If perceivers are better at unlearning, it’s because they delay making judgments. So I’m not sure that unlearning for Js would be the same as unlearning for Ps. For the former, it would involve constantly changing their opinion about things. For the latter, it’s just absorbing information.

I think the value of unlearning basic premises can be overstated. It mostly makes you weird and difficult to manage. It might have entrepreneurial advantage for some people.

Maybe I just have J envy.

My parents, too, kept stacks of books lying about — mostly science fiction, but there was also a huge Complete Shakespeare novel I worked through one summer. Now my husband & I have our own stacks of books for the children to stumble through — a mixture of science fiction & literature, social commentaries & comedies, self-improvement & DIY… a nice mix of just about everything. Both kids love to read, BTW. My 18-yr-old shares with me a passion to devour a book before it hits the screen so we can do comparisons together. And my 7-yr-old is working through Mrs. Frisby & the Rats of NIMH, underlining the words that are too hard & looking them up in a children’s dictionary. So you’re right — leaving books in plain sight does foster curiosity and growth.

I’m unlearning the school-taught significance of memorizing times tables, because I can see how it is affecting my daughter, who is normally very good at spatial and logical thinking about quantities, proportions, and portions (fractions). Even creating the times tables on her own, in grid form (10X10), which I thought would be helpful, created alienation and boredom. I sympathize; I am seeing something in them at nearly 40, which all my life until now, I only saw as a rote memorization of things which can only be figured up by adding a number to itself over and over, each time…or else take the shortcut, and memorize the right answer.

I am seeing that this method has given her the choice between grasping real underlying concepts, or getting the answer right through memorization, because she starts guessing, wildly.

Instead of resorting to rote, which many people assume is all there is to arithmetic, I have decided to step back and question the idea that she MUST have the answer right to “What is eight times nine?” regardless of her readiness to grasp the patterns conceptually, and I see that her talents in spatial visualization, logic, and seeing the patterns in odd and even numbers, are waiting for encouragement, instead. I am seeing that the idea that memorizing the times tables when the person cannot yet conceptualize what they really represent, is counterproductive to the goal of helping the learner exercise logical and spatial thingking skills.

So we are unlearning the idea that that is a necessary first step, and going ahead with logic, with Venn Diagrams, and geometric awareness. Arithmetic operations are, to me at least, more complex than the more intuitive geometric ones, and there is no need, in homeschooling, to force a learner to choose between getting the answer right under pressure, and developing the far more important logical and spatial reasoning skills.

We all feel safer going along with what is familiar. Thank goodness for bravery and the willingness to risk the unfamiliar in our assumptions, even at the cost of our own ideologies and the social approval of others.