New "school year"

Ya win some ya lose some.... although I actually manged to get the paperwork and check in the mail to TheFarm, I neglected to save a copy of the New! Improved! Learning plan thingumagiggy. So I'll have to wing it and try to remember what I wrote. I don't really categorize Ray's life into "subjects" at home - just for reporting purposes.

Anyway, welcome to anyone from The Farm School at Home who may be checking in and feel free to comment. Here is a quick reference to said plan, best as I can remember:

Language Arts: Research/ information science
Mathematics: Logic and programming
Sciences: Applied physical science (objects in motion)
Social Studies: economics
Physical education: seasonal activities
Wellness: independent living
Music: appreciation
Arts: painting and manipulating digital imagery
Foreign languages and cultures: global studies
Community service: negotiation skills

My intent with this blog is to record what Ray's actually doing with reference to the learning plan but more as an attempt to give an idea of what autodidacticism really looks like in Ray's life. Although we didn't have the funds to register last year, I've been doing sort of a "dry run" of this process since...hmmm, December of last year, so there's quite a bit blogged already.

I've already posted somewhat about the programming under "Adventures of Satanbot", and about the economics under "online education" - that's way back in February, so check the archives if you're interested. Research and foreign language has been touched on under "Dabbling". So far I've been updating the blog about twice a month, each time discussing a different "subject".

By and large, I'd have to say that Ray has been doing spectacularly since he moved in with us last November. He's a pleasure to live with and a true autodidact.

the adventures of Satanbot

Da, da DA!

Its not a comic book character, its a computer program. Rayan has been very excited to show me his new "bot" -a program he created for use within (yes, you guessed it) Runescape. Originally, Satanbot, as he calls it, was designed as a sort of mini search-engine. Characters on Runescape have the option of battling against other characters, under certain conditions. What Satanbot does is to look up the stats of other characters so Rayan can decide if he wants to fight them or not. Clever. Next I suspect he'll be looking up others "bank accounts" to see if he wants to trade with them.

He's mostly cutting and pasting code at this point, but still, he's learning which bits of code do what and starting to get a feel for the overall patterns. I'm impressed - I'm still struggling to find what I want in HTML. Of course, I'm not spending hours a day studying it. Yeah, that's right, Mr. "School Sucks" is spending hours at a time Studying something. I'm so tickled.

Satanbot, in addition to its utility as a search engine, is also part of a "channel" Ray's created - sort of a chat-room within Runescape. Since the game itself is "family friendly" its strictly moderated against profanity, which Ray finds irksome. But he doesn't want to get his @ss kicked off either. Finally he has another option. The channel, known as "antichrist", is linked to Runescape in some way I don't understand, but separate from the game. So the chatees can cuss to their hearts content and talk about whatever they want. Satanbot acts as a sort of "host" on the channel - I've seen this but, honestly, I'm not getting all the details - and greets those who log on with a friendly "What the Fuck do You want?" I'm so proud. He's found a way to get what he wants without breaking any rules. Fiendishly clever.

Da, da DA! Satanbot!

social stuff and exploding into autodidacticism

I'm on a few different unschooling boards - unschooling is one of the words used by homeschoolers to describe interest-led learning. Here's a part of a reply I posted to a mom worried about her son's interests and level of motivation where I happen to have a lot to say about what's going on with Rayan:

Another mom wrote: "Nate doesn't finish anything.. Well unless he is building something with Legos or making paper airplanes."

I replied: Wow, what a great example of the difference between chosen work and imposed work! He *has* the ability and attention to finish projects - the trouble is you are not assigning value to his projects.This statement of yours is also a good look at why you can't make assumptions about how unschooling will look in your home based on how a kid responds to schooling and imposed chores. Ray fought and fought and fought against both - he "looked" alot like your descriptions of Nate. Now, after six months of deschooling, he's practically exploding with new projects and ideas. He's drawing and painting and manipulating digital images. He's writing programs and exploring other languages and cultures. He's water skiing and learning to use a fire-staff. The other day he spent two hours in the woodshop making a staff for a guest bc she left hers home. He learned to use a new tool in the process. He's cooking and cleaning without ever being *made* to do so - although he has asked us to remind him to do the dishes. He *wants* to help.

I have read that unschooled children tend to be more successful intrapersonally then conventional schooled children. I for some reason believed (and I am sorry for my assumption) that unschooled kids mainly associated with other unschooled kids.

