So True

The only difference between joyful moments and others... is you.
The Universe
I love this one. Remember that kid who could go from shrieking to giggling in ten seconds flat? Well, lately she seems to have forgotten that skill. And, of course, me reminding her of the above does no good. No good at all. Makes me realize how seductive this life of duality, this illusion, really is. I guess that is why most spiritual practices are called just that, practice. You have to continually remind yourself of the Truth. Because of that I really enjoy the Notes from the Universe emails I get (click link above). Everyone needs a good smack on the head once in a while.

Fall Joy

I love this picture of E. The colors just coordinate so well, don't they, with her pink hair and pink vest against the browns and oranges? She and I had a fun moment a couple weeks ago raking up a big pile of leaves right under the swing and jumping off it into the leaves. Her cat, Willa, had fun with us, too. Silly cat would run into the pile and disappear, as if asking us to find her. But you had to be careful because as you dug through the leaves looking for the cat, she was ready to pounce on you the second you uncovered her!

Another reason to love fall and living here!

Hey, how about this posting streak? Can I keep it up? Time will tell!

Why I'm Not on Facebook

Years ago I read a short sci-fi story in which a young man was tired of living in his isolated apartment, only connected to the rest of the world by sophisticated tech, not unlike our internet today. He "called" his mother to tell her he was coming for a visit. She was shocked and tried to talk him out of it. Apparently in this world, it was very dangerous outside. Whole systems had been set up to keep people safe and in their homes - food was delivered to them and lots of other needs were provided by robots. Outside was a warzone. The poor and destitute of the world lived out there, fighting for survival.

Anyway, I don't remember what happened to the young man in the story, but sometimes I think real life is resembling this story all too well. Sure we can "talk" to someone halfway across the world at the click of a key(Hi Annette!), but I would much prefer a hug from that person (Annette gives good hug!). We can rack up the "friends" on social networking sites, but how many of those people would come watch your kids in the middle of the night when you have a medical emergency, or bring you dinner when you feel too blue to cope. How many do you know well enough to confide your deepest fears to?

I recently read an amazing article by a therapist who felt her work was adding to the problem of disconnection rather than helping. People can go talk for an hour with a professional, unload their cares, and then head back out there, just as alone as before. Wouldn't you rather have a friend drop by for tea to share your troubles and joys with? I would.

But Miranda, you say, you are here blogging, sharing with complete strangers. Why not Facebook, too? I admit, it is rather hypocritical of me to be lamenting the inadequacy of online community while secretly thrilling to all the hits and comments I have gotten in the last few days. But I am planning and scheming of ways to boost my IRL connections.

I have a local unschooling support group parkday each week and that has been great. We have had a few weeks of hiatus from that as we sort out our winter plans and I have missed it so much. We have been going to the homeschool ice skating, but that does not lend itself to very much connection, if you want to skate and your friend doesn't. But sometimes once a week is not quite enough.

I love this house and the land but I do wish I were just a tiny bit closer to neighbors. Or at least that I knew my neighbors. I'm not so good about just marching up and ringing a doorbell and saying hi. Must work on that. C can help. He is the social butterfly of the marriage!

Anyway, I have been thinking about starting a monthly Studio Night and inviting my friends to come hang out in my basement art/craft/sewing room and be creative together. I think it would be great fun and I can't wait to get it started. Just gotta get the studio finished!

Bottom line, I want more real life "face" time with people, not just Facebook "friends". I want to spend my time getting to know the people around me better, not "meeting" people from far flung places who I'll never meet for real. And it just makes me sad when I think of the people I already feel connected to who are far away and I really wish they were closer. The last thing I need is to feel closer to someone who is never going to be sitting across the table from me sharing a cuppa and our life's stories.

View

This is the view from my livingroom window a few weeks ago before the leaves all fell. If you look closely (click the pic for a bigger one) you can see the chickens in the tractor and two geese who stopped by for a visit down on the banks of the pond.

