Important Lessons at Quarter of 10, or Why We Unschool
Many of you may not know that JLynn is not only homeschooled, but unschooled. We don't really restrict her movies or video games (we don't have TV), except for age-appropriateness (as defined by us, not the MPAA) and we don't force her to learn anything on any particular time-table or curriculum. So, here is a tiny snippet of "school" today:
so i send jlynn (who will be 12 next week) to bed, tearing her away from her Brain Games book. i tell her she's welcome to do it upstairs, and she asks why it matters if she's just going to be doing the same thing. i tell her it's so i can have alone time for the first time since yesterday, at least knowing where both children are and that they're not killing each other. "plus, then you'll be in bed for the 10pm no-kids-allowed time."
she goes upstairs and comes back down not 5 minutes later, and sticks Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 in my face. "dude! Shakespeare was gay!" I read. we google. we talk about why does anybody care what anybody does in bed. i said "I sleep with my feet on the pillow. Nyah-nyah!" Then we read something that says something about "the social consequences of associating the most canonical author in history with the historically controversial behavior of homosexuality" to which i called bullshit, since there were the greeks? hello?
then i also mention Romantic Friendships and how lots of famous writers had these intense, lifelong friendships (we compared them to today's BFF, OMG! or, rather, contrasted them) and how these people, often women, had these decades long intense relationships with other women that didn't necessarily cross into "sexually 'romantic' boyfriend/girlfriend or girlfriend/girlfriend" type of relationship. "Like Anne & Diana," I said... I think she had an example too, but i forget who.
and then we talked about how they wrote these letters over great distances, and talked about how the concept of distance has changed so much in so short a time, and then that got into how as recently as 500 years ago there were areas of the world where if you left your village you might never get back. and how they got stupid names, like "big hill town." then i said "one of the other ways places got named was through - you're going to learn a new word! - hierophanies. You know like the hierophant?" She nodded and defined him in the tarot quite accurately & succinctly. I said that a hierophany was when there was a manifestation of a deity or God or something. The example I gave was of Bob the woodcutter who cut down a sacred oak "(because oaks were sacred to them for whatever reason, that doesn't matter)" and then his wife spontaneously combusted and burned down their thatched roof cottage. "And to this day the place is called "burning oak town" or something.
while she was putting her wet clothes in the dryer we had this conversation:
"will i still have to be in bed at 10 o'clock when i'm 15?"
"it depends on how annoying you are. if you're like xxxxxxthen yes."
"i won't be like xxxxx!"
"i know. you'll probably have better things to do. governments to overthrow, buildings to blow up, heads of state to assassinate, y'know."
"hahahahah! you're a bad parent."
"i know."
and then i really made her go to bed. then i realized the clanking sound from the dryer was WRONG and discovered she'd left her lip balm, a rock and 75c. (and hadn't cleaned the lint trap). i marched upstairs & handed her the rock & lip goo & said "I'm totally keeping this 75 cents for rescuing these for you and cleaning the lint trap. Check your pockets!"
so i send jlynn (who will be 12 next week) to bed, tearing her away from her Brain Games book. i tell her she's welcome to do it upstairs, and she asks why it matters if she's just going to be doing the same thing. i tell her it's so i can have alone time for the first time since yesterday, at least knowing where both children are and that they're not killing each other. "plus, then you'll be in bed for the 10pm no-kids-allowed time."
she goes upstairs and comes back down not 5 minutes later, and sticks Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 in my face. "dude! Shakespeare was gay!" I read. we google. we talk about why does anybody care what anybody does in bed. i said "I sleep with my feet on the pillow. Nyah-nyah!" Then we read something that says something about "the social consequences of associating the most canonical author in history with the historically controversial behavior of homosexuality" to which i called bullshit, since there were the greeks? hello?
then i also mention Romantic Friendships and how lots of famous writers had these intense, lifelong friendships (we compared them to today's BFF, OMG! or, rather, contrasted them) and how these people, often women, had these decades long intense relationships with other women that didn't necessarily cross into "sexually 'romantic' boyfriend/girlfriend or girlfriend/girlfriend" type of relationship. "Like Anne & Diana," I said... I think she had an example too, but i forget who.
and then we talked about how they wrote these letters over great distances, and talked about how the concept of distance has changed so much in so short a time, and then that got into how as recently as 500 years ago there were areas of the world where if you left your village you might never get back. and how they got stupid names, like "big hill town." then i said "one of the other ways places got named was through - you're going to learn a new word! - hierophanies. You know like the hierophant?" She nodded and defined him in the tarot quite accurately & succinctly. I said that a hierophany was when there was a manifestation of a deity or God or something. The example I gave was of Bob the woodcutter who cut down a sacred oak "(because oaks were sacred to them for whatever reason, that doesn't matter)" and then his wife spontaneously combusted and burned down their thatched roof cottage. "And to this day the place is called "burning oak town" or something.
while she was putting her wet clothes in the dryer we had this conversation:
"will i still have to be in bed at 10 o'clock when i'm 15?"
"it depends on how annoying you are. if you're like xxxxxxthen yes."
"i won't be like xxxxx!"
"i know. you'll probably have better things to do. governments to overthrow, buildings to blow up, heads of state to assassinate, y'know."
"hahahahah! you're a bad parent."
"i know."
and then i really made her go to bed. then i realized the clanking sound from the dryer was WRONG and discovered she'd left her lip balm, a rock and 75c. (and hadn't cleaned the lint trap). i marched upstairs & handed her the rock & lip goo & said "I'm totally keeping this 75 cents for rescuing these for you and cleaning the lint trap. Check your pockets!"