Small Unschooling Victory?

Shortly after James and I started dating, he bought Daphne the Super Scratch Programming Adventure. She did about 2/3 of the book, got through the tedious stuff, and about the time she hit the place where shew as beginning to do some actual creative programming of her own, she just lost interest. I tried, for a few days, to get her to do several pages at a time; but it was like pulling teeth. Eventually, I just stopped encouraging her to keep pounding away at it and we moved on to other things.

Earlier this week, she said that a friend of hers (online) wanted to teach her C++ (which James assures me is not for beginners) and though she didn't specifically say this person recommended starting with Scratch, she did say she wanted to get back into her old account and start it again.

She was so good at picking up the programming (good enough that James had to check her mistakes, because I couldn't find what was wrong when something didn't work), and it was really tempting to try to force her to finish the book. But I didn't, and now that she wants to do it again, she will. And she's more mature and has more tech skills now, too.

Unschooling doesn't mean un-parenting. I still discipline. I still make Daphne do things she doesn't want to do... but I don't make her pretend to learn things she's not interested in studying, because I feel that, in the long run, she'll only master the subject long enough to jump through the hoops I've put into place, and then forget it all. That seems like wasted time and effort on both of our parts, and I don't like wasting my time.

I continue to look forward to seeing what this kid will produce, with her artistic bent and increasing technical prowess. I don't want to dampen that by force-marching her through the process until she's sick of it and gives up. And so far, that approach seems to be working.

(We've done the same thing with "I bought you a Bamboo drawing pad; why aren't you using it?!" which she picked up again for the first time in over a year this month. So maybe, just maybe, we're getting somewhere. Slowly and surely.)