Stumbling into Your Destiny

This weekend, Daphne will turn 14. We shot this video in July 2009, when she was just seven years old.



In 2009, I'd never heard of "unschooling." I knew we were a lot more laid back than some of my other homeschooling friends.

In fact, once I was talking with one of Daphne's good friend's moms (follow that?) when she mentioned that they were really getting burnt out, because doing all of the coursework outlined in their curriculum was taking 8 or more hours per day. She said that they were working well after dinner, and that they were both just exhausted.

I said, "So, don't do some of the stuff." She looked puzzled. I said, "Just.. if your daughter clearly has something mastered, don't run it into the ground. If it's taking too long or is frustrating, just bag it for a while. No one's forcing you to keep their suggested schedule."

A few weeks later when we spoke again, she said she felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of her shoulders. She said they'd let go of their "finisher" mentality and were so much more relaxed, and having so much more fun.

At the time, we didn't have a set curriculum. Actually, we never had a set curriculum. I'd buy one of those all-inclusive "2nd grade" books at Sam's Club or on Amazon, and we'd be pretty good about hitting math at least three times a week. I think I tried doing spelling with Daphne for a few months once. We did a full course of "Harry Potter Science," and we did it in like two weeks because it was amazing.

I tried to teach her history, I really did. But she didn't like it, and I wasn't happy putting her through the motions and wasting my own time and energy, so... we didn't. (And before you're too shocked at how ignorant she might be about our human past, just know that my husband and I are both products of the same educational system and he knows a lot about history, whereas I'm as dumb as rocks. Difference isn't what we were taught, but our interest. I had none, he did. So he remembered.)

I tried studying science theoretically, but she wasn't interested in what she couldn't see and touch and study before her.

We did learn multiplication tables, mostly because of a super obnoxious CD set I bought. The 3, 6, 9 skip-counting song still pops into my head unbidden at times. Math was the only thing I ever really "pushed," and now I wish I hadn't. She cried a lot when she was little. I thought she was being lazy, staring off and taking 45 minutes to avoid a sheet of paper I knew it would take her 10 minutes to complete. Ugh. What a waste of our relationship. If I could go back and do anything over, it'd be officially unschooling from the beginning.

Oh, and bed-sharing. But that's a whole other thing.

Anyway, for the most part, I wasn't too concerned about "schooling." I wasn't going to teach Daphne cursive, but at some point she wanted to learn and asked. When she'd get frustrated, I was able to remind her that she is the one who wanted to study it, and she could stop if she was over it. She ended up sticking with it and can read cursive and write it about as neatly as I can, which is to say not very.

We went to the library and checked out books all of the time. She loved crafting books, and I liked them okay, but when I'd look at all of the materials we'd have to buy, it overwhelmed me. Not the price, but just finding every little thing in some big hobby store. Ugh. So when she decided she wanted to learn how to make balloon animals, I loved that idea! Balloons and a blower-upper I could do. (Oh, but in that video, you can see a couple of her crafts hanging on the wall.)

She spent hours for a week or so figuring that stuff out. It's noisy and the cats didn't much like it. There were a lot of burst balloons. There was a learning curve about stretching the balloons first so that you could manipulate air bubbles better and that kind of thing.

It never once occurred to me to: 1) Tell her to finish her "real" school before she did this. 2) Make this an official part of school and then force her to continue balloon-folding once her interest waned.

The result was that she had fun, she learned something on her own, and mastered it enough that she felt she could pass her knowledge and experience on to someone else.

To me, her doing that on her own was one of the more important lessons she's ever learned. Not that she can make stuff out of envelopes of air, but that if she's interested in something and wants to pursue it, she has all of the tools on her own to do what she needs to do.

After my divorce, when I had to work (and, seriously, I can't say enough how grateful I am and was for the opportunity to work for the Hejnys, who provided a private office for Daphne so she could come with me), it forced us further into the unschooling mode, as Daphne was mostly left to her own devices. She did some Time4Learning then, but she also made videos like this one.




I never showed her how to use my laptop like this; she just figured it out and kept herself amused. It's amusing to me, too. Sometimes, she'd need help with something, but I'd necessarily be busy, you know, working. I'd tell her that as soon as I had a break, I'd check it out. Very often, by the time I got around to assisting her, she'd have figured out the problem on her own and remedied it.

It helped me get even more comfortable with the reality that Daphne didn't really need me in order for her to learn anything. She just needed me to be around, to make opportunities happen, and to give her a hand if absolutely necessary. It's rarely necessary anymore.

Now, hopefully, I am making up for the hesitancy to buy things to fuel her artistic bent when she was younger. As Daphne spends the majority of her time drawing, and has for more than three years, we have stepped up her tools. First, a couple of years ago, we bought her a desktop (to replace her weakening laptop) and an upgraded graphics card that would handle both gaming and animation and drawing apps. Shortly after that, we got her a sort of entry-level electronic drawing tablet.

Then, for her birthday this year, we got her a tablet that actually has its own display. Setting it up and getting it fully functional took a couple of days. First, we had to get a USB extension. Then, we had to get HDMI-DVI converter. Twice because, well, long story, but anyway... it happened to render the USB extension useless, by the way, so if anyone needs one of those, or a male/male HDMI-DVI converter, hit me up.

Once she was finally displaying as she was supposed to, the only way we could figure out to make the tablet work right was to mirror her computer display, because when we tried to make the tablet an extension, the pen's "mouse" would only work on the computer screen. This seemed wrong, since the whole point was to be able to write on the tablet, and even when she was mirroring, the mouse was still on the screen instead of the tablet, even though it reproduced whatever she was doing on the tablet, as well.

I figured out how to configure that to work, but then on her drawing app specifically, the pen's mouse appeared about three inches below her pen point. I was having to do something with Mal for a while, and a bit later, Daphne hollered, "I'm not the only one who's had this problem!" And a bit later, "I fixed it!"

I was bragging on her to James, that she got her workstation up and running, and she joked, "Now I just have to learn how to draw."

She knows how to draw. She's taught herself. Through watching cartoons and videos and finding online skeleton references and base models. Through practice, practice, practice... she has a whole bookshelf full of used sketch books.

In fact, I put her in a total of one official art course, two summers ago, and she said that she didn't want to learn techniques from someone else because she liked developing her own style. Lesson learned. No more "classes." It's amazing how long it takes to break one from that habit, once you've subconsciously bought into the notion that if someone more expert than you doesn't pour their knowledge into you, you might not be learning it "right."

(And, honestly, my main thought was that the art teacher would have so much more stuff than we did - charcoals, paints, etc. - that Daphne might enjoy switching it up. She doesn't.)

That there is the story of how we came into full-fledged unschooling. I'm sorry Daphne had to endure the process as a first child. I'm interested to see how it plays out in Mal's life. And I really can't wait to see a picture off of that super amazing tablet...