Me, 2012, on responsibility in teenaged and young-adult unschoolers:
A few years ago when I wrote The Big Book of Unschooling, I had a list of my children's work-shift start times over the years up to that point. I'm adding five that Kirby has had since he moved to Texas to work for Blizzard, and Marty's recent 4:00 a.m. to stock shelves at Target for a few hours and then have the whole day open.
So the new expanded set of work shift beginning times, shifts lasting from three hours to 10 (Kirby's current):
AMThey eat halfway through a shift, and they eat after they get off work, and the best preparation for that was having grown up with parents who let them eat when they were hungry and sleep when they were sleepy.4:00PM
6:30
8:00
9:00
10:00
11:001:00-10:00
2:00-11:00
3:00
4:30
5:00
6:00
6:30-3:00 a.m.
8:30-7:30 a.m.
11:00-8:00 a.m.
People say to me all the time, "How will they ever hold a job if you don't make them go to sleep and wake up at "reasonable hours"? They mean arbitrary and traditional hours, based on pre-electricity, and farms, and school schedules. Looking at that list above, it's more sensible to ask how someone who had grows up with the same bed- and wake-up times could ever find and hold a job.
People don't need fifteen years of training to set and alarm and go somewhere. 😊
The discussion from which I took the quote above is interesting. Someone came into a discussion SO new to unschooling that she asked (among other things): "Is radical unschooling where you NEVER sit at a desk and read and write? Is reading restricted to floor/couch/bed reading?" (I edited, for capitals and punctuation, but the original with over 50 responses, is here: Radical Unschooling Info, July 13, 2012 (you don't need to be a member of the group, but you do need to be able to access facebook).
Sleeping
Being
Discussions, bedtime, perception
(an advanced discussion involving rules about bedtime)
