Laughingmommy
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Posts posted by Laughingmommy
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Thank you!!
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Do "go" and "do" rhyme? Like maybe if you recite a poem in a Scottish accent?
The second stanza:
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountainsides of dreams.
Thanks,
Pei
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VaKim,
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
Pei
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I can't figure out what "by" repeated in the second stanza means, like just definition-wise. How do I find out? Where do I go? Who do I ask?
Thanks,
Pei
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The Big Outage happened during my most intense bout of homeschool planning ever. Fortunately, there were cached threads I found just by googling. And the inability to procrastinate reading the K-8 Curriculum board allowed me to spend a couple of sleepless nights searching the depths of my homeschooling soul and facing the most tedious parts of curriculum planning. If this forum was down for an extra day, I maybe would've even photocopied and typed up assignment sheets!
Pei
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I found it! I found it! I found it!
YAY!!! Great job! for organizing before, and for finding the organized lists! Hooray!!
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What's a good place to look for these? I see they're not at Rainbow Resources. I see they ARE at Amazon... anywhere else?
Thanks,
Pei
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My 4-year-old is fascinated with her big sister's PLATO Science curriculum. Is there anything more suitable for younger kids? Even late elementary would be alright.
Thanks!
Pei
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Such a GREAT idea! Thank you!!!
Pei
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Thanks for listening. Advice? Thoughts? Comforting gestures? :D
I think we homeschooling Moms (and non-homeschooling or non-Mom people) are often so hard on ourselves. I have a feeling that in the long run, this decision won't matter much. So, for now, why not just do whatever feels righter to you. ;)
I feel for ya,
Pei
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I am following this thread mostly trying to learn, and I really appreciate what everyone has had to say on both sides of the issue. I am not an unschooler and could never be an unschooler. But I am interested in the philosophy for what I can glean from it.
I am really confused about this whole definition of "play." It sounds like some people think that if children are doing something academic, then it cannot be "play" and vice versa. Can I share something that happened recently with my dd7, and can you all tell whether this is "play" or not, "unschooly" or not?
Dd7 came to me and asked me for something to read about the Treaty of Paris. (This was completely her thing. It was not anything required for school.) I found something for her to read online, and when she was done reading, she told me she "needed" to write a report. (Apparently she and a friend had formed some sort of club in which they had to learn something and report on it when they next met.) So she dictated to me her report, and I wrote it down for her. I later let her use that for her copywork instead of WWE.
To me, this seems like both academics and playing all in one. And if she continue to do this all the time, I likely would not do a writing program at all, so long as she was learning to write on her own.
I'm not sure anymore about homeschooling labels. Your experience sounds similar to mine, though. I just call it life.
FWIW, I have learned that with my kids, it's been very useful to read curricula and learn them myself. So much "teaching" has to happen on the fly for me. Sort of a follow-the-flow-of-learning kind of thing. We own so many curricula, and I love them all. None works very well for my kids, but they work wonders for my pedagogical thinking. Just something to keep in mind.
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So, I looked up "play" in the dictionary, and true enough, nothing about fun or pleasure. Some about sexual innuendos, though. Interesting.... And nothing about amusing, either, though lots about amusement, as in recreation or sports. (though "playful" seems different) I might have to change my casual usage of "play." How could I ever say now casually, "oh, they're playing outside"?
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The common meaning of "play", including the decent definition from the dictionary that was cited before. When you redefine "play" in this context to just mean "have fun" or "enjoy", you discard the playing aspect and you just wind up with a synonym for "enjoy", or whatever else you've redefined "play" to mean. Play as used in discussing early childhood development includes many activities already mentioned: playing games, playing with toys, role playing, etc.; schooling activities have their own words to describe them.
I think a previous poster painted herself into a bit of a linguistic corner by essentially redefining play to include any learning activity that's enjoyable. Traditional schooling and flexible interest-led learning (relaxed homeschooling) often of course include such activities. There's no need for unschooling to provide this.
Ahhh.... I see. Thanks for explaining this. I knew there was something I wasn't quite getting. So this is like a technical definition of "play," as in "play" in child development terms.
