Here is my son at an empty pool. So many places we go are empty because we go in the middle of the day. This photo happens to be at the University of Iowa, where my brother is getting a PhD in chemistry. But the photo could be anywhere. As someone pointed out in the comments section here last week, people are not used to seeing kids in the world. At least during the school day. Kids are missing from the world during that time.

I never realized how creepy that is. Everyone notices us walking around because kids are not supposed to be seen during the day.

There are so many things I did not notice about the world until I started to notice school. Which reminds me of a study by Roy Baumeister. He had people walk with books balanced on their heads for a few minutes each day. And it turns out that making someone mindful for just a few minutes a day actually makes them more mindful about things all day long. Mindfulness snowballs.

I think this is true about school as well — being mindful of how our society teaches kids has made me more mindful about how our society does lots of things. And I’m shocked by how much I had been missing.

We are in NYC for the weekend. Usually when we come here, my preparations are finanical. For example, perparing for the inevitable $8 hot chocolate (pictured above).

But this time we were going to a wedding and I knew we had to prepare for the questions about school.

So, the first thing is, I’m done telling people I  homeschool. Because look, if you think worksheets, and national-non-customized curricula is best for your kid, then really, school is great at that. School is great at teaching to the test, and you don’t need to homeschool.

So I am unschooling. I am trusting my kids that they can figure out what interests them and it will be my job to help them learn what they are curious about. So we are doing self-directed learning.

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I have a six-year-old boy who absolutely loves being around people. He wants to run and play and be goofy. He needs other kids. And kids love him. Actually, everyone loves him, which has lead my ex-husband, for a time, to question his own paternity. (Reasonable, really. What are the odds of two parents with Aspergers creating a child who is always the most popular kid in the room?)

Okay. So I absolutely have to find my son kids to play with. And I don’t know where to find them. I have tried hard, though, and here is what I have discovered:

1.     The classes and clubs that are high quality are after school. Of course. Because that’s when most kids are free. And those kids have friends in school, so they are hard to get to be my kids’ friends.

2.     The families who homeschool seem to do everything as a family. It is very expensive to separate the kids each day. It requires money for a nanny or two parents homeschooling simultaneously. So families make friends as families, rather than a six-year-old making friends with another six-year-old. This is really hard for me because I have no interest in making friends of my own.

3.     Should we make friends in our neighborhood or in activities? We go into the city three times a week to get stuff we can’t get where we live (like violin, speech therapy, soccer teams). This leaves us only two weekdays to play with the rural kids who live near us. Maybe I’m imagining things, but it feels limiting.

4.     Homeschool groups are cliques. The moms have been homeschooling for ten years. They don’t need a newbie interloper. They are set in their routine. No one is mean to me, for sure, but there’s a wide gap between mean and available.

5.     There is a time gap. We have a lot of time and we would fit well with some families that have kids in school, but kids in school are always crunched for time because everything is scheduled after school.

Do people have suggestions? Am I not seeing things clearly?

Suddenly, so many traditional school subjects look totally insane to me. Here is a list.

Language Arts.
Kids learn languages themselves if you just put them among a bunch of kids that speak the language. The only reason we don’t do that is because classrooms are like antiquated, face-time-oriented  9-to-5 jobs where if you are not there you don’t count. So people can’t put their kids among kids who speak another language.

Spelling.
There is Spellchecker. I know, because I’m a terrible speller. The words like you’re/your and two/too are words you pick up if you read. Words like corollary (I needed Spellchecker for that) are words that if you misspell in a handwritten note, people will excuse the misspelling. So all that time you could spend learning to spell, you could just spend reading. Also, to learn to type you learn to spell. And kids should learn to type before they learn to write a sentence.

Cursive.
This is actually fine to teach – for art class. I bought calligraphy pens for my son. Many kids with Asperger’s love to write by hand, so I thought he’d love calligraphy. I imagined him have a signature worthy of the US Constitution. It turned out that I was right about loving lettering, but not the cursive. He took my Jelly Roll pens and wrote block letters. Fine. No cursive for him, and it’s still artistic.

Geography.
If the kid is on the Internet all the time, the kid is already a world citizen. Anyone who makes a friend with someone in another time zone will want to have a sense of where they live. They will look on a map. The terrible geography of US students comes from being stuck in a classroom, overly focused on US history and US current events, instead of out in the world, reading International web sites, meeting people and traveling. Normal curiosity can lead to a knowledge of geography tantamount to a year’s worth of the topic in high school.

Home Economics.
There is a resurgence of home economics classes that mirror the trend that men take care of kids at home more and also, homesteading and eating local are hip, so homemaking follows, in the hipster category. The thing is that if your kid is home all day, the kid can make lunch for everyone, tend the garden, and do the things that actually need to get done at home instead of making up assignments at school.

My son is learning to use a potter’s wheel. The woman who is teaching him is a potter (is that the right word?) and working with her is phenomenal. When someone knows their craft so well, their teaching is breathtaking to watch — it comes from deep in their soul where their passion for the craft lives.

I wanted to write about all this. I wanted to tell people that finding the right mentor for the right project is what makes life fulfilling. In unschooling or in work. There is no difference.

But then I posted about this topic on my other blog and the discussion was mostly about should people homeschool.

Suddenly, I have no patience for this question. It’s like the question, “Should people job hop?” The answer is unequivocally yes. If you job hop, your work is more engaging, you make a wider range of friends, and you earn more money. On top of that, job hopping makes for a stable career.

