Second Day: First Absence

Well today was to be our first ever day with the Learning Centre: a field trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery! We boarded bus with the rest of the kids, then the bus boarded the ferry, the ramp went up, and Taliesin vomited. Since the ramp was up, we had to ride all the way to the other side, then wait an hour while the ferry did the no-passengers dangerous cargo trip, then return home, all the while carrying the sick boy, the useless lunch, and the jealous little girl (why doesn't SHE get carried, anyway?!). By the time we got home he had vomited 3 times, and now he is asleep on the couch. I will be very educational today and let them watch Pingu if indeed he feels like it, later. Our movie schedule is: approximately once a month, or when somebody's too sick to go out. And that is certainly today.

Tonight is the all-parents' meeting at the Learning Centre. Tomorrow is the first class for the Kindergarteners, there (a full day; we'll see how he lasts), and also Rhiannon will have her first official visit to the preschool (15 minutes intro and meet the teachers). For those who are new to our family, my mother is the preschool teacher, and Rhiannon has been visiting preschool and desperate to attend for 2 years, already. The Learning Centre will be a very big step for Taliesin; Preschool will not be such a change for Rhiannon. Still she's excited, of course!!

Day One: Kindergarten and Preschool at the Dining Room Table.

...of course, technically, according to our educational philosophy, day one was the day we burned a candle together and pleaded with the universe to bring us a baby...

But that was before we had heard of unschooling.

Today was very enlightening, and for me a great leap into the world of unschooling. It was supposed to be our first scheduled day of homelearning: I set a schedule so that we'd actually get specific things done, and not let every day dwindle away into lego-building and drawing. Tuesdays will begin at 9 with some loose math and reading activities, then a walk through the landscape to pick up Rhiannon from preschool, during which we will study the plants and animals as they traverse the seasons. Today, since Rhiannon doesn't start preschool until Thursday, we instead made covers for the journals I bought the kids, and were planning to then do our first "wild food day", where we would harvest something from the wilds (ocean, lake, meadow, forest, etc) and incorporate it into a family-cooked meal. And... well... to be honest, the day didn't go so very well.

There were actually only a few hiccoughs in the morning. Tali trudged through some math activities that were too simple and therefore boring, until I remembered hating the exact same exercises as a child, for the exact same reasons ("if they just want you to show that you know the number, then why can't you just tell the number, instead of drawing six of the stupid bananas!?")... and I told him so, and suggested he just tell me the numbers and be done with it. My children will not be forced to do pointless monotonous tasks in the name of education. Education will make them WANT to draw bananas. Or something. Lesson 1 for today: no pointless banana drawing. He flipped to the middle of the book and found a nice dot-to-dot to do, thereby practising the numbers 1-20. He was very pleased with himself when he was done. Next time I'll let him choose right away.

I think Taliesin and Rhiannon (who will be starting preschool this Thursday, at the same time as Taliesin begins his first Learning Centre day) are going through some pre-school jitters. Stress. Not to mention we're all recovering from a couple of nasty viruses. Today progressed into one grumpy grumpy 5-year-old tantrum, until he did not want to help harvest the mint, nor pick blackberries, nor even cook the mint jelly he had initially been so excited about, and decided to torment Rhiannon some more, simply because I had gone to the garden to get some beans and he thought I couldn't hear him. Do you see where this is going? I lost my patience quite a few times, and by the end of the day, after we'd made amends and he'd gone to bed, I collapsed on the kitchen floor, sobbing. Oh well, I thought. I'm a crazy-woman, now! And Markus sat calmly beside me, his arm draped over my head, as I watched the white rainbows on the ceiling and found my way, again.

Those rainbows have been here for me all of my life. I can't remember much from the time before we went up to Squamish to get this repossessed trailer and bring it home. Pappa covered it with home-milled cedar siding, and stuck a sign on it: the Phantom Rickshaw. And it's been my true home ever since. When it came for rent seven years ago, Markus and I came home immediately. The white pressboard ceiling hung over my childhood bed as it hangs over my bed again now. The pattern repeats in that infuriating way where you're never really sure which rainbow is the repeater; they're so almost alike.

