S2E3 | Unschooling and Connections: How Learning Is All About Creating a Web of Understanding

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Cecilie Conrad: 0:14

All right, so we're back in business with the ladies. I'm so excited. I really love these conversations. I am today recording episode three of season two. I believe it is with Sandra Dodd and Sue Elvis. Welcome both of you, we are.

Sue Elvis: 0:35

Hi Celia, I'm so pleased to be back.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:39

Yeah, it's so nice to see you. We've been chatting let's just be honest about it on Messenger about this topic and now we get to unfold it. So we were trying to find something slightly more less complicated to talk about this time, because it seemed a little hard last time. And, uh, I can read out loud here uh, the headline today is connections and how learning comes from unexpected places. Anyone want to run with the question?

Sandra Dodd: 1:17

early, long ago, when the discussions were mixed up all kinds of homeschoolers together, we didn't have just unschooling discussions Very often, if someone would come in and say, well, how can kids learn fractions without a textbook, without school, without teachers to teach them? And the more conservative moms would say, or the newer people would say, they can learn it from recipes, from baking, from doing half or double recipes, and then they would stop Like that's the answer, the whole, full answer. And I thought, well, what about games? What about Lego? What about card playing cards? There are all kinds of ways, you know, dividing a cake or pizza, but it was always just baking cookies and dividing the recipe. It's not very exciting.

Sandra Dodd: 2:06

So even that, seeing where math comes for little kids is fun because they don't need the notation. It's like a musician who can play or sing really well but can't read music. A musician who can play or sing really well but can't read music. And I saw that with my kids learning language, but especially math. They could be very mathematical, really facile with fractions, even percentages that they just had picked up gradually, mostly playing games that had scores or playing D&D that needed dice and things like that. They just got really quick with those factors, but they wouldn't have recognized it written down. If they had seen algebraic notation they wouldn't have been able to read that.

Sandra Dodd: 2:52

But there was a day when I overheard Kirby and Marty, who were 12, 10 or so, trying to figure out how long it would take them with their allowance which wasn't the same amount to buy a video game that cost about $50. And I heard him talking about all the factors. It was like a business lesson too, but they didn't know. I was listening. It was we could each own half, but it would take longer at Marty's rate of saving. If they bought it as soon as they could, kirby would own more. Should Marty pay him back later or should they just blow that off? You know not care, but they were figuring out how many weeks it would take and stuff. It was pretty great.

Cecilie Conrad: 3:31

I thought about also sharing. I've heard the baking. Maybe that's where you start when you start home educating it's a lot of baking and it's nice. Mean, maybe that's where you start when you you you start home educating it's a lot of baking and it's nice to bake a cake and or some cookies, um, but I think then I don't want, I don't know if I want to say natural, but a place of learning fractions is sharing, and it's.

Cecilie Conrad: 3:58

It's a problem that siblings often have. Though. How do we share this? It's kind of easy. If you have two children, they have to share. They just cut it in half and they share. But if they have, they are three or they are five or they have a friend over becomes more complicated. So how do we share these two apples between the three of us? Or how do we? And and that's also a natural style it doesn't look like the textbooks, but they arrive at, at solving the same problems, and I I've seen that as a very interesting thing, and especially math. I have one door.

Cecilie Conrad: 4:35

Well, both of my daughters couldn't care less about math. One of them sat down and learned it at some point, the other one, for some reason. She can always arrive at the answer. You know she gets pretty close. It's and and in in. In real life math. You need a guesstimate. You need to arrive at something pretty close. So if, if I'm doing this, I'm going to need about 500. And if it's 478, it's not very important. But she always, without learning any formal math, can figure these things out. That need math, which I find very interesting, and there must be some underlying reality behind that that I just don't know about my husband is very good at math and studied at university.

Sandra Dodd: 5:28

He has helped friends of ours understand calculus and things like that. I didn't ever know or care. When I was in, when I was in school and I was Algebra 2, and they started doing formulas that had squares in and cubes. I couldn't understand it and it's the fault of the teachers who didn't show me physically, you know, show me something 3D, but they just talked about it. Or maybe they showed me and I still didn't get it.