Gosh, then I guess my kids "play" very little after a certain age! I can see how "play" learning would be incredibly labor-intensive. So, probably I wouldn't say we do play-based learning since we don't use games to learn anything. We sort of learn as a consequence of living. "Life-based learning"? And I don't know that it's accurate to say we into "child-led" 'cause I still supply limits and resources and guidance, so it's like "co-directed."
Perhaps rather than call ourselves radical unschoolers, I can start to say we are "life-based, parent-and-child-co-directed, academic-resource-rich, interest-driven learners"... something like that? ;)
My kids hate that kind of "play learning" - they always find it patronizing and condescending. They like their academics deeply-meaningful and non-nonsense. "Play learning" always seems so weird to me, but maybe because I find academics inherently satisfying and pleasurable.
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I fully understand that not everyone gets to work in a job of their own choosing that they so evidently thrive in, that many jobs do not offer scope for defining and following one's own projects, and that some people prefer a very serious work life which they separate diligently from sources of play in their lives. But for others, intellectual play and work/study go together inextricably.
I'm really curious about this notion of a dichotomy between play and study. I suppose I am definitely in the "intellectual play and work/study go together inextricably" camp. Honestly, I'm having a tough time figuring out (I don't mean here, I mean in my life in general) if some people are "destined" for academic study and if some people just don't benefit from it. If some people "naturally" have inner drive and others don't. And how much of these things are inherent and how much circumstantial. I ask in earnest when I ask what "play" means to people. I'm starting to get that people don't all mean the same thing! But I still only understand what I think "play" means. For me, "play" and "work" are synonymous, and they are both synonymous to "life." Maybe I need to go find my husband and badger him until he gives me an adequate explanation of what other people mean when they say "play." :confused:
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I'm so stealing this! Thank you, thank you for sharing this!
Months ago you said, "I think the advice that has helped me the most is something I heard at the 2011 SENG conference. It was to frequently use the phrase “That’s good enough,†both with your children and yourself."
I stole that line also. That's good enough. :)
You're awesome, Jen.
Oh.... I think I might have to steal these phrases too! Especially "That's good enough." I dare say we NEVER say that in this family! Well, that's just gotta change right now! :D Thanks, Beth in SW! and Jen!
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Does anyone know if the assessment includes any attention to learning disorders?
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My daughter is enjoying Irasshai, http://www.gpb.org/irasshai. The videos are kind of goofy, and the tone is real casual. We love it! My daughter also loves watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles. Sure, they end up learning really.... interesting words.... but my daughter really did pick up some of the language.
I'm guessing she loves to draw manga? If not, she might like to look into it. My daughter had a lull in her interest in art until she started drawing manga starting a year ago. Recently, she started doing Artistic Pursuits, and I was really amazed what she could do. It's like the manga drawing did things to her brain so that even though she did no "real" art training, she took to "real" art right away.
My kids don't struggle with reading comprehension, though. However, I did. I'm an immigrant, so everyone assumed it was an issue with language. Nope. I coped well 'cause I'm really smart. But I never really figured out how to read "at my level" correctly. I remember doing 4th grade reading comprehension test things with my kids and not being able to figure out the answers. But here's the thing. I'm brilliant at reading. I almost have a good Ph.D. in literature. I discovered recently that I HAVE to read intense texts. Anything a little less challenging, and my brain just won't focus.
I have no idea if your daughter has that problem, or if her reading comprehension problems warrant some kind of intervention. Good luck finding the answers! :001_smile:
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That all sounds good, but is unconvincing as a redefinition of "play" in this context. "Playing around with a concept" and similar sorts of wordings are just attempts to skew things. When one's at work, one can call it "play" if one likes, but the truth is that it's an assigned task, not at all the sort of activity that people mean when they talk of a child playing. It's as I said: unschooling's claims about play are rooted in ideas about early childhood development; it's simply overstating the case to say that structured learning of advanced abstract topics is play. Words can be twisted, but in the end after the twisting is done, the original meaning has gone by the wayside. It's not such a harmful thing to admit that one is wrong.
