm and forging ahead through uncharted territory.

radical potty unschooling

Posted on by
2

unschooling at its core is the recognition that learning happens through living- all the time, everywhere.

i’ve heard unschooling explained by some who describe the way a child learns to walk, and how a child doesn’t ever really need a lesson in walking- it just happens. a child can’t help but learn to walk, given a body that is physically intact. the desire is certainly intact. it’s a train you would be hard put to stop, if you tried! i don’t think the learning-to-walk example is the best explanatory analogy for unschooling, most importantly because many mainstream parents actually do put effort into teaching their kids to walk, and therefore they may not be aware that this is a natural skill that kids don’t need to be taught. i do, however, value what happened for us as quinn learned to walk, because it taught me so much and was a lesson i have been able to apply elsewhere in our unschooling journey. quinn has a particular way of acquiring many of his life skills that is so inherent to his personality and nature. the way he learned to walk exemplifies it, and i’ve seen him repeat the pattern numerous times now. when he decided, at 15.5 months (late! by conventional standards), that he was ready to walk, he got up one day and took- not one- but ten steps. then got up again and took seventeen more. without falling! he is a guy who observes, observes, observes…. waits…. observes some more… and then when he is sure, he goes for it.

as i’ve been learning right along with him (i don’t ever pretend to be the learned one teaching him, just his partner in learning together!) i’ve been thankful to be able to see this part of his learning personality, since it makes it so easy to have a deep faith in his inherent ability to pick things up without me needing to contrive anything. sure, i’ve had the usual helping of doubts and concerns (like “omg! maybe i wore him too much in the sling and deformed him so he can’t walk!” and the like) but i’m pretty mindful to ignore most of that and just enjoy the ride.

with the potty topic, i have had another considerable helping of worries, but again, i’ve been confident all along that this is another skill that every child cannot help but pick up. kids (and all of us) have innate sociality. (thank you jean liedloff! rest in peace…) they want to do what their fellow humans are doing! it can be really hard to maintain the “trusting in it” attitude, when everyone else’s kids seem to be potty trained long before your own, and yet, i’ve watched friends one by one, complain of “regressing” potty learners, and wondered if maybe children get rushed into this stuff.

another facet of this particular topic for us, is that during quinn’s short 4 months in daycare, i learned that the childrens’ bodily functions were treated as “yucky,” a term quinn had never even heard before he went there, and that their diaper changes happened with latex gloved hands. i truly believe this harmed my child. sensitive guy that he is, i believe he internalized a message about his poop and pee that they were somehow not okay, and i have been doing my damnedest ever since to convince him they are in fact good and right and it’s great to poop and awesome to pee! we have talked about it a lot, and struggled through many resistant diaper changes (which i came to think of as outward manifestations of his inner struggle about bodily functions) and for the past several months he has had a pretty positive attitude about peeing and pooping in his diaper, and has been really helpful with getting them changed (whereas a few months before we were having a really hard time!) and the dialogue towards learning to pee and poop in the potty has been ongoing.

still, it was hard not to rush it- seeing his readiness to talk about it, though, was just an early sign. he needed more time to try on the idea. i did what felt right to me: nothing. i waited. i trusted.

and about two weeks ago, he decided to stop wearing diapers, and using the potty consistently.

100% consistently.

he’s not trained, he’s radical.