Anywhoo. I hope that those new readers who came by because of the unschooling stuff I had to say will stick around to see what else I have up my sleeve. ;-) As the weather cools down and more inside time is in my future, I do want to spend more time posting here. I have many thoughts about the state of the world, how it pertains to my life and how unschooling fits in, or not. I want to share the many projects I have been working on around the house. There will always be stuff to say about what the girls are up to and I have neglected that recently. I also see myself putting more pictures up on my photo blog, so be sure to check that out as well.

I guess what I am saying is that I have a deepening need for connection in my life and one facet of how I am going to address that is to post more, to share more of myself. I also have IRL solutions to implement and I will share those with you as well.

Time to get a shower to get ready for ice skating with the homeschoolers! See ya!

Finding Joy

I am on a roll here, clearing out the archives of my past work. Must be I needed to re-read these! This one would have been published in Live Free Learn Free if the editor had kept it going. I miss that magazine. :-(

My daughters have a beautiful puzzle that is really a set of square wooden tiles with fragments of a scene painted on them. A piece of sky, with sun or rainbow, here, a window, door or roof there, various animals, people, and plants as well. There is no correct way to put it together. You start with one piece and add on, as you like. Each finished picture is different, but they are all beautiful. Four tiles, ten or thirty, it does not matter; each is a complete scene.

I like to think of life and the learning that happens as like a puzzle with no edge pieces. There is no limit to what you can learn and no set time frame for how long you have to learn it. Each piece you find will fit somewhere in your own personal puzzle of life but it does not have to connect to any particular other piece. You build it as you fancy it. And it all adds up in the end because it is YOURS. It does not have to, and really should not, look like anyone else’s picture. Our present method of educating our children is to hand them the standardized puzzle pieces and tell them they have 13 years to complete it. And that they will be failures if they don’t complete it or if their puzzle looks different from everyone else’s or if they reject the standardized picture altogether.

Unschooling is honoring that individual picture of a life in each child, even that picture in ourselves as well. Respecting that we each have a picture of our own choosing to create. Trusting that we will “finish the puzzle” because in each given moment it is complete. Knowing that all the moments leading up to the present moment create a finished life. You never know which moment will be your last. Why not live each one as if it IS your last?

When people first start learning about unschooling, they think it is a method of homeschooling. You know, throw out the curriculum, pretend you are on summer break, and watch as your kids’ learning takes off. But what a lot of them find along the way is that unschooling is so much more. It tends to change the way you see the world and how you live in it. In profound ways that are hard to describe to the uninitiated.

It all boils down to the meaning of life. No, really. No simple matter, but the crux of understanding unschooling requires a shift in your beliefs about what life is all about. I’m sure most of you have heard about the idea of living in the present moment. Well, that IS unschooling. Pure and simple, but oh so very difficult for those of us brought up to live for the future, which is just about everyone out there. From the earliest times in life, we are encouraged to focus on what comes next, to prepare for the future, to put aside momentary whims for more important pursuits. What else is school but a preparatory course for “real life”? So they say, anyway. No playing now, you have to learn to read, so you can get good grades, so you can get into a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can make a lot of money, so you can be happy. All that time and effort and wasted joy. All for a promised moment of happiness, in some distant future you might never live to see. And who says money makes you happy anyway?

You see, that moment when you wanted to play but could not because you had to do something for the future was life wasted. Joy sent packing. Peace disrupted. What kind of foundation for a joyful life is that? Finding joy is the meaning of life. Discovering what your passions are and pursuing them is the meaning of life. Choosing your purpose and fulfilling it is the meaning of life. Unschooling is how you find joy, pursue passions, and fulfill purposes. How does that work? Live in the moment.

Yes, I’m going in circles. You’ll find life is like that when you slow down enough to see that life is NOT a straight line drawn out for you by someone else, about which you have little choice. Learning does NOT have to happen in proper scope and sequence. One thing does NOT necessarily follow the other. Life is meandering; it builds on the past, but not always in a linear fashion. Each new piece of life adds to something that was already there, deepening the meaning, polishing the theory, bringing each bit more into focus. You start in the center of your model of the universe and add on to the edges as you live and learn. Very much like that wooden puzzle of my daughters’.

Copyright 2004 by Miranda Demarest

Beauty and Balance

Another blast from the past, this one was published in Live Free Learn Free magazine in 2006.


