Talking about it

I’m a little ashamed to admit  it, but I’ve been rather shy about talking about my intention to home-educate Fisher with people I know or just meet. I realize that I’m worried about being discouraged in the face of my own slight uncertainty about taking on as huge a responsibility as educating my own kid. I’m also worried that I’m too radical in my opinions of modern schooling, even though I know this insecurity stems mostly from my own “follow the rules” kind of upbringing. And I can’t even imagine what my parents, who have already started an RESP for Fisher (which will come in handy if he chooses to go to university, and I hope he does), will have to say about yet another unexpected and unsubstantiated (in their minds) decision I’ve made about my life, and about Fisher’s.

But I have found bits of courage here and there, and when pressed about where I hope to send Fisher for school, I have been honest and told many people the truth about my plans for unschooling my son. And I am very happy and relieved to report that the support (after the awe has waned) for my choice has been quite overwhelmingly positive. I mean, we’re not living in the mid-20th century where the very idea of learning at home would have been far more foreign to mainstream, institution-fearing parents and leaders. And I’m fortunate enough to be taking part in an ever-expanding movement that is at the very least tolerated by my government and public school system.  So, as it turns out, I may not be so crazy after all, given the feedback I’ve gotten from the people with whom I discussed the issue.

Even friends who don’t have children have thought my decision to be wise. Even friends who are professional teachers (a group I’ve been especially hesitant to speak with about home-education because of their chosen career) have been very encouraging, acknowledging that the system they work in is far from ideal.

So today, after having discussed Fisher’s likely future course of self-education with another group of people, I decided that in order to infuse some confidence in my choices, I needed to talk about it with a lot less reserve and apprehension. I now know whom I can turn to when I’m unsure about my intention to unschool Fisher, but I also can gain confidence in myself by explaining my perspective to others. With practice I’ll also be able to find the best answers to the questions I’m asked, which will in turn re-affirm the feelings that brought me to this position in the first place.

So now I’m coming out of the unschooling closet, and I’m set to really put the wheels in motion for Fisher’s “unusual” education.

Delightfully puzzled

I have to take a moment here to boast about Fisher. He has been attracted to putting picture puzzles together lately, and is now able to put a 24-piece puzzle (usually intended for ages three and up) together without too much fuss. I’ll admit things weren’t when he first showed interest in puzzles. He wanted so badly to get the pieces together, jamming them into each other as best he could, and often breaking down in screaming-and-crying fits when the going got tough. He would often implore me to help him, and when things got really ugly I showed him how puzzles generally work. As he figured the process out through trial and error, I didn’t have to sit on the floor with him as much, and could call out advice such as, “turn the piece around until it fits,” or, “try a new piece,” when he got confused. Now he hardly experiences the frustration he felt before, and still keeps at it because he really enjoys putting these puzzles together.

The big motivator to his learning process is the actual interest he has in doing puzzles. Without that interest, he wouldn’t have come out the other end of that frustration period with as much skill as he now has. I’ve been trying, for instance, to get him to learn how to pedal a bicycle, but he hasn’t been too keen on learning this particular skill and is therefore resisting my attempts at teaching him anything about it. And there really is no point in pushing something that he clearly isn’t ready to learn yet. In fact, I might end up discouraging any appreciation for bike-riding he might come to have, and actually complicate and lengthen the learning process more than necessary.

And watching Fisher put together yet another puzzle this afternoon reminded me how illogical the learning mind appears to be to an outside observer. I mean, I can show Fisher how puzzles work and how I would put a puzzle together, but his way of accomplishing the same thing is naturally going to be unique to his particular pattern of reasoning and adapting. For example, I saw him pick up a piece and try to fit it somewhere, and when it didn’t fit, he dropped it and picked up another piece for another spot. And sometimes he would need to get one piece in the right place at one end of the puzzle before he could make sense of a completely separate piece at the other end. It was instructive to me to watch the seemingly random steps he took to get the right pieces in the right places, and yet he managed to accomplish what he wanted to in the time he needed to take. He was free from the pressures of “teaching” and of the clock, and that kind of freedom shouldn’t be a gift to a child; it should childhood protocol.

Witnessing my dad’s “supervision” of Fisher while he was putting a puzzle together yesterday drove this point home for me. My dad sat there pointing out the obvious, such as “no, that won’t fit there,” and “yeah, that’s the one,” with every move Fisher made. Talk about a display of the teacher’s ego! He was merely flexing his intellectual muscles (you know, showing a two-year-old how smart he himself is in being able to call out the right and wrong pieces of a 24-piece puzzle!), and didn’t once stop to consider how little, if anything, Fisher was getting from this experience. He didn’t stop to think that maybe Fisher needed to make the connections freely by and for himself without comments from the peanut gallery ignorantly pushing him to achieve some irrelevant goal. My dad was essentially telling Fisher, through his outwardly benign play-by-play commentary, that Fisher couldn’t be trusted to figure things out for himself. And THAT, my friends, is the biggest mistake that mainstream “teaching” makes, to the detriment of our children. Not trusting the pervasive talent and desire for understanding that children come into this world possessing is nothing short of a mortal sin against humankind in general, and our most vulnerable charges in particular.

More to that effect, I would be so bold as to declare that most teachers teach to make themselves feel useful because they don’t know how to be useful to their proteges. I would also argue that most don’t know the difference, though that doesn’t lessen the offence. School systems as a whole do little to encourage improvements on teaching approaches, which only aggravates an encumbered and often counter-productive practice.

