Changing

Sarah and I tweak our homeschooling approach fairly often. We reconsider and shift around our daily routines, our monthly themes, how we shape the "playschool" part of our day... We make changes based on how our old routines were working, whether we've been feeling overscheduled or underscheduled; based on ideas from our friends, ideas from books, ideas from our own imaginations. I get ideas from her, she gets ideas from me.

All these changes add up over time, and sometimes we find ourselves somewhere completely unexpected, having wandered so very far away from where we started. Our recent meanderings, as it happens, have brought us around to an approach that is a whole lot more school-y than I'd expected. I'm basically okay with that -- I'm more of a whatever-works sort of a person than I am committed to any particular philosophy, and I love our approach to School -- it's all the things I loved about school as a kid, all the sorts of things my sister and I made sure to include in our totally self-directed Daily Plans every day of our summer vacations, and Sarah seems to love all those aspects as much as we ever did. And combining a more structured morning with a much more spontaneous, free-form afternoon seems to work really most wonderfully well for us both.

I'm a little sheepish about it, though, when I talk with our more unschooly friends. I feel... shifty-eyed about it, as if I'm risking my membership in some beloved club, or as if I'm thinking I must somehow be subconsciously or secretly tricking Sarah into liking to play school together (despite the fact that, even if we were much more schooly than we are, we'd still have way more in common with our unschooly friends than we'd have differences, I've had several friends explicitly reassure me on this point, and Sarah's often the one reminding *me* when we forget to play school or have our practice time in the afternoon). I'm getting over that, though.

But I also have to be careful not to let myself pick up bad school-minded habits while we're integrating the fun schooly stuff into our days. When we're reading together or doing projects together, we're on the same side, we're having fun learning and exploring together. Sometimes, though, when we get into certain areas (I notice it most often in math, but not exclusively), I'll fall into the habits I picked up from years in school. I start out with the best of intentions but... Looking to make it more interactive, I fall into an unintentional pattern of quizzing her -- asking her to locate two dates on a timeline or to figure out place values in her head -- instead of just drawing out the timeline myself if it seems as if it'll make the chapter we're reading clearer, or inviting her to do it together, just as we go through most of the side projects in the book together. I don't even notice I'm doing it, usually, until she's gotten frustrated and I've gotten tense (because 'what do you mean you don't know, didn't they just tell us how to do it?!' -- I don't say that, but I'm sure as hell thinking it, some days).

I think maybe the secret lies in reminding myself, every single day if need be, that we're *playing* school. That the idea here is to be doing something we enjoy together, and to be taking only those parts of school that we both want -- fun worksheets, lots of stickers, marble notebooks, dioramas -- and to leave by the wayside the performance anxiety and judgement.

When I forget my intentions and fall into the trained-seal approach to learning, though, she gets performance anxiety and freezes up, I get aggravated and tense because oh my God we read about this stuff together months ago and what does it mean that she doesn't have it all memorized by now and maybe this whole unschooling thing doesn't actually work in the real world and what if she never finds a job!!! She can feel my tension even when I try not to express it, which makes her even more uncertain and tense, which makes me feel guilty and frustrated. Three short steps and we're no longer companions on the same path but, instead, we're feeling cranky and sullen and adversarial.