Sandra Dodd: 5:54

And I remember saying to my Algebra 2 teacher what is this good for? Why do we need this? And he said, can it's? It's helpful for things like figuring out how far away the stars are. And first I thought who cares how far away the stars are? Because I didn't care. And I said, don't, we have people to do that.

Sandra Dodd: 6:11

And I ended up dropping out of that class and taking a poetry class. But that was me. But meanwhile my husband and I hadn't met yet right, he's off somewhere said everything he did. He thought of in patterns, his normal way of organizing the world and his thoughts was patterns and graphs and you know ratios and comparisons and I'm like, well, that's too much work to think, thinking meanwhile in words and music. So everyone's thoughts are organized a different way and and that's one reason school irritates some or most kids because the teacher's trying to show them the patterns or the music or the words and that's not how they think well, it's a it's a big problem with the math thing because it's being taught in a specific way, in a specific way of talking about these patterns and these kinds of logic and these systems that math is.

Cecilie Conrad: 7:09

I'm also very good at math and I enjoy math. I do it for funsies, like people play games or solve word puzzles. I like math, but not everyone does that, and and and I think the idea that everybody needs to learn this and they need to learn it in this specific way, where it's this two-dimensional, flat way of talking about it and in in science, is not compatible with the needs of everyone, and I find it a very hard thing because, yes, we do have people to measure the distance to the stars, the people who are passionate about exactly that, and they will sit down and learn all that math because they find it fun and interesting, and why do we have to torture everyone else with it? We don't.

Sandra Dodd: 8:08

I know why it's sad, but it's true.

Sandra Dodd: 8:11

I think, at least in the American school system, they used to break kids out when they were 12 or 13 to trade school or college prep I don't know what they called it at the time Liberal arts, I think they called it.

Sandra Dodd: 8:23

So you're either in liberal arts, where you're going to learn more about history and poetry and philosophy, or you go to trade school and you learn how to build things and fix things. And that became considered a prejudice and to keep some people from ever succeeding, accomplishing the American dream or whatever that it was not giving an equal education to everyone. So instead of saying, oh great, let's teach all the kids how to make and fix things, they went the other way. Let's prepare all the kids for college, just in case they want to go, because that's more fair. So a lot of kids come out having failed to prepare for college, just in case they want to go, because that's more fair. So a lot of kids come out having failed to prepare for college and not learn how to fix or make things. So that's that. That's just a gradual evolution of the education system where I live and I just heard a story from catalonia and north of spain.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:20

It was a woman I interviewed with my husband on the other podcast and she had this problem that she was in that Spanish school system. Apparently, they pick people out If you're good, if you make good grades, then you go in one direction, and if you make less good grades you go in another direction and you can become a plumber or a hairdresser or, I don't know, a seamstress. And if you're really smart quote unquote then you go in the other direction, towards academia. She wanted to be a hairdresser, but she was. She wanted to be a hairdresser, but she was too smart to be a hairdresser. So the school system sent her on the track to university, where she didn't want to be. She wanted to be a hairdresser, but now she was on the wrong track. So once she got to the point where she got to choose not the school system, based on her grades of the things that she was forced to learn, she couldn't choose hairdressing school because that was the other track. She never became a hairdresser oh, no, sad story.

Sandra Dodd: 10:29

It's not the happy ending I was expecting.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:31

Well she's a very happy woman. She did a lot of other happy things and she's an amazing unschooling mom. So it's just um. This is the funny sorting system where we sort, we, we force, teach something and then we sort out the children based on how they perform in these things they're forced to do, instead of allowing them to do the things they're passionate about doing and then see what happens them to do the things they're passionate about doing and then see what happens. I'm not sure how that compares to the american. I'm not sure I got it, sandra. Actually, how did it work? So either you become what did you call the liberal arts, liberal arts uh-huh, or you become the good the.

Sandra Dodd: 11:19

You call it the liberal arts, liberal arts, uh-huh. Or you become the good grades, go into college track. But then they tried to apply that to everyone, just in case, because it's not fair that someone had that. They had assumed early on that a child wasn't good enough or smart enough to go to university, and so that turned people's attitude, I guess and I don't know attitude and money, the expenditure of money away from particular wow, I'm not thinking of the word trades from teaching trades in school, because it was considered condemning someone later to to an inferior income and an inferior status or life. But as things turned around, they never will seem to admit that the people who make a lot of money are electricians and plumbers and they have a steady future a lot of philosophers are out of job actually, oh yeah, and because here that's called blue collar.