My kids don't *know* very many unschooled kids. Mo knows a handful, but they all live an hour or more away from us. Ray knows no unschoolers his age irl - although he's met some online. They both spend more time with adults than kids in general. They both have really great social skills for dealing with adults - including the ability to gently deflect adults who are condescending and belittling to them.Mo's better at asking for help with social situations she's not comfortable exploring on her own, but that may be as much a matter of personality. Ray's an extrovert, so he tends to dive in and figure things out in the middle, as it were. That got him into trouble when he was expected to "be respectful" to adults in particular, but also in a lot of kid situations where he was expected to behave in certain ways. Ironically, now that he's not struggling against those expectations he's far more tactful and gracious, even with people he doesn't like or disagrees with. I've seen him "work as a team" with people he barely knows to get a job done more efficiently, whereas half a year ago he would have done his passive-aggressive best to make a mess of things to "get out of" having to help.

dabbling

"Everyone for what he likes - we like to be
Heads down, tails up, dabbling free!" ---K. Grahmm (sp?)

When I was filling out the fs@h "learning plan" I was strongly tempted to skip over the box marked "foreign language". At that time, just out of school, Ray seemed to have no interest in languages other than English. It was a remnant of my own public schooling that prompted me (write anything! just don't leave it blank!) combined with a somewhat more noble belief that everything is connected, and learning is all about connections. So I wrote: Emphasis on global awareness and left it at that.

Six months after moving in, I'm starting to see a transition in Rayan. He's starting to expand his interests and awareness. He's choosing - completely independently - to learn new things. He is currently doing this by the time-honored method of dabbling.

Kids are regularly encouraged to "stick with" new interests, even after the interest wanes. Kids and adults who pick up and put down interest after interest and project after project, leaving older loves and skills behind, are seen as lazy or undisciplined or lacking some other, essential quality. And yet inventors, artists, and autodidacts across history have very often been dabblers. Archimedes and DaVinci are probably the most famous for this, poking their noses into everything imaginable, and going on to imagine new things besides. Franklin and Edison are popular dabblers from US history and much admired. Schools go so far as to attempt to teach dabbling - its called getting a well-rounded liberal arts education. But for all that, dabbling has fallen into disfavor.

Rayan is dabbling in foreign languages and, in the process, is expanding his awareness of other lands and cultures.

Runescape started it (humbling, to realize how much learning takes place as a result of this game) . Its played internationally, and in the pursuit of virtual commerce and less lag time, Ray discovered some servers set up for German users. Its possible to get translations for posts between members, but all the on-screen information is in German. Ray quickly began picking up useful vocabulary, and is probably the only teen in the county who can now shop for weapons and armor in German.

A few months ago, that would have been enough for him but, as I said, he's changing. The deschooling interlude is fading into true autodidacticism. Ray wanted more. George showed him Bable Fish and they looked a few things up together. The boy who still claims to hate reading then proceeded to spend hours researching his topic of choice. Take that, public education.

German's a pretty intimidating language in print, though, so Ray got his fill of it quickly. The desire for more lingered, though, sending him to research Italian, briefly, and spend an entire evening simply looking up different languages and asking to which countries/nationalities they belonged. Mandarin and Urdu, Sanskrit and Yiddish, Arabic - that one threw me. With all the hoo-haa in the Middle East, is it really possible he didn't know one country where Arabic was spoken? He kept searching and pondering. I reassured him there was no need to pick one language or to "stick with it" even if he did. He remained restless and dissatisfied, still wanting more.

Maria Montessori wrote about young children arriving at a state she called "normalization", focused concentration on their work. I've seen this state in Ray playing computer games. Now I've seen it with an "academic" pursuit (take that, again, public schools).

Eventually Ray settled on Gaelic and Ireland as a specific realm of interest. I'm used to those being more favored by hippies and folk musicians than bad-boy metalheads and skaters, so I was a little surprised. Ray's been fascinated by Ireland for some time, but has had little opportunity to learn about it. So he's dabbling in the subject. He'll do some reading and leave it for a day...learn a handful of words and drop it for a week. He's serious and intent, but its not one of those overwhelming passions, like the one that led to Morgan drawing nonstop for weeks and the house looking like an explosion in a comic-book factory.

Dabbling can be a transitional stage of learning. Some people (adults and kids) dabble around in a subject until they reach a comfort or skill level, and then dive in. Dabbling can be a means to finding the right niche. I think it is in this kind of dabbling that Ray is engaged, currently. Others are life-long dabblers, immersing themselves in a subject for a time, and then moving on. Our friend, Mirror, is this kind of dabbler, as are some of those famous dabblers of history.

In the long term, it doesn't really matter if Ray is the kind of guy who dabbles to get his feet wet or occupationally. What's important is that he understands his own natural process and is comfortable with that.

In the shorter term, all y'all family and friends reading and lurking, keep your eyes open for any resources you can throw his way. Given Ray's other interests, anything related to Irish punk music, the IRA, religious warfare or other aspects of Ireland's bloody history might interest him. Just keep in mind what I'm saying about dabbling. In a few months, Ireland may be passe.