I understand better now that the "play" in "playing around with a concept" isn't the "play" you're talking about. So what is? I really do want to know. I know someone cited: "1. To occupy oneself in amusement, sport, or other recreation" as a possible definition. I wonder if there's a distinction between study and play. Is there? I mean, sure, there's work in play and play in work. Like, you can play computer games at the office, and you can "study" the rules of a board game. But are they just inherently different? I'm really curious. I mean, can chores ever be play (to put the notion of work in terms I can relate to)? I mean, you can talk all about laundry sorting fun and all kinds of cleaning games. And I think they can be fun. But we're still trying to make something inherently "work" MORE play, or LESS work. It's hard for me to imagine laundry as play.... though I will allow that it might be possible for somebody else. Maybe work and play exist on a continuum? Or maybe they're two different and separate quantities in each situation.
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I'm going by the standard meaning of the term "play", that's all. Sure, one can have fun learning anything; one can be amused by a concept one's studying in any sort of way; but feeling like you're having fun or being amused doesn't mean you're playing. I don't think most children would tend to learn quadratic equations just for their own amusement.
I think I understand it well enough. I think what's going on with what I consider to be the misuse of the word "play" is that an idea about children learning many foundational skills etc. during early free time (actually playing games, playing with toys, roleplaying with other children etc.) is turned into an overarching statement about how children optimally learn all things. After that ensue many discussion board exchanges where some people attempt to show how even structured learning is play, and others keep pointing back to what play really is.
I think that encouraging a love of learning is a great thing, and so is interest-led learning, which tends to encourage it.
Iucounu, I suspect I misunderstand your definition of play then. I understand play to mean using something to have fun, like playing with a doll or playing with a concept, or play-acting. It sounds like a much more broad definition than yours.
I really like that you're separating love of learning and interest-led learning from unschooling. Unschoolers hardly corner the market on those things! In fact, it's highly-disputable what allows someone to follow their interests. I think structure is necessary for creativity. You need a structure to resist, co-opt, explore, play with, and manipulate. I guess maybe I include "work" in my notion of "play." I mean, even if you're playing with blocks, it's WORK! :D
For me, play had always been a lot of work. I was very result-driven (i.e. knitting to make the thing, studying to get the grade, playing blocks with the kids so they grow their brains). Just recently, I made a New Year's resolution "to not try." And since then, I've been slowly discovering that I like to play. But I'm not doing anything differently. It's just that everything I do now seems fun and exciting.
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I find this discussion very interesting. I toyed with the idea of unschooling when we first began homeschooling, and i do love Holt's books. But I Realized it was not for me, for many reasons. Mynhomeschool group otoh, does have a few unschoolers, including my closest friend. I truly believe she is doing her children a disservice, and have suggested this, gingerly, to her. Over the course of the last year pr so she has begun to add in more formal academics because she has come to the conclusion that "my kids need to learn to apply themselves to difficult things.", somethingnshe says they were not doing on their own. They were playing upwards of 6 hours a day on computer and video games, watching a lot of television, and the oldest, at 9 could not add or subtract. Not only that, the oldest was beginning to notice that she was "different" from her peers (she joined our math club) and instead of feeling motivated, or inspired to dig in and learn, she felt embarrased, ashamed and "dumb". It didnt help her confidence at all when my 6 year old tried to help her with a sticky math problem. I do believe some children dow ell with less structure, and some children need more. Sme children have the sort of personality that says "Let me at'em!" when they realize they have a deficiency, other children just shrink from it, beginning to believe the worst about themselves. My friend found that when she posted on a popular radical nschooling board about 1) her 6 year old's abiding interest in violent, mature video games she was told that to prohibit them would be wrong, controlling,, and tha she should "let him find his own way." and 2) when she posted that her younger asked her to teah him how to read, most board members discouraged her from any direct instruction whatsoever.
Of course, this was a radical board, and there are unschoolers who perhaps don't go to that extreme. Nonethesless, i do think this particulAr brand of unschooling is becoming more commonly associated with unschooling in general.
I feel for your friend. I never went for the violent media. I did relent with anime for an 11-year-old, though we watched it together (very enjoyable!). Those "radical unschoolers" your friend found sound awful! I had disapproving looks thrown my way when my oldest started showing interest in reading at 2. Not unschoolers, though, WALDORF! But is is not really Waldorf. Like all communities, you can understand the philosophy and apply it to reality, or you can take the philosophy and take how people adopt it as dogma. Homeschooling can be so hard: finding community, figuring out your parenting/schooling/life philosophy, applying it to actual kids and situations. I'm glad for your friend, that she took cues from her kids in terms of what they needed. Video games 6 hours a day is usually not fun or play. For me, anyway... I find it's a lot of work! It's what I do when I'm exhausted, though it does nothing to help me rest. It does help me stop and reassess what I'm doing in my life, the choices I'm making. You know what it reminds me of? SCHOOL! The tedium, the suffering, the constant jumping through hoops, the arbitrary grading.... :lol:
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I like to say, "oh, it hurts so good!" We find it amusing that doing fun things can be so painful, whether it's muscle-ache or brain-drain. It's all good. :chillpill:
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Yes, it works only for you, not by the dictionary definition. Learning quadratic equations occurs as part of study, not "amusement, sport or other recreation".
