Unschooling in difficult times

A bit of background: The type of homeschooling we do is usually called “unschooling.” It’s a lifestyle based on the belief that kids – humans, really – are learning all the time, and that structured lessons are just not necessary. With our academic backgrounds and priorities, it took a real leap of faith for Frank and me to try this little experiment on our kids. Two and a half years later, the results have far exceeded our hopes, not only in terms of the learning that we are seeing (and can prove to the state), but in the fun we are having and in the way it has strengthened our relationships with our kids.

An ideal unschooling environment is one where the kids are exposed to a wide variety of materials, people, and experiences, usually with one parent on hand whose full-time job is creating, maximizing, and “refreshing” the kids’ learning opportunities. We do this by packing our house with books, supplying learning materials, answering questions, subscribing to magazines, signing up for classes and teams, watching movies, and, of course, traveling.

Hurricane Katrina tossed the ideal right out the window. In addition to suffering a tremendous family disappointment, we are facing insurance and other hassles, worrying about money, living in somebody else’s house, sharing said house with 8 members of our extended family (for a total of twelve people), trying to find what we need in an unfamiliar town, and feeling completely removed from the resources we usually rely on. Add into that our concern for our relatives and other residents of the Gulf coast who’ve lost so much more than we have, and I’m sure you can see that we are unschooling in less than ideal circumstances right now.

It’s working beautifully anyway.

In the past few days, we’ve had conversations about the periodic table (encompassing atomic weights, compounds, chemical names and tricks for remembering them, and protons, neutrons, and electrons); _The Scarlet Letter_ and the mores of Puritan society; evaporation and why lakes don’t dry up; the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln, and how diseases spread (all thanks to watching “Sahara”); regional political leanings; the differences and similarities between Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Party members, Socialists, etc.; the process for and implications of appointing a Supreme Court justice; imagination and what counts as “real”; positive, negative, and neutral buoyancy and what it takes to achieve each (with real life experiments in the pool involving flotation devices and a big rock); and, of course, hurricane formation and direction, latitude and longitude, barometric pressure, levee construction, FEMA, civil disobedience, what a modern city is like when you remove the “modern,” economics and oil reserves, insurance-industry-as-legalized-gambling, electrical grids, dehydration, sanitation, how boats sink, and the best and worst of human nature.

My kids have also been reading, writing, interacting with 3 generations of people, experiencing a culture that is noticeably different from the one they usually live in, exploring the resources of a house and city other than their own, watching TV and movies, exercising, watersliding (whole lot of physics at work at your local waterslide park!), doing random math-problems-with-a-purpose, and eating new foods. They’re also gaining experience in coping with loss (experience a protective mom might have preferred they wait a lifetime to gain), and they’re watching a variety of adults cope with loss in a variety of ways.

And then there’s the way unschooling has centered and anchored me through the storm. My kids always center me, of course – if they’re okay, I’m okay – but this is more than that. Unschooling is *there*, a core purpose that runs through even the toughest days. I mean, not once in the past week have I given a thought to creating a learning-rich environment or accommodating my kids’ different learning styles or even unschooling itself really (and I usually think about unschooling quite a bit), but I’ve been conscious of and immensely comforted by all the sparkly moments of learning.

We’re hearing a lot about displaced families struggling to find schools for their kids and talking about how that will give their kids a sense of normalcy. I am so grateful that isn’t us! My kids get their sense of normalcy from being with their family (with an added boost from a trip to the local mall ;-)), and we are able to see that – far from being a time when learning stops – difficult times provide the kind of learning that will last a lifetime.

KQR