Every Waking Hour

I was looking for a word like circadian that expressed an annual rhythm and I guess the one in the title is a real one.

I decided to wake up this old unschooling journal in order to try a more narrative form for the daily learning notes I have been putting over here. While I was trying to figure out a way to start, I looked back over archives — specifically, April 2007. Right at the “one year ago tomorrow“, April 3, I find this:

As we get closer to summer, I am planning to phase out of a “learning notes” format and into a more unschooling type format of journalling, closer to what I was doing when I originally started this blog. Our CM semester is scheduled to end at the beginning of June. I am planning a few summer type lessons — which is what we usually do — but I think that once or twice a week will be enough to log our progress.

In early April 2006, I was answering Ron and Andrea’s questions about unschooling and wrote as follows:

I have an ideal of what education should look like. It is definitely NOT what standard schooling looks like nowadays, but it is little emphasized in unschooling circles, either, as far as I have seen. (It may be an implicit undercurrent; that is something I am still trying to figure out). Historically, it was called “paideia”. … the enculturation of a child into what it meant to be a person. Obviously, this was an ideal, and not carried out perfectly. But the idea of paideia gives an idea of a dynamic, of an interaction between what society is, what human nature is, and what the individual child is meant to be.

The April of 2005, I was just starting to inquire, skeptically though with serious intent, at Real Learning, about how unschooling could possibly work.

So to carry on the food metaphor, my toddlers get to snack on a variety of things we have around the house, but at dinnertime I’d prefer not to make 9 different meals for 9 different people. In fact, I have a meal rotation which I deviate from as required but which keeps me from panicking and ordering out at 5 pm every day. I encourage the kids to eat a bit even of the things they don’t like, though I don’t make a giant power struggle of it.

Can you do this kind of thing with education and still be an unschooler? That is, plan ahead and expect the kids to try a bite of each “dish” but be flexible in between, offering lots of options for supplementary learning and also be willing to switch and compromise on the “main courses” if something is *really* not working? Or is this sort of missing the point?

I am not as random as I used to think I was! In fact, it is a bit humbling to realize that you could almost predict what I am thinking and doing in the homeschool by the season. I would have to go back into Yahoo egroup archives (a frightening undertaking) to find what I was doing before that. But I know from this old egroup post from April or May 2001 (copied onto my blog years later) that I had already gotten a glimmer of my seasonal focus.

With education, I see from experience that a lot of learning depends just as much
on serendipity (Leonie’s word) as on conscious intention on the part of the teacher. Even medically fragile children like my son fare better statistically at home than at hospitals where they are cared for by trained experts — why is this? Preemies fare better when the bonding process with their mommies and daddies is encouraged even with a higher infection risk. Children in orphanages who were cuddled and nurtured by retarded teenagers developed normally, while their deprived peers failed to thrive. Homeschooled kids general do better academically than schooled ones even though their instruction is less systematic and less time-consuming, and less expensive. I think that is because learning is an active engagement, what Charlotte Mason calls a relationship, rather than an imparting of content. Relationships grow and are nurtured, like plants, as CM writes; they are not built like a skyscraper.

Last April 3 I did a sort of summary of how our year had been going.

Now, some thoughts on how the semester has gone so far.

Generally, it’s been good. I see that life is much happier when we are doing SOMETHING. In the past I’ve struggled with boredom when we got overly structured. This time I think we’ve hit a fair balance. Charlotte Mason believed in variety along with consistency in the daily schedule. She also believed in hitting the structured academics in the morning hours using SHORT lessons, and saving the afternoon for free discovery and exploration and self-directed projects and TIME OUTSIDE.

Our balance is still fair-to-middling. We still do our academics in the morning and — well, I only wish our afternoons were devoted to exploration and time outside. We still have a lot of icy, grungy snow outside and it just isn’t very appealing. The past week or so we have all been sick when we weren’t zipping from one appointment to another, so too much of our exploration and discovery time, I regret to say, has been spent on Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog.

I’m afraid that this is a rather self-referential spiral of a post. In future I will try to be more concrete! If you read this, though, and care to comment, I’d be really interested to know whether anyone else finds their homeschooling “style” changes with the equinoxes (equinoces?) and the solstices. I suppose farmers find their job shaped thus, the local flora and fauna in our corner of the California Sierras respond to the seasons, and the Catholic Church has framed the seasons in the liturgical year, so perhaps it is not surprising that my homeschool echoes this rhythm.