First of all, no we did not eat a whale.

However, a sperm whale washed up onto the reef line a few miles from where we live. I heard about it on the news and in typical unschooling fashion, decided to take my kids on an impromptu field trip to see this sight. The only directions I had for where to find the whale was on the beach near the Yona cemetery. Eric thought it was very fitting of the whale to die near a cemetery.

I parked as close to the beach as I could get and then Eric, Cassie and I hiked a short way to the water’s edge. Along the way, Cassie noticed pinecones on the ground and was surprised to see them. She remembers our conversations in Canada about the different kinds of trees that grow in different parts of the world. The pine cones she saw were tiny replicas of those seen in Canada, and came from the Ironwood trees that line the shoreline.

The kids were expecting to smell the whale long before we saw it as we discussed decay of animals. But all we could smell was the usual salty air of the ocean. No sign of a whale. Looking out towards the reef line, at least 1/2 mile away, I could see a rounded long brown “lump” that the waves were splashing over. I'm fairly certain that was the sperm whale reported in the news. Too far away to smell or to get a good look at.

Disappointed we returned to the cemetery where we wandered a bit looking at graves and reading inscriptions.  Then home we went, where we looked at various pictures of sperm whales (and others) online.

Later that night, another teachable moment ensued when Eric was trying his first hot banana pepper. He talked about enjoying hot things and the trick is to not let them touch his tongue. So then I asked the kids if they knew that certain parts of the tongue could taste different tastes.

“Oh, yes” Cassie exclaimed,” I read about it in a book.” Both her and Eric were able to tell me what parts of the tongue tasted sweet, salty and bitter. And then told me how they had both experimented with this to see if it was true. All without benefit of a science curriculum or lesson plan.

Cassie has been showing an interest in cooking lately so I have been taking full advantage of this window of opportunity and trying to teach her all I know. On Sunday we made a cheesecake together. It didn’t turn out so well. It tastes good enough but the texture is not right and so the kids, who generally devour cheesecake, weren’t too interested in it. I used the failed cheesecake experiment as a lesson to teach Cassie the importance of following a recipe. It’s not good enough just to gather the ingredients together and use the right measurements. It is the ORDER you put the ingredients together that makes all the difference. Our mistake with the cheesecake was not putting the items into the bowl and mixing in the correct order. Result? Cheesecake that was not as good as it should be.

Last night we made macaroni and cheese. With a white sauce. Very important to do that in the correct order or you will have very lumpy sauce. Cassie was very interested in my stories of Home Economics classes in 8th grade. She thinks that has got to be the best class in school. Until I told her we still had to do tests and homework and it wasn’t all just about cooking food and eating it. She feels that it should only be about the cooking. That is what is so great about homeschooling. It can be just about the cooking! But at the same time I showed her how to read the measuring cup and to find out how many tablespoons are in a cup and how many teaspoons in a tablespoon. She also learned about thickening agents and seasonings. And how just a little bit of salt can really make or break a dish.

In the meantime, while cooking was happening, back in the bedroom, Eric was working with his dad on how to find out where his air con was leaking from and how to rig up a system so that the dripping water landed in the bucket and not on the floor. So a little home building, mixed in with physics came into play. And a little lesson on electronics and water, and how the two just don’t mix.

Recently Adam moved out to a small apartment in our dive shop, freeing up a bedroom in our house. Since Eric will soon be 11 and Cassie will be turning 8, we figured it is time they each got their own room. So this weekend I worked on both room and finally have them all switched over. The bunk beds are a pain to move and so Cassie inherits the bunk beds. Eric had no bed, but luckily Dad just happened to bring home the extra couch from the dive shop, so it is temporarily his bed until a new one can be bought.

With this new switcheroo I thought I’d post some pictures of the clean rooms.

Cassie’s bed, with stuffed animals poised on a chair next to it.

I love big closets, it gives more room to store their things in!

Eric’s room. He wants posters to cover the pink walls! All the walls are pink in this house!

The bookshelf is still full of Adams’ books. Eventually they will go wherever Adam chooses to go. Or Eric will inherit what Adam doesn’t want.

So far we are on day 2 of the switcheroo and Eric has rediscovered his love for lego, now that he has room to play it. The sound of rattling lego pieces in a bucket is a cheerful, productive sound. Though it can drive you crazy at times!

Cassie is enjoying her room too and our next step is to help her turn it into a girl’s room.

I used to be involved in a direct sales company, Simply Fun, that sold board games. I loved the idea of playing games as a family and stayed in long enough to get one of each kind of game they sell. I love all the games and if I were a better saleswoman, I could see this company doing well. Anyway, despite my enthusiasm for the games, my family pretty much ignored them. Until recently.

Cassie and Eric are finally at the age that games are appealing. So they sneak into my closet and take out a game to explore. Part of the appeal is the sneaking into mom’s closet I’m sure.

