Good Vibrations 2009

The bright side of a little mid-conference insomnia: I have a chance to get down some of my thoughts and memories from Good Vibrations so far.

Spoiler alert! My notes below about specific talks reference bits that will be ever so much better if you listen to the whole talk, available for download a while after the conference. You can give them a listen and then come back and read the fragments I chose to highlight.

Update: I just discovered that Jeff posted his talk here. Yay!

Unschooling and Math by Pam Sorooshian. Lots of good stuff in this talk, but there were a couple of things that especially grabbed my brain. One was the reminder of how disconnected from reality is the math they teach in class. Pam led us through a little exercise that illustrated this pretty clearly: Make a little list of situations in your real life where you use math. (We came up with tipping, figuring gas mileage, figuring value at the grocery store, doubling or halving recipes, and budgeting.) Ask yourself (1) what method you use to do those calculations (paper and pencil, calculator/computer, or in your head), and (2) how important precision is in the result of each calculation. Compare your answers to what school requires.

Pam also told a very cool little story in which her daughter Rosie was working (playing) her way through an activity book one day while they were driving in the car. Rosie became frustrated with a page that asked how many kids were in each classroom if a school with ten classrooms had 80 students. Rosie complained that it didn't provide enough information. When Pam explained she should just divide 80 by 10, Rosie said (and I love this), "It's not a division problem!" Having never been in a math classroom, Rosie could see all the variables (ages or grade levels of the students, content of the classes being taught, and so on) that formal math instruction requires kids to simply ignore, thereby ensuring that kids know that math (or rather, the math that they are being taught) has little to do with reality.

In Pursuit of a Passionate Life by Jeff Sabo. Lots of good stuff in this one, too, but the highlight for me—the moment that had me teary-eyed—was when Jeff talked about showing inner-city kids three numbers and encouraging them to guess what the numbers represented. The numbers were (I think) 1.7, 75, and 8. He said the kids never got all three. They are, respectively, a specific person's high school GPA, the number of jobs the individual has had, and the number of times this person was suspended from school. Got a picture of this person? Lovely. Throw it out the window. The individual is Jeff. He has a masters degree and a successful career in the corporate world, he is an amazing dad married to an amazing woman who clearly likes him a whole lot, and he is a talented and inspiring writer and speaker. He's also one hell of a bass player!

So, just imagine those kids discovering how little their own numbers could predict what their future held in store.

My own numbers were "better" (unless you count each contract as a job—then I might have Jeff beat), but they carried just as many expectations for my future. It was a heavy burden, and one I might have set down for the first time yesterday.

Strangers in a Strange Land chat. Shonna and I hosted this circle chat yesterday. We went in hoping to encourage and benefit from some brainstorming about how to help other people's kids when we see them being victimized by harsh parenting. I think it went pretty well. Here are the tools we discussed. Which of these is the best to pull out in any given situation will depend on the situation and your resources at the moment.

• Empathize with the parent. We've all been there in that overwhelmed moment, and we all know snapshot moments do not necessarily reflect the whole of the parent-child relationship. Also, those of us (yours truly) who started out as traditional parents can (should be able to) empathize more than most.
• Validate the child's experience. A small verbal expression of your understanding of the child's perspective can provide a lot of comfort to the child, and it just might help the parent make a shift, too. For example, suppose you see a child in a store crying because he's been denied candy or a toy. You can say, "It's hard to see all these cool things and not be able to take them home, isn't it?"
• Say "I've been there. Here are some resources that have helped me a lot," and then hand over a card that lists a few of your favorite parenting Web sites. This one lets you immediately withdraw from the situation; the parent doesn't have/get to respond.
• Say (even if it's not true), "You know, the exact same thing happened with us. Here's what worked for us..." and then describe the parenting that you wish you were seeing.
• Interject with a little comment that might jolt the parent into taking a breath. My example was Count to a million, Mom.

I might be missing a couple, but I'm getting sleepy finally. Thanks to all the women and men who helped with that list! More later.