Balanced Thoughts

Some of this was overflow from the page on Balance.

Karen James wrote in response to someone having described something as "never ever":
***never ever***
When people think "always" and "never", they get stuck in "always" and "never", and can't see the in-between where, most often, the details and valuable bits of wisdom are.

I've found that a lot of new unschoolers seem to get stuck in extreme thinking--the always and never lands. 😉 I probably did too. Maybe it's part of adjusting to a new paradigm of thinking.

It kind of reminds me of when we manually adjust the focus on a camera. (I'm talking about before auto-focus.) We adjust the lens back and forth to first find the extreme edges of clarity. When we know where those slightly blurry edges are, we can then move closer to where the true, crisp capture of whatever it is we hope to see lies.

The thing is, if we don't move away from the extremes--those slightly blurry edges--we won't get to appreciate the crisp details of whatever it is we do hope to see and understand better.

That's true for most things, I believe.

Learn to recognize your own extreme thinking. See the nevers and the alwayses. 😊 Then, move around a bit, in search of greater clarity. That shift in thinking will help most relationships, I'm confident.

The original was written April 23, 2021, and can be read there on facebook, if it's still there


Joyce Fetteroll wrote something wonderful on balance:

"Unschooling is the opposite of both authoritarian and hands off parenting. It's neither about creating rules to remote parent nor about letting kids jump off cliffs. It's about being more involved in kids lives. It's about accompanying them as they explore, helping them find safe, respectful and empowering ways to tackle what intrigues them." (on Family RUNning, March 5, 2009)



Natural balance

If you limit it, they will want more.
If you "unlimit" it they will fill up and be done.

They can only make their own choices if they're allowed to make their own choices.
I don't think balance will come from limitations as well as some people wish it would.

I had a niece not allowed to eat sugar at all. NOTHING with sugar. A little hippie kid in the late 1960's, early 1970's.

She came to stay with us for a few days when she was six. We were keeping to her mom's rules about sugar.

We found her in the field, squatted over a 5-lb. bag of sugar, eating it with both hands like a monkey, as fast as she could before she'd get caught.

That wasn't balance.

Or maybe it was. It was the balance of all her deprivation.

My kids have come to their own balance with food, TV, activities, sleep, because they're allowed to make their own choices.


The quote is from an online discussion in August, 2001. The story of the sugar was when I was 22 and in my first marriage, long before I had children with Keith.

A related link is SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Sandra Dodd

Awkward Beginnings

Ren Allen saved this writing of mine, and then Vlad Gurdiga saved HER writing, so good! I'm grateful. It's useful.

Lately there has been discussion about why unschooling lists are contentious.

I'm not sure they're more contentious than other lists on earth, but if they are, why would that be?

Unschooling isn't just another way to homeschool. And people are accustomed to going to a book or magazine or website and getting the simple five or ten facts they wanted, and then going and doing their project. When to divide bulbs and what fertilizer they need. How to clean a fireplace or who to call and how often. What to substitute for buttermilk in a recipe. Where to get pool chemicals, if you live in the boonies and want to mail order.

So people look into homeschooling and they see that what happens is a family buys a curriculum. Oh! Here are some people who don't. Okay, instead of the curriculum, what do I use? And hurry, I don't have much time to read online. And could you e-mail it to me, because I might not find my way back to this forum.

I think there are other factors too, more subtle. Language works with labels. Words are labels. People like to know who they are by what they're called, but they claim not to like it. "I don't like to be labelled" is a form of "I'm an individualistic person too cool to be pegged, and I like to intimidate other people to try make them think I can control how they may refer to me."

That's a lot of labelling right there.

Christians are Christians the moment they're baptised or confirmed or the moment they're born again. No other approval. "You're in." Jews are Jewish when they're born to a Jewish mom. They're in.

People who enroll in a school are students there. There are Montessori students, and Waldorf students, and honor students, and pre-med students (I love that one especially: "I'm pre-med") and law students...

But with unschooling it doesn't quite work that way.

Unschooling is more like riding a bike.

Owning a bike doesn't make you a bicyclist, nor even a bike rider. Walking the bike around certainly shows you're not a rider. Talking about riding it doesn't make you a bike rider. Signing up for a course in bike riding (is there even such a thing??) would not make you a bike rider, nor would a certificate saying you had completed a course in bike riding change a damned thing if you couldn't get on the bike and go.

So with unschooling, you can "not buy the curriculum." You can not send your kids to school. But when will you be an unschooler?

Is a caterpillar a pre-butterfly?
You have to change inside. Nobody can tell the caterpillar he's going to be a butterfly. He might easily be bird food, or road kill from a passing bicyclist.

The way to be an unschooler is to change the way you see and think, so that you can change the way you act and react..

Nobody can act like a bicyclist (maybe on an off-the-ground bike with a bluescreen for a movie, but that's not riding a real bike for real). You either are doing it or you're not.

People can't act like unschoolers and fool unschoolers into thinking they're really riding it. They have to become unschoolers inside themselves to the point that they're not always asking "Is this book okay? Is this idea okay? Is this game educational in any way, and how?"

It's okay to ask at first, but I think some people think they can ask for twelve or thirteen years, instead of really becoming unschoolers at the depth where it is part of their thinking and being.

And those who thinking asking forever is the same as being get angry when those same people they were asking for help or approval say "You're not thinking it yet. You're not keeping your balance yet. Just go fast enough to feel how you need to balance. Ride it!"

If I asked "Which pedal should I start with?" after two years of riding a bike, my friends and relatives might think I was really not too bright at all.

"How far should I lean when I turn?" Exactly far enough. It works by itself, when you do it. When you become an unschooler, you will know kids are learning because you see their eyes, you hear their breathing, you see their posture and you're there with them.

And so some people, when they read things like that, think "AH! So nobody can tell me if I'm unschooling or not! Whatever I say is unschooling is, because kids learn all the time."

Yeah. But if the other bicyclists see you back at the starting point messing awkwardly with your handlebars and not really going anywhere, what you say you are or can do just won't impress them.

Other people buy their unschooling. We're making our own out of our lives and families and homes. We transform our lives into unschooling lives, and it's just not the same as showing your Calvert receipt and saying "We use Calvert; the box should arrive next week."

Sandra
May, 2004
Quoted on Unschooling Basics
(a list I was not on)


Acceptance



Clarity



Mindfulness