And Just Like That...

Man who is behind on everything realizes that pesky number at the end of the date is different.

Folks. FOLKS. FOLKS! Holidays happened. We had New Years! It’s a new year now, people are putting their intentions out there and shifting their aproaches to things and also trying to prepare for a new presidential administration here in the US and all the things it could and probably will mean for us. I have been… doing a weird combination of taking on WAY too much and also trying to conserve my energy. I’ve been daydreaming about a bright future, letting things slip through the cracks, learning to crochet, and generally trying to problem solve about those pesky adult life things that follow up.

2024 was, in some ways, a less dramatic year for me and my little family in our little corner of the world. I mean sure, sometimes smoke from far away poisoned us, we felt the impacts of climate change, the election was very stressful, and we continued to be broke, neurodivergent, and queer, in a world that doesn’t like to make those things easy. And yet… none of us had covid, none of us were hospitalized, we continued to home educate and the only major deaths I recall at this moment were ducks (which was a lot to deal with in its own way). Things were… stable. I picked up odd childcare and freelance gigs, sold a few bits and bobs of curriculum, while my partner stayed at the same job they’ve had for a few years now. Our daughter started reading for pleasure. In the spring we adopted a new dog, in the winter we bought a new (to us) vehicle. We went camping twice. I used a reading tracking app for the first time and liked it.

And now, it’s a brand new year.

This year, it’s my hope to offer a lot more in the way of curriculum and other resources in order to support more home and small group educators. I also would love to do more collaborative projects, and I plan to go to the dentist (eeeeep) and turn 40.

And, after nearly nine mostly wonderful years renting the same home, we will have to move this year. The details are still being sorted. It is not without challenges. I’m hoping it will be a new adventure that brings new opportunity, but the unknown is always scary. After moving constantly for most of my adult life (and a good chunk of my childhood) I have been in this place for almost as long as I’ve been anywhere. Have I lost my packing abilities? How will moving with a kid who is nearing double digits be different than moving with an infant was? Time will tell.

One thing is certain, though. I intend to write more. A lot more. I’m afraid to commit to specific amounts and dates because I’ve been moving slowly this winter, and there are things I have to prioritize at the moment, but if you look forward to seeing me pop up in your inbox, hopefully this will be a good year for you.

At least in one way.

Virgo Season and Seed Heads.

I have just started listening to the audiobook of A Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl. It’s read by the author, and when she says her own last name, it sounds like “wrinkle,” which I particularly like. It has also inspired me to write again, which is a particular joy. I am putting off finishing Moby Dick, which I started sometime in the spring and I do like it, but I keep needing breaks from it. And anyways, it being September, and Virgo season, and the “start of the school year,” my mind has been so full of education lately.

A field of yellow flowers near my home, long before they turned to seed heads.

My plan for fourth grade was simple: We would begin with one block covering the georaphy of North America, and the indiginous peoples of the east coast of what is now the United States. Then, a block on fractions, using Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (yes, I know what the US version is called, and yes, I do detest the author) as an inspiration text to tie it together and give us a narrative arch. Then we would move on to a block on the white settlers up through the revolutionary war. Throughout the year, we would alternate US history with other topics (science, math, etc) and keep including indiginous voices and Black voices throughout. So, we would start with the fact that the land was very much inhabited before we ready anything about the doctrine of discovery of the myth of the prestine wilderness or westward expansion, but we would also refuse to leave “natives” in the past tense. In this way, I think I hoped to not only teach my child history, but also wake her up to the cry for justice, the many injustices performed in our name as white folks. At the same time, it being fourth grade, I would be expecting More Work from her. She would do both math AND handwriting practice in the morning! She would do more writing. She would practice her guitar and a foreign language (I benevolently would let her choose, of course) each day. I thought this would work. In years past, the start of the new school year comes with renewed energy. She finds herself excited about whatever the new content will be! She says things like “Papa, you are the best teacher!” and brings a kind of “what cool things have you found for me?” attitude. This year I had carefully tabbed my three primary books (called “spines” in homeschool lingo): An Indigenous People’s History of the United States for Young People, A Young People’s History of the United States, and History Quest: United States. I planned all of my lesson blocks by the cycle of the moon. I was ready.

So what happened was completely different. A week before we were to start lessons, she started listening to audiobooks in her bedroom. This is the Warriors series, books about feral cats who live in the woods and fight each other with plenty of gore. The books are written by “Erin Hunter,” a collective pen name for a group of writers who, when I am feeling less charitable to the books, I think probably don’t want their names attached to the project. Here is an exerpt from my favorite review, found on amazon:

first of all, this is an amazing book, like a few others I'm rating it low so it will be noticed. My actal rating is 5star
1. The writing is awful.
Excuse me? I can't see that, people.
2. It's only fights and gore.
Hate to break your bubble, but thats how cats act in real life. Humans have adapted, we don't fight anymore, but most other animals still fight each day. Most in clans too!
3. It's not for kids.
You are seriously overprotective. Like I said, animals act like that! Kids should know that. They DO know that. I'm sure your child knows that lions could kill them.
anyways, this was my rant, sorry for the bad grammer, I'm writing on a Kindle.