Do you ever find yourself with tears in your eyes over silly stuff? Just a tiny moment that speaks of the beauty of life, like a scene in one of your kid’s cartoons, or an ad in a magazine, or a moment in your life that seems like a gift. Gifts from beyond are not silly, of course, but try to explain the reason you are crying to someone else and it might make you feel a little silly. I find myself having these moments more and more now that we are unschooling. I remember the first time I found myself crying over something I would have deemed insignificant. It was a Hallmark card commercial on TV when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. I was never one to go for touchy-feely sentiments and it took me by surprise. I had little idea then of how having children and sharing my life with them would change me. And since I have found unschooling, my life has been changed so deeply, it brings me to tears more than ever.

Unschooling seems to me to be the recognition of life as a series of moments you only get once, and the vow to do them right the first time. Children come into the world with no concept of life beyond the Now and it is a shame we put so much effort into abusing them of that gift. We should be learning from them about how life is a series of silly moments. You can either brush them off miserably in your haste to “do something” or “get somewhere”, or you can sit and laugh with wonder at the perfection.

I have learned from my second child about how each moment Is what it Is and how you can move on to joy from despair, in only a moment. Really. She can go from shrieking to giggling in 10 seconds flat. No grudges held for this one. We cannot control what life gives us, but we sure can control how we deal with it. We can choose to be the source of situations that our children have to exercise their amazing ability to forgive over, or we can partner with them in joy.

Unschooling focuses on the relationships in our lives, so that we can clear the way for joy and beauty and love and trust. Ask yourself each time you interact with those you love, if what you wish to do or say adds to the love between you or subtracts from that love. If this were your last breath on earth, would you choose to waste it yelling at your child or forcing them to fill out worksheets? Relationships are the most important things in life; they are what give our life meaning. It is not what we have; it is who we get to share what we have with.

Unschooling is not so much about learning as it is about living. Learning is inevitable, so they go hand in hand, but to really embrace unschooling, you almost have to forget about the learning. You don’t stop providing interesting stuff and experiences for your children, but you start to do it in the interest of a life well lived, not a learning moment. You buy the video game because it is fun, not because your child might learn something from it. You go to the museum to look at interesting stuff because you enjoy it, not for the educational opportunities. The really cool thing is that the learning happens anyway, even, and especially, if you don’t plan and scheme for it to happen. People really do learn what they need, when they need it. For me, to believe otherwise would be a serious lack of faith in a higher order and purpose to life.

There is a balance to be found between living in the moment and living in the world with others who do not share your belief that the moment is paramount. Too much laissez faire education does look to the world like educational neglect. Rest assured, it usually means they just don’t know what they are seeing. However, engaging your children in the world and showing them all that life has to offer is our job as unschooling parents. To allow our children to think the world is only what they know and have seen so far is to do them a disservice. My mother used to say that what I knew could fill a book, and at first I took it as a compliment. Then she would say that what she knew could fill the encyclopedia on our shelves, and I realized that what she was saying was that there was always more to learn. She knew more than me due to her longer life, but what there was out there to know could fill every book in the world and then some. As long as they know that there is more to know and as long as you strive to show them ever more, unschooling will flourish. That is to say, your lives will be full and interesting and, well, worth living.

Find the balance between striving and being, reaching and relaxing, living for and just living. Find that place and unschooling will become living and that will be a beautiful thing. Watch out, it just might bring you to tears.

Copyright 2006 by Miranda Demarest

Unschooling Thoughts

I wrote this a long time ago, but realized I never shared it here on the blog, so here goes:


There are two days about which nobody should ever worry, and these are yesterday and tomorrow.
Robert J. Burdette

Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are. Marianne Williamson

Unschooling is a terrible term to use to describe what I envision our life with our children to be. The focus on the "un" brings up a negative connotation from the start. And the word "school" emphasizes the exact opposite of what we will be living. "Unschoolers" have gotten into the habit of defining what they do by what they don't do. This tends to look like we are running away from something (the school model), rather than striving towards something (living and learning as inseparable). It makes us look like we are basing our decisions on fear of school rather than simply choosing differently.

