Homeschool Fiction

Click here for more “20 Questions Answers from Unschoolers” around the world. If you’d like to answer these questions yourself, please read this post.

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DoLifeRight: Tell me a bit about yourself and your family (name, children’s ages, where you live, etc.):

Laureen: My name is Laureen. My husband is Jason, and our kids are Rowan (7), Kestrel (4), and Aurora (1). We live on a sailboat, the s/v Excellent Adventure, in San Francisco Bay.

DoLifeRight: How long have you homeschooled your children? Do you consider your family an unschooling family? What does this mean for your family?

Laureen: Rowan’s the only one officially school age, so he’s the only one officially unschooled, but of course, when you’re living a philosophy, it stands for everyone.

DoLifeRight: Did you plan to homeschool your children before you actually had children? What is your own educational background?

Laureen: I am a classically overeducated American, one thesis shy of a Master’s degree in treehugging. My husband was a “bad boy”, was in continuation school, and barely made it out alive. We both thought the system sucked, and were looking for a better answer pretty much from the moment our child was born.

DoLifeRight: Why did you decide to not send your children to school? What research did you do to make this decision? Were there any books, magazines, or websites you would recommend new parents (or parents who are new to homeschooling) read?

Laureen: Ohmygosh. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s research. I read freaking *everything*, and then filtered it through the lens of my own and my husband’s experiences. And what finally capped it was the fact that it’s not about education, it’s about faith. Do you, as a parent, have the faith in your own kids to think that they will learn what they need to know when they need to know it? And for us, that answer is an unequivocal “yes!” so we proceeded onwards.

I was lucky enough to get tapped to participate in the Life Without School collective blog (thank you Tammy Takahashi!), and that did amazing things for my learning curve. Not only did I have to examine my process once a month for my post, but I got to read what these other, very experienced mamas were doing in their processes.

I also looked at the schools around me, and honestly, none of them looked like places I wanted to go, let alone places I wanted to send my kids. In a state where the budget is an international joke (California), I don’t blame the schools, but I sure don’t want to participate.

DoLifeRight: Did you consider yourself an “Attachment Parent” when your children were infants? How did this (or didn’t this) affect your choice to unschool/homeschool your children?

Laureen: Oh, absolutely. Attached and then some. But that really was a separate set of decisions; I’m pretty sure there are a heap of attached parents who send their kids to school, too. They’re not mutually exclusive choices. My decision to unschool was more informed by the rest of our life choices. We live on a 47-foot catamaran, and in October, are taking off to sail around the world. We’d be yanking the kids from school for that anyway, so why send them in the first place? I also didn’t want to give them the mixed message that curricula was important, and then, not. (more on this below).

DoLifeRight: What specific benefits to your children (or family as a whole) have you actually seen since you became unschoolers/homeschoolers?

Laureen: My child will never have to raise his hand to go to the bathroom. That’s invaluable, right there. He’s ragingly non-compliant (wonder where he got that? LOL!), and no one’s gonna squash that out of him, so that’s another major bonus. He is not fenced-in by someone else’s idea of what he should be interested in, and I think that’s the biggest bonus. I think the entire idea of “age-appropriate” is evil.

We are going to be cruising the world. My kids are going to learn about geography and navigation and culture and food and language and art and people by going there and being part of it. There is not a thing that they will be doing that is part of recognized curricula. But the value is obvious. So! I believe that what they’ll be learning, by being out in the world, is infinitely more valuable than what they’d learn while locked in a room, sitting at a desk.

Rowan knows about Edo-period Japanese art. He can completely disassemble, clean, and reassemble space heaters. He can climb nearly to the top of the shrouds, he can run the dinghy (once someone else starts it for him), he can surf the web, and he can recite half the Jackie Chan movies ever made. Typical kindergarten? Nope. But fabulous and enriching nonetheless.

And finally… Rowan is a spatial learner. Typical schools have no room for a kid like him. My favorite story about this is the day he was experimenting with writing his brother’s name, and wrote “K E S” but did the S backwards. When this was pointed out to him, he stared at the page for a good few minutes, then rotated the page 180, and wrote “T R E L” but also backwards, so the entire name was correct, but mirrored, perfectly. There’s no space on worksheets for that kind of creativity, you know? It was amazing when Da Vinci did it, but for a child, to a harried teacher with 30 other kids, it’s “wrong”.

DoLifeRight: Do you have a regular schedule in your life? How does this work with outside commitments and responsibilities?

Laureen: Nope. We are Chaos. But in a good way!

DoLifeRight: How important have support groups been for you? Do you have online ones, in person ones, or a mixture? Please list any you want to share.

Laureen: Because of the whole boat thing, my support group is scattered across the globe, so we don’t have a lot of local support. But we’re doing OK. I’d like the kids to have a more stable group of friends to grow with, but I’m guessing that as soon as they can email, that’ll resolve itself. Rowan and Kestrel both are great at just bombing up to other kids and making friends fast.

DoLifeRight: What resources do you use for your children’s “educations”? Feel free to comment on the word “education”.

Laureen: Oh geez. We spend hours belly-down on the dock with field guides, trying to figure out what’s swimming down there. We spend hours belly-up on the dock with weather guides, trying to figure out what’s going on up there. The kids have spent hours working on the boat, figuring out what tools we’re going to need next, and how to use them. We cook. We talk (oh man, do we talk). The librarians know us on sight. And our Netflix subscription takes a beating.