Sandra Dodd: 12:26

It's just a lower caste class in our culture.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:31

Well in ours as well. Doesn't it look the same in Australia, sue?

Sue Elvis: 12:37

Yes, you assume, um, yes, uh, that. So I think it's changing that. Uh, half of my kids went to uni, half didn't, and the ones that didn't are doing really well and I think people are recognizing that. Like a trade isn't just a trade. Like hairdressing isn't just cutting someone's hair, it's creative, it's business. There's a lot of opportunities there.

Sue Elvis: 13:02

One of my sons drives. He started off on a nursing degree, decided he didn't like it halfway through he was good at it, it wasn't the problem. He was a St John ambulance officer but he wanted to do something with his hands. He was a into cars and things and he's in the minds now driving, uh, big trucks and earning a fortune. Um, he earns it because he does night shift and you know alternating shifts. But he, he's really happy. And you think, uh, he's really happy.

Sue Elvis: 13:44

And you think that it's not so much about having your piece of paper anymore. I have a piece of paper. I couldn't get a job when I first came out of uni and that piece of paper I haven't looked at for years. It's just sitting in a box somewhere, had no value whatsoever. And I haven't encouraged my kids necessarily to go that pathway, even though I've offered them. I've said would you like to do this? This is how you would get into university, because there are ways in. But some of them chose that, some of them didn't, and they're all doing okay. Some of them chose that, some of them didn't, and they're all doing okay. So, yeah, from my personal point of view, I think, as Cecilia was saying, don't push towards the academic if they're not just because they've got the ability to get the grades to get in there. If their interest is somewhere else, go somewhere else.

Sue Elvis: 14:39

But I was, um, talking to one of my daughters the other day and, knowing her very well, I think that if she'd been at school she would have been. I don't like talking about um, oh I, um, I can't even think the word they used in school. But you have the upper area where the kids are classified as super intelligent and have different activities to take advantage of that. And she was witty. She wrote novels at nine. The one thing she was so full of life and knowledge, the only thing she felt she'd classified herself not as a genius as such was her maths. She, she didn't like it and, um, we successfully went through all her childhood years without actually doing a lot of formal maths and the funny thing is she's a lot better at maths than all the her peers that went to school she gave.

Sue Elvis: 15:43

As Sandra was saying, you pick up skills in different ways, not necessarily through the textbook way of doing it, and I think there's a certain um intelligence in seeing the patterns, for example, seeing your own way of working things out and not just following the rules through a textbook but being able to work it out yourself. And that just because you can't sit down there and fill in all the exercises step-by-step and come out the other end. Showing all the steps doesn't mean that you didn't work it out properly. And sometimes I haven't been able to follow her thinking, her reasoning, because I like that plug in black and white mess. But she, yeah, she had her own way of doing things which I felt was very, in some ways, more valuable because she wasn't just following the rules, she'd worked it all out herself.

Sue Elvis: 16:46

And you were talking earlier about fractions in the kitchen and one day I got really interested in that because people were saying kitchen maths, kitchen fractions, and I thought there must be more to what kids are learning or what maths we're using when we're in the kitchen, and I made a huge, long list of things that we use maths for without even realising from temperature, food labels, percentages, weights, comparison, mathematical language or capacity, uh, estimation. And there was so much there. I just, out of interest, wrote it all down and put it in a blog post, thinking, yeah, all that math that we're learning and we all our kids are learning, we've already learned it.

Sue Elvis: 17:36

We don't need or you were using it, we don't even realize it's just part of life and the reason I did all that was because, unfortunately, a lot of people like we we were in this situation. We had to prove that our kids were following the school syllabus and they were learning all these skills and we had to find evidence of it. And so I wanted to provide some ideas that parents not necessarily for the kids, but parents could sit and observe and then write it all down for the education authorities so that they had some science, so they could do unschooling. They could just let their kids get in the kitchen and cook and do other things without saying, oh we can now, we got to write, do a math exercise. They just write it all down. We did this, we did that and they could see it. Um, not necessarily did the children have to acknowledge it, but the parent could see it, write it down, present it to the education department, who are then satisfied that our kids were learning maths.