I must be crazy! I LOVED proving the quadratic equation. One of the (very few) highlights of a sucky (for me) high school math education. :lol: Seriously, though. You all don't love learning? Photosynthesis, literary analysis, trigonometric proofs? Not fun, not play? I guess I'm a nerd leading a team of nerd kids! Yikes!
I don't know that unschooling would work for everyone. I'm sure it wouldn't work for all parents and educators. But the assertion that it works for no one seems so misguided. Even if it has never worked for a single person, it might still work for me. Isn't that how innovation happens? If all those extraordinary people stayed true to those ideas of smallness: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "why aspire to what has never been done before".... what an uninspired world we would find ourselves in!
I think the model of schooling is sometimes so wonderful. I've had inspiring teachers, and I've seen inspiring homeschooling parents. I've also seen awful teachers and parents. I mean, of course, awful in my eyes. I mean, honestly, all these statements about how learning is not play, that learning is antithetical to play.... that to me is awful parenting and teaching. How can one hope to inspire a lifelong love of learning when you begin with the assumption that it's an obligation to be suffered? Gosh! :001_huh:
Of course, whoever is pitting learning against playing probably doesn't mean what I'm making it out to seem. I emphasize how my kids use a structure while they learn whatever they're playing with (I suppose you could call it intellectual or academic play, though for us, it's just play). Yet, someone else might emphasize how their kids learn within a structure while enjoying some degree of enjoyment. In reality, these two models could be the same thing, just differently identified.
I wonder how you all "play." What do you do for play? For the longest time, I tried to "play" with my kids and I had a tough time. Over a decade later now, I accept how playing with toys is not my forte, though I still keep at it. I've learned that exploring the world with humility and intellect is the "funnest" play of all. What are your concepts of play? Maybe that's the holdup with understanding unschooling...?
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Only in America, in this century or the last, could a woman like Sandra Dodd ever even exist to share her stories. There has never been another time when the getting of a living was so taken for granted, when comfort was so easy to come by, where concern over where one will get his next morsel of food and understanding to fight off oppressive powers, could produce someone with this type of parenting philosophy.
I would wager to guess that she and most radical unschoolers are all at least 3rd generation Americans. They have not had to suffer the extreme poverty that my friends from Haiti have experienced, or seen the opposite, which is my friends from Haiti who were medical doctors, and could escape that poverty only by the means of extreme measures from childhood on...of extreme sacrifice of parents and children to provide their child with a proper education and attendance to college. My educated Haitian friends tutor their children in mathematics after school every day. They seek Charter schools for pre-med or mathematics. They value formal education because they see what it means for their children. It literally means escape from poverty and generations of children who can have clean running water, electricity, clothes on their back and medical care themselves!
Formal education is the difference between the Protestant Reformation, or remaining in the Middle Ages indefinitely. Without Martin Luther's formal education, would he have been able to read the BIble for himself? Would he have been able to argue with Erasmus? Would he have been able to write the many books and letters?
Formal education is what made the writing of our constitution possible.
Now hear me: By "formal education" I do not necessarily mean institutionalized learning. Formal education can be accomplished at home, by oneself, by a tutor, by mother, in a school, and in many other means. But formal education means hard work and sacrifice, at some point and at some level, and usually means guiding children to get to the plateau where they have the tools to do whatever they are called to do.
Our own benefactor here, Susan Wise Bauer, had an extremely interesting life full of farming, travelling, racing horses, (or something to that effect)...read her blog. THis is a woman who really had a lot of fun, experienced life first-hand, and lived through her Latin studies to tell the tale. Formal education made her book, and therefore these forums, possible!