Or he may be reading Finnegan's Wake for fun.
You just never know.

artist at work

None of us knew that teenagers aren't allowed to buy spray paint anymore. What's the world coming to? George had some errands to run, and Ray went along for the express purpose of buying spray-paint. Its not like its a secret or something - he'll probably ask for help making more stencils in the next day or so. They wouldn't sell any to him. Apparently there's a big fuss over kids using it as an inhalant and someone has decided that if they're going to be doing something that dangerous they can just buy meth and get it over with.


George rolled his eyes and paid for the paint. He said it took a lot of self-control not to ask for a couple extra plastic bags.


Anyway, here's a look at Ray "doing art". Yes, he is spray painting a pair of jeans, and that's Mo in the background, who has just painted her face, although with tempera. It was a big paint-day here. In the learning plan, I have "Emphasis on visual arts as a means of personal expression with regard to real world political, social and legal issues". Ray accomplishes this mainly via spray paint. The shopping trip was a great example of how real world issues intersect with real world artists - I couldn't design a curriculum that effective! We've also had some great discussions of copyright law and intellectual property rights as a result of looking up possible stencil designs.


He's learned to make stencils and use them effectively, and coming to understand background and foreground, positive and negative space. He is experimenting with layering and fade effects and so learning to manipulate the variables of his medium. He's learning about cost-effectiveness wrt different materials and in time he's going to realize that he's learning about ratios. And he's enjoying himself. That's often not one of the priorities of "education" but its a fairly significant one in autodidacticism.

Allowance

The financial situation seems to finally be turning around, after a pretty rough winter, so George and I have started talking about the allowance issue. We hadn't considered it with Morgan at all, in part bc she's so much younger, but also bc she's right there with me, and often George, for the shopping, so talking about finances, budgets, savings, allocating funds, all that stuff is a regular part of her daily life. Ray's new to the family, and with his vampire lifestyle hasn't been awake for shopping opportunities. That's changing, but still, two kids at the store is often more than I'm up for. Either one of them is fabulous, but for some reason, the two together seem to ping off each other until I feel like I'm stuck in a popcorn popper full of bells and rubber snakes. Fantasies of duct tape.

Anyway, that has left us with a bit of a disparity, bc Mo's wants are still pretty easy to say yes to for a dollar or less, so she tends to get something whenever we go out. That's a big part of what's driving the allowance question. I want Ray to feel like he's every bit as much a member of the family as Morgan, and here she is, getting a bit of candy or a toy every day or so, while he gets... groceries. So far he hasn't said anything about that, but I'd like to head off any sense of unfairness, if possible, before it can start. Its a fair estimate that she gets twenty dollars worth of this kind of spending a month, and that's a do-able sum to give Ray, too, with our usual income.

Another issue has to do with the whole idea of finances as a way of learning about economics on a smaller scale than what he's been doing online. He can't learn about money if he doesn't have any, and he can't learn about making real world financial decisions unless he has enough to make decisions about. So the money is coming out of our "homeschool budget". Since those funds generally come out of my income, that will start next time I work at Morningside foods, and he'll get money on a monthly basis.

We're not tying allowance money to expectations of work. He has opportunities to work both here and jobs his mom sets up if he wants more money. Its possible he'll choose not to work for awhile as a result, but its not like we can afford to give him much. We're talking $20 a month, here. Still, if that's more than he's been used to getting (I honestly don't know) I wouldn't be surprised if he elected not to work for pay for a time.

I admit, my own knee-jerk first reaction to that is "that's not the way the real world works" but it doesn't take me long to see the fallacy of that kind of thinking. Sometimes it is the way the real world works. I've gotten a good bit of money that I haven't worked for and used it to buy property, build a house, renovate the barn, buy power tools. Its not that uncommon, and happens in a lot of different ways - windfalls or inheritances or a good stock portfolio or insurance money or whatever.

So that's the plan. If the family finances take another dip, we'll have to cut back, of course. That's the real life limitation to the allowance thing - its dependent on the family income.

springing forward

The weather change seems to have brought a major shift in Ray's sleep cycle. He'd been keeping to a mostly nocturnal lifestyle, but once he caught a whiff of warm spring air decided that being awake in the day-time might have some advantages after all. So for the past few weeks he's been struggling to shift back to more regular hours.

I'm fascinated to see him making these kinds of decisions so soon. I've been reading lots of other homeschoolers' tales of pulling kids out of school in the early teens and some take a whole year to decompress and be able to start making independent decisions, self-motivate, decide to learn actively rather than passively. A lot of that is just who Ray is - I mentioned that he seems to have a lot of "intrapersonal intelligence". He's really very introspective and thoughtful. I am glad, though, that George and I are already somewhat experienced in the world of autodidacticism - with Mo I mean. We're used to the idea that self-directed learning doesn't often "look like" school learning, so we're not all that tempted to nudge and coax and try to "get him to do things". That's a big hurdle for a lot of homeschoolers who are transitioning from either school or fairly structured homeschooling to interest based learning.