Cecilie Conrad: 18:42

That's kind of a translation, like when I say we have to sometimes speak educationese just to let the context around our unschooling understand what's going on or at least get their shoulders down. I was thinking it's funny how we ended up in this math conversation, but it's a relevant one. Most people who embark on unschooling get to a point of worrying about math and maybe they start at a point of worrying about math and they will get a lot of questions from people around them about math and I think in a way I haven't thought this through completely but I think math and the teaching of math in the school system and this weird way it's done, it's the means of suppression. I think it really is a way to make the kids feel stupid. That make the kids feel stupid and and also the ones who can, who can stay on the surface of this, who's got it? Who can figure out these weird, these?

Cecilie Conrad: 19:50

What is it called work books in english? Workbooks is it called workbooks? You know the little and then you have to and they have all these crazy systems and weird little. I don't know. Math is pretty simple, but but they make it like colorful and and all these weird stuff and they have to do that and they have to do it in a specific order and on a specific day. When I was in school, I had to use my eraser because I I had done the wrong page in the book, or one page too much, and I had to erase it and do it again tomorrow. It's a way to only a few enjoy it in that context and only a few get it in that very strange way. It's taught. Everyone else fail, am I right?

Sandra Dodd: 20:42

is it just because the school doesn't know who will like it? Then they offer it to everyone and some kids really like it. Some kids really enjoy any kind of math exercises textbooks they love because they get it. They like it. I really love howard gard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. That's another topic that should be one of our topics. I love that discussion about how someone can be very, very talented in music and sports In school. That doesn't get you any scores, that get you into college or anything right, it's just like extras. But they can be just as good at music and sports as someone else can be at math and language, which does get you to university. I like this impression.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:30

Sorry, Sorry. No, I'm just thinking about the whole. You get into college because you're good at playing basketball thing that you've got oh there's that too.

Sandra Dodd: 21:38

There are music scholarships too. That's not what I meant. That's weird. In school they're not going. Oh yes, come be in the honor society because you're such a good musician. That doesn't happen. No, no, it has to be the standardized test subjects.

Sandra Dodd: 21:52

And when you said that they used math as a suppressive element, I thought about reading. There used to be bumper stickers. They might come around sometimes, but for a while. There were a lot of bumper stickers in the early century that said if you can read this, thank a teacher on bumper sticker. So when those came out, I was hanging around with a whole bunch of unschoolers whose kids are learning to read without a teacher and I said there should have one that says if you don't want to read this, blame a teacher. And then somebody actually made some and credited me, but she worded it differently. I don't remember the exact wording of mine or hers now, but the idea that teaching reading can cause someone to hate to read, to avoid books, to be afraid when they see written word. So you know we're way off topic about how people learn. We're talking about how people are blocked from learning. But I think sometimes if you see both sides of the coin, it can help it's fine.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:55

I think it's a good topic. We're talking about important stuff, so whatever we had a starting, we went in a different direction.

Sandra Dodd: 23:01

I know we started talking about our kids, I have one kid with a college degree and two without, and it's interesting to see the effects. It doesn't much matter. I mean, marty was able to get a job that he couldn't have gotten otherwise, but the way he thinks is still the way he always thought. The way he thinks is still the way he always thought. The university degree it's the piece of paper, like Sue said. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Sue Elvis: 23:28

I always think it's very interesting how people ask well, what did you do at uni, what was your job before you became a stay-at-home mom? And I tell them that I did a science degree. I did biochemistry and botany, and people go, oh wow, you know all that science and did your kids pick up on your love of science and biochemistry? That sounds intelligent and I think I don't remember much that I did it because that's what the pathway I was pushed along. I came out the other end with that bit of paper.