So it’s up to us, we who love and obsess over and honour our little learners most of all, to decide what is the best way to serve our children. And I mean this proposition sincerely and with a spirit absolutely open to diversity; that as unique as learning patterns are to each human mind, so must our choices be with regard to educating the children in each of our families. What works for you may not work for me, but as long as we take a selfless and radical view toward modern education reform, and more importantly, simply choose to put the needs of our children above all else, progress is imminent. We must trust that our children innately know what they need, and trust ourselves enough, hand in guiding hand, to leave them to their own magnificent devices.

Mama and Papa, Part Deux

I’ve come to realize over the last few days that there is still have a lot of forgiveness I need to show myself over my own shortcomings. And I believe that this shortfall in self-forgiveness has been the biggest thing that has kept me from allowing Fisher to think and learn as freely as I would like.  The problem is that I try to reason many of my feelings away, admonishing myself for not wanting something “better” or different for myself and my family. But, I tell you, the mind never does win over matters concerning the heart. And when I finally trust that what I feel is indeed the right thing or way, and that I don’t need to justify to anyone why it is so, I’m more confident and open to allowing other good and right things to come into my life. Taking a deep breath and simply following the curves in the road make life so much simpler.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Since last August (about the time I last posted to this blog), Eric and I started trying for a second baby. I wouldn’t call it so much “trying” as removing obstacles, but there isn’t that much difference, so whatever. I figured it would be ideal to have a two and a half year age difference between our children, so we started the process expecting it to take a few months. It is now the beginning of March, about seven months later, and I haven’t gotten pregnant. I’m actually quite a bit surprised that nothing’s happened so far because Fisher was conceived on the second cycle of barrier-free sex. But I’m also a sleep-depravation survivor with a body that has changed a lot in the last three years. I’ve gotten older, wiser, happier, yes, but the older part is probably what’s choking things up a bit. And I think there’s one more huge thing that I’ve only recently been able to admit: I’m not actually ready for Round Two. I’ve been convincing myself over the last while that Fisher needs to have a sibling, that I’m home with him now so I might as well have another one as soon as I can, and that I want to be able to get the baby stage out of the way so that I can start thinking about what I’d like to do outside of my family life to, you know, make money. And in those moments when I couldn’t help but acknowledge my gut feeling, usually found in the relief I felt following the arrival of yet another period, I knew that there was more than biology at work here.  In fact, since last August a whole heckuva lot of things have been going on with us that would have put too much stress on an early pregnancy and an anticipated baby. For instance, we had bought a house by the end of that month, and had a close-call with the financing. By the middle of September, it had closed and we were in the midst of arranging contractors because the place was a disaster. After almost two stressful months of getting the house into move-in condition, we moved in. By the time we got settled, Christmas hit, which brought way more visiting than we’re used to as well as a driving test (which stressed me out so much that I actually had breakthrough bleeding the day after). And winter has given me cabin fever and too much time wandering around the mall. And now that we’re on the edge of Spring, I am a little overwhelmed as well as excited to get the rest of our renovations done. I don’t want to be inhaling dry wall dust and paint fumes while trying to nourish a life growing inside me. The front garden and back yard need years of work, and I have a lot to look forward to and work hard towards in that respect, which again won’t bode well for pregnancy or my state of mind if I feel I have to give up a much needed summer in the name of procreation.

All of the reasons for not getting pregnant I’ve just named seem really selfish, and perhaps they are. They are also very rational in nature, which is why those reasons are really only half the story. The truth is, the idea of caring for a newborn baby, however different it will be given that we now have experience, really turns me off at the moment. You would think that I would be pulling out all the newborn clothes, looking longingly at babies at the play centre, or doing everything I could health-wise to conceive. But I’m not doing any of those things because I simply don’t want to really even think about it. I adore Fisher and I want him to enjoy as much of his parents’ attention as possible until it becomes apparent that he doesn’t need us quite so much. But even more importantly,  I want enough time to essentially overcome the shock of Round One. It’s not that I am traumatized by the birth of Fisher, in fact far from it, it’s that I’m still adjusting and growing and replenishing myself in the face of the great love he brought to my life. My perspective has evolved so much that I want a bit more time to satisfy this need to become a bigger and deeper person, emotionally and creatively. And to be sure, there is also some more forgetting involved  because of the incredible responsibility of  caring for a new human being. Some mothers require much less time to move on to having their next child, but when I look at where I am, I’m really not there yet. In fact, these days I’ve been wondering if a second child is even in the cards for me (which is nothing short of stupefying given how long and how intensely I’ve wanted to have at least two children). But that last concern really is not relevant until a much more substantial amount of time has passed and I continue to feel the way I do now.

So all things considered, it seems I’ve reconciled myself to the strange but faithful acknowledgement that conceiving a second child is not my next project, as it were. My body has been following suit long before I knew what was what anyway. And as a result of my new outlook, I feel renewed patience both with myself and with life in general, as well as (funny enough) a raised interest in the babies I’ve come across. Eric is, as always, following my lead with this issue, though I can tell he still has to make up his mind on what he’d like us to do in the long run. We’re probably going to ride out the rest of this month (tee hee), and then get back on the ol’ birth control for the next while. And if I happen to get pregnant this month, all because I finally relaxed and said, “now is clearly not the time”, then all guts are off!!