For me, it is about choosing a lifestyle for our family that can offer so much more than the public school model. It is about allowing our children the opportunity to figure out Who They Are and then live that Truth. Starting Now, not some distant time when they are set free to "find themselves", as so many young people seem to need to do once they get out of school.

Unschooling allows our children to discover and learn freely, when the interest strikes and as they come upon new things, not according to some predetermined schedule set by someone else. The learning is more real and the "lessons" are forever. When you think of the things that you have learned in your life, I would bet that most of the learning that you actually use in your life is the stuff you have learned on your own or that which you were already interested in when it was taught to you. How much of what you learned in school do you even remember, let alone make use of in your life?

Unschooled children will most likely not learn the same things that their peers in school are learning and they will learn similar things at different times. This is okay because unschooled children will be learning every day the things that are important to them and the things that are relevant to their lives. They learn the things that they need to accomplish their goals according to their passion. Over time, this leads to a vast repertoire of knowledge that they can actually use in their lives. During this effortless process, they are learning the most important thing of all, how to think.

Learning to think for your self is a crucial skill and unschooling is an excellent way to "teach" this skill. If you don't know how to think for yourself, you are forced to let others do the thinking for you and are therefore under their control. It is a common practice of some organized religions, in order to protect their dogma/tenets, to encourage their followers to avoid questions about their faith. Do you know why? It is because the dogma does not hold up to critical analysis. It usually does not even pass the internal BS meters of the followers of the faith, as evidenced by the infinite individual interpretations of the tenets. For example, the Catholics who think that birth control or abortion are okay, a belief that is directly contrary to the teachings of the church. Why is it so important that everyone follows the dogma, or at least keep their mouths shut about it if they don't, and not trust anyone who questions their beliefs? Power. Plain and simple, it is an issue of power for the institution of the Church. It affords the institution power and therefore control over the followers.

The institution of school has power over us for the same reason, although maybe not so overtly. But we generally do not question the necessity of school. And if our children do question us, we silence them with dogma about how it is good for them and how they won't succeed without a good education. Most of us have not stopped to question our motives and goals for sending our children to school. We go along with what we were taught, what everyone else is doing, and never stop to think that there might be a different way, let alone a better way.

It is imperative that our children learn to think critically, lest they be controlled their whole lives by the institutions of our world; church, school, medicine, etc. They must learn to march to the beat of their own drummer, to know and follow their hearts, to seek and meet their life purpose and goals. The best way to do this is to ask themselves, as they encounter new ideas, "Is this what I believe?” "Does this support Who I Am?” "Why, why, why?” Otherwise they will live unexamined lives, pushed along by the groupthink, never truly happy, never knowing what it all means.

And this brings me back to unschooling. This is the hands down best way for children to grow up knowing Who They Are. It requires living in the moment, leaving out fear of a future never actually experienced. The future is truly a figment of our minds. When the future gets here it is then Now. Now is All There Is. If now is all there is, then there is no sane reason to spend all your time preparing, and poorly at that, for a future that will never come. This is school. You work so hard to learn the stuff someone else has decided is important for your future (and risked being judged poorly if you do not "learn" it well enough). No one can know what you will need in the future, not even you. All you have is the now, and all you can do is be in the present moment. All you can do is use your resources, both internal and Divine, to act appropriately in any given life situation. The more present you are, the more effective your actions will be, unmuddied by fears of the future or weighed down by thoughts of the past.

Unschooling allows for living in the moment, pure and simple. That is what unschooling is. You live your life, now, and along the way you learn. You follow your passion, now, and it leads to a successful life. If you define success by the amount of Love, Joy, and Peace in your life, not by how much money you make, that is. Fortunately, for you skeptics out there, a life filled with Love, Joy, and Peace tends to include all the money you need.

It is an exercise in faith and trust to unschool. As the saying goes, faith is stepping out into darkness and knowing you will either find solid ground beneath your feet or you find that you can fly. Unschooling is leaping off the cliff and finding you can soar to heights never dreamed of while standing at the edge.