I am not advocating for an extreme. Early formal education does seem to have its detriments. Too much formal education to the detriment of play, exercise, and free time has its detriments. Formal education that does not fit the student can have detriments.
But to espouse a theory that all children should always choose what to learn, when to learn, and how to learn is, to me, just so obviously a product of the prosperous times we have been in.
Well, I'm an immigrant myself, as is my husband, and we unschool. I haven't experience what I would call extreme poverty, but my Mom often peeled "bad parts" of vegetables off at the cash register (so it wouldn't be weighed) only to put it all back in the bag to cook at home later. :tongue_smilie:
Is it wrong to be a product of prosperity? I'm not sure. I know that I complain sometimes about how so-and-so feels SOOOOO entitled. But then I gotta think, aren't we privileged as well? What motivates my desire to criticize or look down upon someone else's sense of entitlement? I'm not totally sure. I do know this, though. Entitlement and victimhood are flip sides of the same coin. They both come from a place of powerlessness and lack of self-esteem. Rather than use one's accomplishments to define one's self, an entitled person uses their privilege. Even if they profess and believe themselves to love it, inside, there is a hollowness. Or not... I am only conjecturing based on my own self-examination.
I guess for me, though, I've had the privilege of attending prestigious learning institutions, and I can, with minimal reservation, bear witness to my own experiences of intellectual joy. I let my kids know: these were my trials, these were my shortcomings, these were my strengths, these were my goals, these were my desires, these were my dreams. And I ask them, what path shall you take? They are still young (almost 12 and 10, 4, 2), so they haven't "rebelled" against my life's experience. And I don't know that they will. I haven't tried to impose my experience on them. I wait with baited breath to see what amazing things they will one day create. They might win Nobel Prizes, they might display art in galleries, they might be hobos living in remote woods. I don't know, but I know whatever they choose to do, I will be equally amazed. I see in them divinity, and as creatures with spiritual purpose, what is there to judge? The only thing I will not tolerate is their not processing their experiences. That is the only regret I would never be able to live down, that I fail to instill in them the desire to be mindful and conscientious.
For my kids, formal education is very important. For them. They ask for it, I simply supply. I am grateful that their world views align with mine. They don't have to, though. It's just practical that my kids are greatly gravitated towards intellectual studies, 'cause I'm pretty much a moron when it comes to everything else. If one aspired to be a personal organizer or a sports star.... well, I might have to outsource the parenting and schooling!!! :lol:
I think it's a great privilege to live in a time of prosperity (for us, not in the world everywhere). I would feel uncomfortable if my kids used that privilege and abused it. Yet, at the same time, I would feel uncomfortable if my kids did not use that privilege of having many options. That's like throwing away a spiritual gift. Of course, Buddha (Siddhartha) renounced his worldly abundance, and that seems to be awesome too. But I think I have the responsibility to explore what can be explored with privilege and prosperity, to the best of my abilities (which is somewhat limited because of previous times of less prosperity). My husband and I talk about this a lot. We are naturally very fearful and negative, having been raised that way. But that is not our children's past, at least not the main portion of their past and identity. We hope our kids will learn from our stories and opinions and perspectives. We hope they will grow solidity in their own perspectives.
I used to lament, for many years, how my kids will never be able to relate to me. They'll never get that steely core that I got from striving for survival. Well, years later, as it turns out, they didn't need that. They're developing steely cores from other trials and tribulations that come up in their own lives. And boy, can our takes differ sometimes! In the process, I've learned to enjoy prosperity more: I've gone hog-wild with curriculum. With art supplies. With outdoor toys. With organizational purchases. I'm doing totally impractical things like sketching, notebooking, printing in color (!!!), knitting, learning, and just enjoying what a non-poverty-stricken mindset can feel like. I think it's no less a challenge than feeling poor, mentally that is, obviously physically it's far worse to be poor.
My apologies for the long post, this discussion has been so thought-provoking for me! Thanks everyone! :grouphug:
"The Land of Nod" poem
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
You know, I read in a poem later in the collection ("System") end rhymes "good" and "food" ("And every day that I've been good,/I get an orange after food."). I think it's the Scottish accent! Because these two words do rhyme in a Scottish accent where "good" is pronounced with the oo sound. I just wish I could listen to a recording of these poems read with Stevenson's accent (Scottish).
Pei