The latest game they’ve been playing is called Take Your Pick. It is a card game. Each card has two words on it. Usually opposite or contradictory in meaning. Like “Hot” and “cold”. Or “Indoors” or “Outdoors”. You are supposed to take three cards and think about the other person you are playing with. What would they choose? It’s kind of like a personality game where you try to analyze the other person’s personality. What do they like? Great game to play between brother and sister.

Cassie needs help reading some of the words and then thinking of a question related to the words to ask Eric. They both need help figuring out what some words mean. Great vocabulary builder for both of them, and Cassie is practicing her reading skills. She is getting much better and I predict she’ll be a full on reader by the time she is 8. A little later than our other 4, but you can see how the process is just so different for her. One thing I’ve observed is that when she is reading she does not look ahead to the other words, but actually stops on each word and ponders the meaning. Sometimes she begins to question the author of the story. Like this simple reader I found called “This is a Fish”. In the story where the kids see a whale at an aquarium, one character says, “that is a big fish”. Cassie paused in her reading to scold the book. “It’s a whale you stupid kid!”. Reading further, the other kids do correct the boy, minus the word “stupid”.

Other games played this week:

Take Four – Discovery Toys – a scrabble type game with letter tiles.

Ooga – Simply Fun – memory type game with dinosaur cards.

Breaking Down the House –  Simply Fun - dice game where you build a house by rolling dice. Three die alike and an earthquake strikes (the house falls down).

Psychonauts – playstation 2 video game

Lots of TV watching as we just got cable at the air station office. So far we aren’t directing their viewing too much…lots of iCarly and Nick cartoons so far. I also got a new DVD free in the mail from the History Channel – America, The story of Us. So we’ve been watching a bit of that a night. Along with a new hulu.com show we found….or an old show actually, Eerie Indiana – spooky stories told by a 12 year old kid about his weird town he lives in.

One thing to mention about my kids and their game playing. They sometimes ask me to tell them the rules. Once they get the basic concept down, though, then their own rules come into play. Rarely do they keep score. Eric used to have an issue with winning and losing (hated losing of course) which made playing games with him a nightmare a few years ago. So now, his rule always is, there is no keeping score. You just play for fun. And he loves to figure out the rule and do the opposite. And make that the new rule. Hard to explain. You’d have to see him in action. But thankfully Cassie agrees.

Two weeks ago I took the two youngest kids half way around the world to visit my homeland, and their heritage, Canada. Our specific destination was Powell River, BC where my family lived. On the way we passed through Vancouver, my birthplace.

The journey there had much to be desired. But any travel long distance on planes with kids is stressful. It started out with good intentions, but reality is…..plane rides and waiting at airports for 9 hour layovers in a foreign country has a lot to be desired. However, Eric and Cassie tried to make the most of it. Here they are posing at the Osaka Airport. In Japan, the kids played hide and seek, rode around on the luggage car (with mom as driver), learned about Japanese Yen and foreign money exchange rates, sampled Japanese Ice cream and gum. By the time we arrived in Seattle, they were quite worn out!

We had many adventures and I hope to be able to record them over the next few days. Stay tuned.

Steph is going to audition for a part in Cinderella. She has been taking private lessons from a voice coach.

Rhea, her teacher, is young and friendly. We watched her give her recital when she graduated as a music major in opera. She stood alone on stage with only a piano in the corner for accompaniment. She sang in German, French, Italian and I believe, Swahili. So we know who we are getting for our daughter.

Rhea is gracious to give Stephanie extra lessons as we get close to audition time. Steph is going against people who have been in lessons since they were three. I hope she gets her part. She is working for it. If she does not, I hope she gets something. She really wants to learn this business.

We are also preparing for the turn-over of our new business on Sept 1. Steph will not be the main person in the store as I thought would be the case. She needs to be writing and sleeping. The people we are buying the business from are sharing their knowledge with us, so we are blessed. But Steph is misunderstood, or we are. She comes in late after writing all night and sleeping too much. So she is in trouble for wasting her time and we are in trouble for allowing it.

But again, how can we judge someone else’s journey if we don’t even know where that person is headed? The air shop business is not the end; it is the means to an end. The purpose of it is to create resources for us to follow up on our collective artistic promise. So Steph will NOT stop writing in order to become a scuba air tank filler. She fills air tanks so she can write and get voice lessons and fancy musical equipment and sleep all day if she wrote all night. If she writes 1000 words per day for 10 years, she WILL be a writer.

And we continue.

“Mission Accomplished!”

Remember the photo of President. Bush on a carrier with a banner announcing, “Mission Accomplished!” on the eve of five or so more years of combat? When can I (or we; the unschoolers), claim success, or alternately, when can our critics declare our defeat?