Copyright 2004 by Miranda Demarest

School Math

Got the below here.

The Standard School Mathematics Curriculum

LOWER SCHOOL MATH. The indoctrination begins. Students learn that mathematics is not something you do, but something that is done to you. Emphasis is placed on sitting still, filling out worksheets, and following directions. Children are expected to master a complex set of algorithms for manipulating Hindi symbols, unrelated to any real desire or curiosity on their part, and regarded only a few centuries ago as too difficult for the average adult. Multiplication tables are stressed, as are parents, teachers, and the kids themselves.

MIDDLE SCHOOL MATH. Students are taught to view mathematics as a set of procedures, akin to religious rites, which are eternal and set in stone. The holy tablets, or “Math Books,” are handed out, and the students learn to address the church elders as “they” (as in “What do they want here? Do they want me to divide?”) Contrived and artificial “word problems” will be introduced in order to make the mindless drudgery of arithmetic seem enjoyable by comparison. Students will be tested on a wide array of unnecessary technical terms, such as ‘whole number’ and ‘proper fraction,’ without the slightest rationale for making such distinctions. Excellent preparation for Algebra I.

ALGEBRA I. So as not to waste valuable time thinking about numbers and their patterns, this course instead focuses on symbols and rules for their manipulation. The smooth narrative thread that leads from ancient Mesopotamian tablet problems to the high art of the Renaissance algebraists is discarded in favor of a disturbingly fractured, post-modern retelling with no characters, plot, or theme. The insistence that all numbers and expressions be put into various standard forms will provide additional confusion as to the meaning of identity and equality. Students must also memorize the quadratic formula for some reason.

GEOMETRY. Isolated from the rest of the curriculum, this course will raise the hopes of students who wish to engage in meaningful mathematical activity, and then dash them. Clumsy and distracting notation will be introduced, and no pains will be spared to make the simple seem complicated. This goal of this course is to eradicate any last remaining vestiges of natural mathematical intuition, in preparation for Algebra II.

ALGEBRA II. The subject of this course is the unmotivated and inappropriate use of coordinate geometry. Conic sections are introduced in a coordinate framework so as to avoid the aesthetic simplicity of cones and their sections. Students will learn to rewrite quadratic forms in a variety of standard formats for no reason whatsoever. Exponential and logarithmic functions are also introduced in Algebra II, despite not being algebraic objects, simply because they have to be stuck in somewhere, apparently. The name of the course is chosen to reinforce the ladder mythology. Why Geometry occurs in between Algebra I and its sequel remains a mystery.

TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds. Truly interesting and beautiful phenomena, such as the way the sides of a triangle depend on its angles, will be given the same emphasis as irrelevant abbreviations and obsolete notational conventions, in order to prevent students from forming any clear idea as to what the subject is about. Students will learn such mnemonic devices as “SohCahToa” and “All Students Take Calculus” in lieu of developing a natural intuitive feeling for orientation and symmetry. The measurement of triangles will be discussed without mention of the transcendental nature of the trigonometric functions, or the consequent linguistic and philosophical problems inherent in making such measurements. Calculator required, so as to further blur these issues.

PRE-CALCULUS. A senseless bouillabaisse of disconnected topics. Mostly a half-baked attempt to introduce late nineteenth-century analytic methods into settings where they are neither necessary nor helpful. Technical definitions of ‘limits’ and ‘continuity’ are presented in order to obscure the intuitively clear notion of smooth change. As the name suggests, this course prepares the student for Calculus, where the final phase in the systematic obfuscation of any natural ideas related to shape and motion will be completed.

CALCULUS. This course will explore the mathematics of motion, and the best ways to bury it under a mountain of unnecessary formalism. Despite being an introduction to both the differential and integral calculus, the simple and profound ideas of Newton and Leibniz will be discarded in favor of the more sophisticated function-based approach developed as a response to various analytic crises which do not really apply in this setting, and which will of course not be mentioned. To be taken again in college, verbatim.
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And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds—a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract.
And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.
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Phew! Glad my kids don't go to school. Time to go play with triangles in boxes...... (Read the article to find out what I mean!)