And as I lay there on the kitchen floor, looking at my painted cupboards, thinking how my mother never would have painted the cupboards so garishly, there suddenly came visions of grass to my teared-up eyes, and I remembered running through the field on the other side of the road, where this trailer originally sat, with flowers in my hand for my mother. My mother wanted to see anything that was beautiful, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world and I wanted to be her favourite person, and I wanted to see her smile. Then I realized that the reason the field was grassy was because my Pappa made it that way, wandering around with a bag of seed like van Gogh's Sower in a purple sunset, he is still there in my mind, and I see him casting long trails of grass-seed again when I look at the ceiling in this house. The reason I was running to my Mama with a flower - it was a buttercup, I think - was because she was making my world beautiful. Images of clothing and food and gardens came flooding through my mind as I watched the white rainbows in the ceiling. My parents gave me the gift of inspiration long before unschooling was in vogue. They took me out of school and bore the reprimands of my teachers, so that I could visit quaint galleries with them in town, and sit on Granville Island to watch the weirdos with crazy hair -- never realizing that I would one day be one of those weirdos attending the exact same art school. My Dad had long hair and leather clogs (and skipped down the road to my absolute horror as a teenager)... because that is who he was and he wasn't hiding it. My parents did what they felt was right, and all of it got somehow stored away in my heart to be retrieved simply by looking at those endless white rainbows of the pressboard ceiling of the Phantom Rickshaw. One day we hope to replace this old and moldy house. But those ceiling panels are coming with me. And no this unschooling is not a mistake.

Welcome to Rickshaw Unschooling. :--)

Unschooling Philosophy

Unschooling, also known as free schooling, child-directed learning, and natural learning, is our educational philosophy and goal for our family. The word unschooling seems to spark quite a bit of controversy, which we feel is in part due to the radical sound of the word. The word isn't going away, however, so we have to live with it.

Basically what we are aiming for in our children's education is a loosely structured system of learning that is both exciting and flexible for all of us. That is: it's a lifestyle for the whole family. Learning doesn't happen at school; it happens everywhere, all the time, throughout our lives. Instead of being given assignments indended to "teach" concepts, the children (and we) will learn from those concepts coming into play in our daily activities and projects. We've always been aware of learning opportunities in everything we do. That doesn't mean we press the kids to read every word they see, or to help tally the groceries. But when they show any interest at all, we try to encourage it. And we have an unending trajectory of projects and adventures, some of which were conceived for their ability to educate/inspire the kids.

So why school at all? Because we believe that the most important aspect of group education is social skills, and that is something we cannot give our children here in the Rickshaw with only the immediate family around. We don't want the wild, often-violent and frightening social life of the public school playground, but a nurturing, supervised, mixed-age group where they can learn to celebrate individuality and togetherness. That is what we hope to get at our local Homelearner's Program (AKA The Learning Centre), where, starting this Thursday, Taliesin will be doing 1.5 days per week of learning with other children aged 5 to 8 approximately. He has the option to attend many other events at the centre, and the option to skip classes entirely without any reprimand from us or his teachers, as long as he is willing to discuss his decisions. We hope that the centre will also help us navigate the legalities of what we're choosing to do, as well as facilitate our homelearning.

I've found myself trying to explain our stance on education many times over the past few months, as we've navigated the procedure of signing Taliesin up for the Learning Centre. We've encountered a lot of genuine concern for our children's wellbeing, from people who, quite frankly, don't know what we're talking about... and that's our fault. It's hard to explain! Mostly that's because of our fear of criticism... Anything so radical as "unschooling" seems pretty scary, even to us, at times. It's partly uncharted territory, and requires a lot more from the parents than more traditional forms of schooling. But we believe in it wholeheartedly, and, since this is all about listening to the children, are ensuring that their options are left open. So if they decide to go to the local elementary school after a couple of months or a few years, they still can.