But people don’t like hearing it. Because hearing it makes it harder to pretend that staying in one place is really okay. I don’t want to debate about whether the hard thing is the right thing when it so obviously is. I want to talk about how it’s so hard to do what’s right all the time.

I’ve been homeschooling for about two months. I remember when my first son was born, and I thought, after five days, “This is crazy. How could I possibly do this for eighteen years?”

Of course it gets easier. And the same is true of homeschooling – the first few weeks I thought I would never make it a month, let alone until they’re 18.

Mostly I have spent this month generating more questions than answers. A boyfriend in college told me that the process of learning is asking sharper and sharper questions rather than finding answers.

He was right. And I am learning a lot.

So I have little that I can tell you that I know. But I can tell you two things:

1. Each fall day when we walk in the pasture, goats trailing us like dogs, I’m thankful that my boys don’t spend the day in school.

2. Each day that I post a photo of my kids I am thankful that I started a blog about homeschooling, because I also started a photo album, which I never had before.

This is a guest post from Kate Fridkis, whose family did homeschooling when she was growing up. She blogs about body image at Eat the Damn Cake and she blogs about homeschooling at Skipping School.

When you’re homeschooled and interested in something, you don’t go to your mom and say, “Mom, teach me more about this.” You try to figure out how you can gain more exposure to that thing. You might ask your parent/s for advice on where to start. And then you go out into the world and learn some more.

If you want to be a poet, you contact the most famous living poet in your area, and you ask if you can hang out with him/her. You join poetry workshops and groups and you sign up to compete in poetry slams. You send your poetry out to magazines and competitions. You start a poetry club. By the way, by this time, you are learning a lot more than poetry. You are learning how to organize people, compete in a public arena, and manage what is beginning to resemble a small business.

When you learn naturally, on your own, it’s hard to cut the world up into subjects. If no one tells you that this particular thing is called science, and in science you learn biology, beginning with the parts of the cell, and then you learn about genes, and eventually you get to chemistry, then you might find yourself doing science by accident, for fun. Just because you want to.

Which no one ever believes, because people think that kids are lazy.

“If I left my kids alone,” they always say, “They’d just play video games all day.”

They would definitely do that some days. Because video games are fun. But if they were homeschooled, they wouldn’t have learned that work and play are two totally different things that you’re supposed to do at different times. And the part where you’re supposed to be learning is over on the work end of the spectrum, while the video games are all the way on the other side, under a big sign that reads “play.” Work is an activity that you can be bad at. You might fail at any moment. You know it’s work because it’s required, and because your progress is always being measured. Play is when you can relax and be yourself.

It’s sometimes hard for people who went to school to imagine living in a world where work and play are the exact same thing. But guess what? That’s this world. And for kids who grow up out of school, learning is the same as being alive.

You don’t exactly need a teacher for that.

I went to a meeting of homeschoolers. In rural Wisconsin, of course. Because that’s where I live.

We talked about that the group is a safe place to talk about the things we’re having trouble with. A leader pointed out, “If you go to church and tell someone you are having trouble teaching algebra, the person will say, then put your kid in school.”

Everyone nodded.

Then no one told about any problems they have.

Instead we talked about what there is to do. Where you can take your kids: The zoo. The children’s museum. The science fair at the local college.

I expected to talk about educational theories. Does project-based learning make workbooks irrelevant? Does child-driven learning mean no algebra for dancers? Who among us would qualify as an unschooler?

But here people are proud that they can teach their kids to national standards. They talk about Algebra 1 and they worry about getting the right answer when someone asks what grade their child is learning at, saying only “between 8th and 9th.” And I think, “Really? At that age, who cares? What does she like to do? Where does she want to go?”

There is a pattern in my life. Where I try my best to do what is right. I go with my intuition and follow my heart. And I realized that, once again, I have driven myself to the fringe of the fringe.

When my son realized I had his dance class music on my iPod, he started asking for it all the time.

Then he started asking about the lyrics.

“Are they saying shit?”

“Yes.”

“Can we say that?”

“When we are singing the song.”

“Really? Let’s go back to that spot in the song. I want to sing it.”

I explained that in other parts of the world, saying shit is not the huge deal that it is in the country.

“Everyone says it?”

“Well. Not six-year-olds.”

“When I can drive?”

“Yeah. When you can drive and you’re in that area of the country.”

“How will I know if we’re in that area?”

“Someone will say, ‘Yo yo bro, how’s your shit goin’?'”

The kids die laughing.

We listen to the song more.

They ask what it means to say, “Beats so big I’m steppin’ on Leprechauns.”

And they point out the song sheds light on Lucky Charms.

And I’m starting to think the car might be more educational than I realized.

We do a lot of driving. The largest city within four hours of us is Madison, WI, so we drive there three days a week for swimming, soccer, violin , dance and social skills lessons for my kids. We drive to Chicago once a week for cello lessons. So one of my biggest worries is that the kids are wasting their lives away in the car.

This is not the worry I expected to have when I signed away my high-flying CEO position in favor of  life on a farm.

We listen to lots of classical music in the car. The Suzuki method espouses the idea that listening to a piece of music is akin to practicing it, so I tell myself that we are really practicing a lot.

But it’s hard to know where reality ends and my rationalizations begin. Is is good to take the kids to Madison? Do all kids need to try new stuff or can they hang out on the farm all day?

Don’t tell me the farm is a great place to grow up. Because it’s isolated. And one kid, for sure, is a city kid. And I feel that I owe it to him to show him more of the world. But I’m not sure: at what cost?