My dad was (still is, I suppose) opposed to homeschooling. He invested maybe 10 years of expensive education to become a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), so I don’t blame him for being kind of put out when our actions say, “It was all redundant. We don’t need experts to educate our kids. In fact we don’t even need adults, except for guidance and resources. Kids can teach themselves what they desire to know, and what they don’t desire to know, they won’t learn no matter what coercive technologies you develop and impose on them.” Whew. But that is what we say, right?

I asked him (ten years ago) what he would want to see. He replies something to the effect that he would want to see some fruit. Don’t think that was his word, but that was the idea. I didn’t follow up; I thought about it and I hope he did, too.

Some questions: What about other kids, ones in school, that are 11 years old? What “fruit” are they expected to display? My experience is teachers and staff make endless excuses even for 18 year olds, saying that they are not just miniature adults, but that they need time and guidance to become adults before they can be expected to reflect any positive character traits. So what is the difference? If kids are on a journey, then when do we grade them on their ‘arrival’? Or do we grade them on the journey itself? What about a kid who takes a different path? We declare him a failure because we can not be bothered to take the time to understand his motives, his plans and therefore his progress?

If success is the incremental achievement of a worthwhile goal or goals, then how can we judge someone else’s, most especially if we don’t know what their goal is?

What is the Goal, Anyway?

Of course, it is widely accepted that the goal is to get an education so you can get a good job so you can afford to get your kids a good education so they can get a good job so they can….

Yuck!

Hey, anyone seen this super-depressing movie called Revolutionary Road? (spoiler alert!)

This couple had a dream to go to Paris and find the husband’s “true vocation”--his dream. The world did its best to entice them away from the dream, offering tempting promises of a bigger house, a nicer car, a happier wife…

They let the world steal their dream. And it killed the woman, the wife who was supposed to be happy for the success. Well, we have always known we are different, and I thank this horrible movie for clarifying a few things:

I now know why other homeschoolers tend to misunderstand us and our methods: We went to Paris. Figuratively speaking, but yeah, we did. Our life is an adventure—for real. We do things and build our lives around things that are not just designed for long-term security. In fact, I believe from Bible verses in correct context, that spending your entire adult life working to provide financial stability and attempting to eliminate any possibility of financial discomfort, is the opposite of trusting God.

But there are some tradeoffs for our freewheeling lifestyle. My kids hardly have any friends here because most of the homeschooled kids we know are even more regimented and inflexible than schooled kids. And strangely enough, the parents are proud of it. (One mother wrote a scolding email to Colleen explaining that they literally do not have a five minute block that is unscheduled and available for discretionary use, like walking on the beach, which we do every day.) I’m still not sure if she was supposed to admire this or pray for them…

Other kids, school kids, are not allowed to play; they must do homework until bedtime. Again, not sure if I should admire that or pity it. So anyway, most of my kids’ socialization comes from adults, family members and online friends. (We may have to let Eric go to school ‘cause he loves to play with kids and nobody will play with him.)

We worked hard for many years to build a business that provides the flexibility we enjoy. But I could quit any time if God tells me to. I already left a successful career and moved half-way across the world to a place where my skills were mostly non-transferable. I suffered for it, but where are we promised that there would be no trouble in this world? We do have roots here, but God can pull them up any time He wants.

So these are just the facts, not an indictment of anything or anyone. And I know there are lots of other people who live the adventure. But this is about my family, and this is me putting down what I am thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it! So here it is:

Trying to Understand Why

I guess most of us have a hard time separating our lives from the American religion of over-consumption. It all ties in together. We buy things we don’t really need, mostly to impress people we don’t necessarily like, so they will admire us. But we also know that if there is a glaring weakness evident, that is what people will talk about. That makes us want to shore up our defenses and be ready to cover up anything that may cause people to look askance at us.

School-at-Home vs. Unschool 

I think that may be why the majority of homeschoolers might as well be in school because they don’t take advantage of the flexibility that homeschool allows (at least from what we can see). Instead, it seems like they try to emulate the school in their home. That’s the major difference between unschoolers and school-at-homers. We are confident in what we do and do not feel a need to display our flight itinerary and progress to people who are looking for something to complain about. School-at-homers want to be sure they look and smell good because they know that the average parent sends their kids to school and that’s all they know. So if they don’t want to be misunderstood (by people who adhere to public school doctrine), they just make it look like they are doing the same thing that everyone knows and that way the path is pretty well paved and not too bumpy. In other words, emulating the school in your home is the path of least resistance.

And to keep on subject here (declaring success in homeschooling), the school-at-home people will do standardized testing to be sure they are on the right track, and also to show others that they are on the right track. This is to reassure the parents and also the community. We (my family) accept the trust and take responsibility for it, like a manager or steward is expected to do. Once in a while we explain what we’re doing, but mostly I am very glad we have a large “traditional” homeschooling group here and I am happy to let them be the face the community sees when they see homeschoolers. Because not even homeschoolers understand us; why would anyone else?

