Utterly Meaningless

I have three boys. Much of their education has been around the sandbox, literally. Read aloud and discuss while boys push trucks thru complicated cities they have built and continue to build while they are listening. Study Egypt; build sand pyramids. Study Virginia history and geography, sculpt “the Mountains, the Piedmont, the Coastal Plain.”

We’ve also done family outdoor “dramas” depicting the food chain, buried different kinds of materials to explore decomposition, and an incredible amount of bird watching and sketching, sprawled in the grass of our ordinary back yard. Then there are the sleeping bag nights for learning constellations.

Everyone laughs when I tell this one (forgive me if this is a constant rerun) – but most memorable of our outdoor classroom experiences was when those little Razor scooters became all the rage, and I read Greek myths aloud as my wild little boys circled around me in our apartment parking lot, pushing with one foot as hard as they could go and rattling those scooters among the stray gravel. They got it all, from Apollo to Zeus, and begged for “more myths” every day, much to the amazement of our neighbors.

Thank God (and I mean that quite literally, not in vain) they were not constrained to desks, where their inability to move would have interfered with their ability to pay attention.

And yes, today, the big kids of my family (18 and 16) are quite capable of sitting still and knowing how to give all the cues of traditional “paying attention” for meetings and regular classroom work.

And the only desks they’ve asked for have been computer desks, which we have found to be quite helpful.

Our school desk is either the dining room table, or the back porch, depending on the weather. I actually have a schoolroom, with a school table. It holds stuff.

Wow – and apparently it’s not just the article’s assumptipon! What discouraging comments — If School is a State of Mind, then I guess setting your kids up for “home education” doesn’t mean you’ve escaped it!

It’s been years since I was reminded just how radical we must be as unschoolers. Regular classroom work? Schooldesks? Paying attention to classroom experiences and lessons? What schoolish comments – UGH!

I’d love to have a schoolroom to keep all our stuff in but we wouldn’t do our lessons in there.

A craft room with a big table would be even better. I hate to use the kitchen table for crafts because they are never done in time for our next meal. That would get used at our house.

Little Homeschool on the Prairie in the backyard? So the TV audience can understand homescho- I mean, school-at-home, for what it really is?

I have a tiny house, there is absolutely NOWHERE to put desks. One wall in the dining room is our computer lab(if you will). The walls above it and around the windows are for posters, maps, and artwork. One wall is nothing but bookshelves, there’s another in the spot between the diningroom/living area. The door to the garage has a picture of George Washington on it, and some cut out words we put up last year. Another wall has some poetry on it. There are two more bookshelves/video shelves in the living room. There are things stuck on the walls in the hallway. There’s stuff stuck on the fridge. I’m going to copy another local home educating lady and paste up a laminated times table chart in the bathroom. Yup, education pretty much happens wherever the heck we feel like in this house. 😀

If you were doing anything interesting at all, why would you need “lots of things to look at” like brightly colored walls and a rug? Shouldn’t they be looking at what they’re working on??

Gotta agree with you Nance. When I wrote about our outdoor experiences in that comment above, I blanched at my using the word “study,” after having settled on it thru some internal debate as a genuine description, tho’ perhaps with more intent implied than was really present at the moment. The experiences were experienced as unschoolers, but I find myself constantly balancing as to when to “translate” into something non-unschoolers seem more willing and/or able to comprehend, and something that is more authentic about unschooling life.

As you say, sometimes a cake is just a cake, and no lesson plan or school furniture is needed to make it “count” or just fun and tastey.