Interestingly, museums and such aren’t a real help with my boys. I think because living on a boat is such a very hands-on kind of thing, they don’t have a lot of appreciation for stuff they can’t mess with. We just saw the Samurai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and Rowan was really disappointed that the armor was behind glass and he couldn’t fiddle with it to see how it worked.

I don’t get too bogged down in the semantics (although I loved reading Frank’s deconstruction of the Latin! Go Frank!). In my brain, “education” and “learning” are all one big thing, absent coercion. But I totally understand how those word choices impact thought, and how they make some people twitch.

DoLifeRight: How did your friends and families react when you told them your children wouldn’t be going to school? Have their opinions changed over the years?

Laureen: The Grandparents are delighted. One Grandma is a little nervous about it, but she’s coming around. But honestly, the proof is in the kids. You can’t miss the fact that they’re thriving, and isn’t that really what matters most?

My friends are divided on the issue, so we don’t talk about it much.

DoLifeRight: What have been the benefits (unexpected and expected) to homeschooling?

Laureen: I remember what my first few years of school were like, and what they did to my head. Rowan’s not going to experience that. ::whew::

DoLifeRight: How does your family make money? Do you have a job? Full-time or part-time or something in between? Can you tell us about your choices and how you made these decisions?

Laureen: I was a fulltime corporate mouse jockey until January, when I got laid off. We decided that meant it was time to go, so we’re taking off in October. My husband has a retail job at a marine supply store, and also does work on boats. And we are frugal, uber-frugal. It means we really don’t fit in in this part of the world, where everyone has nice cars and the newest cell phone and all the gadgets, but it’s worth it.

DoLifeRight: How have *you* personally grown since you started unschooling/homeschooling your children? How has your relationship with your spouse/partner grown?

Laureen: That faith thing I mentioned above? That. We are all intertangled in each other’s activities and interests and business, and because of that, we have all increased respect for and appreciation of, each other.

DoLifeRight: Are you able to find time to have your own hobbies, interests, and friends? Beyond your children (of course), what are your interests?

Laureen: You have to have a life if you’re going to share a life. The biggest, of course, is the boat thing. The kids didn’t pick it, but we’ve managed to help them love it, over time, and I think that’ll get bigger as soon as we cut the lines.

I personally have a passion for birth advocacy, and travel the country giving talks about social media and birth choices, so the kids hear and see a lot of that kind of stuff.

Jason is an athlete (never met a sport he wasn’t instinctively and instantly good at), so the kids are gaining appreciation for that. It also is helping them recognize that they have the same set of skills.

DoLifeRight: How do you respond to other people’s questions about the following: completeness of education, socialization, college plans, etc.? Do you give different answers to different people? Why?

Laureen: Pass the bean dip. Seriously. I have been dealing with faux questioning (where the questioner is more interested in proving you wrong than in informing themselves) for *years*, starting with the questions about birth choices, so I’ve gotten really, really good at just changing the subject. If they persist, I usually head into discussions of logical fallacy and unclear thinking (the socialization one is great for that; where did anyone get the idea that school was good for socialization?). But my children and their achievements are not up for examination or discussion. People that attempt to quiz my kids get shut down and hard.

DoLifeRight: If you have more than one child, how do you handle their different interests and desires? If you have one child, how do you handle his/her desires to be with other children? How do you reconcile these interests with your own?

Laureen: That hasn’t been an issue for us yet, since Kestrel is still pretty young, and hero-worships his brother and anything his brother is doing.

DoLifeRight: What are the biggest issues you are currently having, or have ever had in regards to parenting and/or homeschooling/unschooling?

Laureen: Choking down my own schoolish thoughts. Rowan isn’t reading yet. He can navigate the web, he can spell the stuff he wants to put on the grocery list, he can play video games, but he can’t officially read yet, and I’m panicking, because I had already been reading for three or four years by his age. But I am a word-based creature, and he is not, and remembering to honor his skills and strengths (which are prodigious, and utterly different from mine) is a daily challenge. My joke is that I have to send the School Gremlins off to the potholder factory.

DoLifeRight: Any regrets? We want to hear the good and the bad! This is the best way to make informed decisions.

Laureen: I regret that I was in school for so long!!! =) Otherwise, no. I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

DoLifeRight: Do you have any websites, yahoo lists, etc. that you run or maintain? Please list them here with descriptions.

Laureen: I blog about the boat, the trip, the kids, unschooling, and birth, at http://theexcellentadventure.com, and am on Twitter as LaureenH

DoLifeRight: Any last thoughts or advice for DoLifeRight’s readers?

Laureen: Life is short. Really short. And kids are young for such a very short amount of time. I think that what they learn about being a family is far more important than what they learn by being part of a societal institution, and I think that what I learn by being with them 24/7 is more important than what I could buy them were I in a societal institution for most of their waking hours. I think that families function as a unit only if they practice being a unit, and that can’t happen if everyone’s haring off in different directions for the majority of their days.

I also believe that children are best served by providing them with a sound and solid emotional foundation. It’s almost impossible to not learn, but if someone is scared or uncertain, they don’t get as much from their life as they do if they are confident and assured. I’m not so worried about packing random facts into their heads as I am about making sure that they have the self-assurance to face and integrate whatever they encounter in their lives.

Related Articles:

• 20 Unschooling Questions: Candy from Atlanta, GA, USA
• 20 Unschooling Questions: Kate from WA, USA
• 20 Unschooling Questions: Sylvia from NM, USA
• 20 Unschooling Questions: Idzie from Montreal, QC, Canada
• 20 Unschooling Questions: Shari from CA, USA

By: Lisa