My Second Homeschool Graduate

One of our workers, a part-time guy who is a professional teacher, talked to me about Adam. Adam is the manager of the office that this teacher works out of, so Adam Smith is basically this guy’s boss. Well, the teacher guy said Adam is too quiet. He needs to get out of his shell.

Well, let’s see here. Adam is quiet. And when I was teaching in a classroom setting in a private high school, I wish some of the students knew when it was appropriate to be quiet. But they had zero self-control and so they talked and talked and of course swear words came out and I had to discipline them for it. So as a criticism of a person, or of our schooling style or of our parenting, that’s pretty thin.

Let me try this: I will make a small list of some of Adam’s positive and negative character traits. And then we will see what we got.

Adam is kind to people and animals.

He is organized and dislikes a mess.

He works the family business for a meager allowance, because he knows that after age 18, dad does not owe you a living.

He washes dishes and laundry.

He cares about accuracy and keeps the paperwork in order.

He is an excellent manager and keeps the office profitable.

He shares ideas and helps me develop profitable ones.

He is presentable and friendly to customers.

We can trust him with the business’ money.

He is frugal and sensible with his own money.

If he doesn’t know an answer, he does not give false information; he calls or looks it up.

He cares about his younger siblings and keeps them safe.

He teaches them.

He writes music we all love.

He stays out of our way and seldom asks for anything.

He does not complain about unfairness—ever.

No girl is pregnant because of him

He does not say bad words or take drugs or alcohol

We know where he is at night even though he is old enough to be on his own.

He has pledged to share his success with his family

He reads voraciously and writes beautifully, including perfect college-level essays

He can and does cook.

He is a very safe and correct driver.

He respects and obeys the laws (to which we are to be subjected according to scripture.)

He is respectful to his parents, even in anger.

He is interesting. Fascinating, in fact—If anyone cared enough to get to know him.

He is intelligent.

He is extremely flexible for our family’s sake.

He is in touch with his sensitive side.

He can cut the grass in 100 degree heat.

His siblings adore him so much they fear him as they don’t want to be displeasing to him.

I could go on and if this was your kid you could too. But maybe you get the point:

Anyone who has met or worked with Adam should know more about him than he is shy and too quiet. And if that’s all you take away, it’s your loss. Friends look for good things to say about their friends, and if you try, you can find plenty to be celebrate in any of your friends.

How to be Special

I have to tell this to well-meaning friends and relatives: If you want to critique, criticize or complain about our kids, our parenting, our style, our school, etc, take a number and get in line. This does NOT make you special. If you want to be special, understand your choices: You can love my kids or disapprove of them. Your choice. You decide if you want to invest in a relationship with these little-known relatives of yours. Or if you want to discard them and all the richness that friendship could bring, because you are disinclined to take the time to try to understand and maybe even have your eyes opened to something new…

Wisdom

One more thing before I close this chapter about the journey and when do we declare success, or failure in a child’s education: Revolutionary Road. Again. Ugly movie. But eye-opening. Very depressing for most, I can see why! To some extent, everyone sacrifices their dreams and goals for security and prestige, and justifies it by calling those spectral ideas “immature” and “unrealistic.”

But in the end, in the final analysis, what you have done with your days is what you have traded your life for.

Money? Security? Will that keep you alive? In a hundred years, we will all be dead; we have that in common!

Does Anyone Really Believe This?

In most serious discussions about homeschooling, people understand the basic premise. But in some discussions, where the truly uninitiated embarrass themselves with commentary, we hear that kids must go to school to learn intangible lessons, such as how to prepare for the real world of work, where your ability to deal successfully with nasty office politics will be your salvation, or to be able to understand a deadline and meet it, or to be prepared for the reality of getting up at 5:30 am to be at work by 7:00, five days a week for fifty or more years.

Wait a sec! You mean to tell me my kids need 12 years of training in order to be able to get up at 5:30 or whatever? Maybe the reason these poor kids need 12 years is to prepare themselves for the horror of emptiness that will be theirs if they subscribe to that program.  That’s what “going postal” is all about! They need years of being inured to the reality that their dreams must, and will, evaporate unless they are lucky enough to save enough money to enjoy a sliver of the original dream when they are over 70 years old and can retire and travel .

All that institutional training is to prepare them mentally and psychologically and spiritually for the reality that they will work a job they hate so they can make enough money to have everything that is advertised on TV so they can show the neighbors that they have the ability command more than their share of resources. Then they can declare “success”, while desperately trying to forget that there once was a dream…

Conclusion

I am very thankful to God for allowing me to have an adventurous life, and to have a family that, for the most part, agrees with it all and enjoys the adventure.

I guess I am declaring success to be the adventure itself. I give us a passing grade.