Brown

Kristen,

You say / ask:

Do you all unschool math as well?  I've read over and over the ways you can unschool math, and it is starting to "sink in".

<and>

I can see how this would work.  I worry about gaps though, even though I know we all have gaps. Unschooling fits our way of life well, but I tend to use it to "supplement" a more eclectic approach, hmmmm, or do I supplement unschooling with the eclectic approach??  (sigh). Kristen
IMO you can't unschool one subject, nor can you use unschooling as a supplement. Unschooling is an attitude to life, not a technique or method. If you stress the importance of some 'subjects' by insisting on the child learning them, then then you can't 'unschool' another 'subject' without saying, in effect, that this subject is less important than the ones you teach - that you don't trust the child to know what s/he wants / needs to learn.

And yet I too struggle with maths. Because I don't understand it, because I don't like it, and because I have found the need for it in my own life. Yet I have to wonder: is my inability as an old dog to learn the new maths tricks I need, not directly related to the misery of those enforced math lessons of my childhood? Is it not precisely because I was made to try and learn stuff that was at that time totally irrelevant and uninteresting, that I became math phobic? So is it not better to leave math as an interesting possibility for future learning, than to try and force it on the unwilling?

And yet..... I worry..... The theory of unschooling is a lot easier than the living of it, for those of us who are school damaged <sigh>.

Carol
in New Zealand