Ok, that’s the whole review actually. Fifty six people found it helpful as of this writing.

While not a fan of the books about fighting feral cats myself, I try to keep my opinions to myself. She enjoyed listening the books! And then she was listening many hours a day. Sometimes finishing a book in a single day and going straight to the next. When she finished the first six book series, she only took an afternoon to mourn and sulk, and then jumped right into the next series. I forget how many there are. It goes on.

And so, when the first week of homeschool arrived, it was just an interruption of her real life, which revolves around these successive generations of cats. I was just another one of “the two legs.” When I presented my carefully made lessons I was greeted with eye rolls and a sarcastic “of course” to the ideas I thought were very clever and fun. Clearly, I had planned for the kid I had back in June. Nine year olds are still kids, but they are growing so fast. September is a lifetime away from June.

A stack of books to be used in the most perfect homeschool plan.

Today I walked the dog, even though I have a bad cold and didn’t want to. We walked past the seed heads that I have been gathering from every third or forth walk. I’m trying to collect a variety of differnt native seeds, which bloom and then seed in stages over time, and I collect them in bouquets that look dead, a parody of flowers. I put them in jars without water. If the dog poops on the walk, I have to carry my bouquet and the bag of shit. The plastic bag of feces I put in the dumpster, to be taken away later in the week by a yellow truck. The bouquet that looks like it represents death, I put on a high shelf in a jar, hoping the kittens don’t knock it over, for the future.

Here are the books I read (mostly consumed in audio format through the library app Hoopla, just as my child devours her books) in the month of September:

The Kingdom of Chilren: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens. (more on this in a future post, I have a lot to say)

The Dawn of Everything: A New HIstory of Humanity, by David graeber and David Wengrow.

Trust Kids!: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, edited by carla joy bergman.

Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, by Patty Krawec.

This is of course in addition to what I have been reading aloud to my child, which includes the books mentioned above, exerpts from A Kid’s guide to Native American History, as well as Children of the Longhouse, a novel by Joseph Bruchac. And it’s fair to say that whatever learning journey I imagined my child would be emersed in this fall, it is me who is wholly emersed in it. I am making connections and unlearning old ideas about history. I am finding a feeling for how full this land was before the first European ship was spotted in the distance. I am mourning, and hating some of my ancestors, and then finding that hate to be less useful over time. I am also thinking a lot about the idea of freedom.

In The Dawn of Everything, they list three fundamental freedoms: the freedom to move away or relocate, the freedom to disobey or ignore commands, and the freedom to shape new social realities or shift existing ones.

My child has been really showing me her love of that second freedom lately. She’s like, really good at it. Myself, I’ve always been partial to the third.

Many of the essays in Trust Kids! touched my deeply, inspired me, and fired me up to live more collaboratively with my kid and trust her more. But others annoyed me, they got under my skin. I told a friend (who loved the book) while we watche our kids play on the playground and they said “I think that’s a trigger for you.” They were referring to the fact that I have witnessed unschooling done really really poorly, I have seen it morph into neglect, and so anything that seems to imply (or directly says) that anyone can unschool, no matter how busy, no matter how imperfect, and their kids will be fine, I wince. I’ve formed my ideas about education partly in opposition to that (more on that another day I hope, hoooo boy!) and come to firmly believe that adults should have a say in what and when young people learn. And yet, I’m an anarchist who believes in freedom. And there’s the tension. Solidarity does in fact begin at home, but none of us knows what we don’t know. Kids do, in fact, know less than adult, simply by virtue of time. And their brains are, in fact, still growing. It’s hard. I met some new home educators, probably ones who are closer to unschooling than I am. They asked about my approach and I said “I am trying to find the balance between allowing more freedom and still having some say.”

This mother smiled back at me in recognition. “Us too!” she exclaimed. “Maybe that’s always what it is, right?”

Many years ago, when I was heavily pregnant and seeing my amazing midwife for prenatal care, I told her how nervous I was about parenting a newborn. She told me that babies are like a videogame. After I finished laughing, she explained herself.

