Baby Blogger

I consider myself a sort of baby blogger - I just called myself that today to a friend. I'm learning the ropes, learning my own voice and how all the bells and whistles work. I think I've stopped fiddling with the layout here, although the limitations do bug me quite a bit from a designer point of view, and I'll likely need to pay attention to that part later. Right now, I'm focused mostly on how the flow will go. I'm doing this in the same way I manage my life - experimentally. I'm jumping in and working out the kinks. That seems like such an ineffective way to learn, but my years of unschooling with my children have taught me that this is precisely how we learn and any other method proposed serves mostly to give the illusion of order to a necessarily messy process.

Babies learn like crazy - their desires are so far out of reach of their skills that they must. And they're such sloppy learners too. They try to stand and fall over, try again, fall again, until one day, they stand with a big toothless grin on their slobbery little faces. That's learning without the sanitizing of school systems. It makes some people very uncomfortable, and although I understand that, I've decided that I don't really care.

I watched my son teach himself a skill he had avoided for years - cursive writing. Because we unschool, I don't force my children to learn anything. We discuss why people learn certain things, why the school system requires them, and what real value these skills may have in their lives. My opinion on cursive writing is that it was going to be a lost skill set now that we all are so hooked into our machines. But I told him that for at least another generation, I foresaw people my age judging him (and me) because of his not having mastered this skill and that it would likely interrupt some aspect of his business life. This year he listened to that and saw that it was likely true.

My son is a bright boy, but probably not much more than a lot of boys in school. But because he understood why he was learning this thing, what value it could have, which we also discussed, and was old enough to value these things, he sat himself down and mastered this thing in a week. We do a review, every once in a while, to see if he is retaining his knowledge and with a few exceptions he is, but honestly, I use the skill so rarely that I, also, have forgotten things - does anyone make the upper case "Q" correctly?

So this story is about me though, and I guess my son's experience gives me hope that I, too, can overcome  obstacles quickly by jumping in at the right time and learning by experience, observation and review. I'm still so fascinated with the process of learning and all the interesting serendipity that enters a life when the mind attached to it is open to change and growth.