Newborns are on easy mode. But when you first start out, it doesn’t feel easy at all. There are night feedings, mystery cries, a thousand diapers, all the things. You have to cut those thin little nails without cutting the baby’s finger (shudder). But they are pretty simple all the same. They need to be dry and fed. They need a lot of sleep. They need closeness, but their emotional needs are very simple and easy to meet. Eventually you will get good at it. And just when easy mode starts to feel easy, bam, they switch the difficulty level on you. It gets harder. It happens over and over again. Until they are grown.

I have found home education to be the same. You will find yourself sighing that you finally understand just how to teach kindergarten… and then first grade starts. You will finally add enough movement games to a reading lesson to make it engaging for your particular kid, and then you blink and that kid suddenly just wants to sit down at their desk and quietly finish the work. They will look at you like “when in the name of all that is good are you up running around?”

I always tell this story about my kid, when I tried to do a more child led approach in the past. She looked me in the eyes and said “I just want you to teach me things. I don’t want to have to decide.” And so I, I learned how to teach. But here’s the thing. My child was five years old when she said that. It has been four years. And she has no recollection of it, not at all.

Every two weeks, we have an all family meeting. At our last meeting, I brought up the topic of school, and was greeted by groans from my child. She disliked it so much she didn’t even want to discuss it. I pushed. I said “let’s open this up, let’s brainstorm.” And so, we brainstormed, our three person family. Everything was on the table. Full unschooling? Keep things the same? Find a way to give her more choices but parents still have some say? We talked about everyone’s concerns about each idea.

What about longterm. What about the feeling of autonomy. What about math skills. What about the need for freetime. What about bad days.

Eventually we hit upon something we all agreed to try. This is always how our meetings go. Every new idea is on a trial basis, to some degree, because every single system is always on a trial basis to some degree. Our lives, our tiny three person collective, is the third freedom in action. Does this work for you? Does this work for us?

We would keep my precious schedule of readings. To my surprise, my child, when she felt she had a real say, found them valuable. But she would choose the activity for the lesson. So now I make a grid schedule, the kind I have been making for myself for years now, only I don’t fill it in. Instead, I write all the ideas for activities, more than we can do in a week, on post it notes that fit neatly in the spaces. She can add her own ideas. She chooses when to do what. And much to my surprise, she didn’t avoid writing tasks. The first week went shockingly smoothly, even as we had to adjust things when we ran out of time for something or didn’t have the supplies for another project.

Her heart is still in the forest with the cats. But she has also drawn connections. She has been annoyed at how a documentary about North American people hurried from the Maya to the Pilgrims, with no mention of the nations of the eastern woodlands. She took the time to lovingly draw a picture of a longhouse without saying “can I be done now?” Did you notice the similarity between this Haudenosaunne story about animals playing lacrosse and the anishnabeg one we read last year? She says “duh of course I did” but she says it with a smile. Freedom.

The milkweed pod bursts open from in it’s bouqet on the high shelf. I try to gather up the seeds, but they are showing me their freedom to move away.

A few days ago my kid said that she hates Harry Potter. This was news to my partner and me, but it’s also fine. I had planned the Harry Potter and fraction block because she used to like the books, and in spite of my feelings about she who shall not be named, I thought my child would enjoy it. Now I see that I planned that for a child I had a year ago, so I scrap it. In the spirit of collaboration, I decide to offer her many options for what we do for the next block, and a space to write her own. I bring this to her outside of lesson time, and she very grudgingly pauses her latest book.

“I will put a check mark next to the ones that sound good to me.” Then she hands it back to me. She has added Star Wars, and it is the only item with a check mark.

Outside, it is still hot, even though Virgo season is almost over. When I walk the dog I am sweating, but whether it’s the heat of the day or the fever I can’t be sure. I move slowly and the dog gets the message, only down she doesn’t want to move forward at all. Can’t we just stay here all day, in front of the neighbor’s house, sniffing everything? When we adopted this dog, back in the spring, I confess I didn’t care much what dog we got. I only knew that my family needed one, and there were dogs at the shelter who needed homes. But she is perfect for us, perfect for me, somehow. Would any dog have grown to feel perfect? I’m not sure.

In my headphones, Margaret Renkl (wrinkle) is speaking. She is telling me about winter. She’s telling me about leaving the seed heads for the birds. I smile as I pass by some. I don’t pick any today. The dog refuses to move on, and because we adopted her when learning Cymraeg (Welsh) was my special interest, I call to her in that language.

“Dare ‘ma! iawn!”

We throw away the bag of poop and make it to our front yard. I say “Yn i’r ty!” and the dog pranced up the steps to the door to mynd yn i’r ty. I tell her she’s a merch dda because she is, and then we step inside.

From upstairs, the sounds of narration drift down from my child’s bedroom. The clans are fighting again but thankfully, it’s not my problem. I have Star Wars research to do.