Sue Elvis: 24:09

But I'm not a scientist, I'm a writer and I don't have a piece of paper for writing, but I have a lot of experience and a lot of love and passion for it. But the science sounds so much more people value that. When they hear about that with me, they just say, wow, you're a scientist and I think, no, I'm not. So that that to me, uh, empty bit of paper. I mean it's, it's, my husband's got two degrees and that's useful for him because he's a school teacher and uh, he, that that's great. But for my personally, no, it's just a piece of paper which I probably I don't even know where it is anymore. I'd never be able to go and get a job in science, because, uh, it's been so long ago since I even thought about it that, yeah, that's not my topic anymore.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:51

Well, I only have one who could have a university degree, because the others are too young, and she did one, but she did one for authors. So it's a different, cut different. We had this special education under the one of the universities in Denmark where they would educate talented writers, and she got into the one for children's literature when she was 16 only. So that's a different path, maybe I always thought, but it might be different because I'm from a country where universities were free. Um oh yeah, but it is a game changer. Actually you get a salary in Denmark.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:38

If you study, you can get a salary for six years and it's if you do the student's life. You can live off this money. Maybe you want to work a little bit at a cafe to have a little bit more fun, but you come out without debt and the the education is free. You pay for the books and that's all um. So you buy your own books or you borrow them or share them with a friend or whatever.

Sandra Dodd: 27:05

So it's not risky like it is here. Are you going to risk taking four years out of your life borrowing money, probably not having a job?

Cecilie Conrad: 27:14

So you do it for fun, you do it because you want to, and I suppose the policy I'm not into politics, but I suppose the policy, the idea behind it is you want an educated population so you give everyone you can have one education for free. You can't keep going. You get one education for free, but still it's hard work to do it and I thought when I started at uni that you should only do it if you're passionate about it, and I'm saying the same thing to my children. If you want a university degree, you can get one for free in our country, which is quite the privilege.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:55

You can have five or six fun years at university, diving into something you find really interesting, together with other people who find the same thing really interesting, and you'll come out with or without a piece of paper, depending on whether you take the exam or not. But only do it if those five years will be fun. You shouldn't do it because you think it will help you. I mean, do it if you're passionate about it. Do it if it's what you want to do, but not to prove a point or to sound intelligent, or because you think you'll make more money later or anything like that. That shouldn't be. I mean mean, if you're in a context where you come out with a huge debt, there should be.

Sue Elvis: 28:42

You have to look at the math of it, yeah maybe can you delay uh going to university, can you that six years you can wait until?

Cecilie Conrad: 28:53

like sometimes if you you haven't had one, you can take it when you're 70 or 100.

Sandra Dodd: 29:00

That has lately become true in New Mexico. In the United States, states are very, very different about education. But New Mexico just lately, for a while they had free. You go to college free if you went straight after high school and you had good grades and you kept good grades like a scholarship. But now apparently I have heard that just in a couple of years, it doesn't matter about your age, you can. If you're a resident of New Mexico, you can go to university for four years. They'll pay the tuition and that's new.

Sandra Dodd: 29:29

And it has to do with the money from gambling, from state lottery, Because there are so many good Christians here that they didn't want to approve a lottery and they said well, with the profit, we'll put it toward education that people have free access to. It has no relation to buying lottery tickets or anything right, so totally separate. So the money that the state makes off the profit that the state makes off the lottery, they put toward education and that's interesting and it's not guaranteed to last forever, but it's a good idea, it's a good deal well, there's a big difference between university and basic education and yeah, that's another topic, because it's usually voluntary and and seventh grade is usually not voluntary.

Sandra Dodd: 30:13

So, right, yeah so I think I want to talk about writing. I used to teach writing when I was taught english when I was a teacher, but I I think that being online is what helped my kids write well, having real people to write to, about real things, because that doesn't happen in school. In school, when you write, you're maybe writing a journal. You're maybe writing, uh, what I did on my summer vacation. Or they say I remember writing a paper about all the rivers in France. You know they flow down from the mountains. Okay, so do all rivers. But you know, if you're lucky, you have mountains. But I didn't know, I'd never been to France at the time. I, you know, it was just so they give you some random thing and say write about this, and the only person who reads it is the teacher. So that's practice writing.

Sandra Dodd: 30:59

And people will say how your kids learn to write, how they underwrite reports. And I would say again you know, I in my, in my normal way to make people slow down and think about what they're even asking a report on what, and the people who are asking me would go you know reports like, yeah, I do know reports. I mean, I used to teach english, but I'm still trying to torture them into thinking like a book report. And they said, yeah, and I said what you mean? Like amazon reviews, oh, uh, yeah, um, but my um oldest was working at a gaming store and the first report he ever wrote was he was, he was the what did they call it?

Sandra Dodd: 31:36

The gym something, gym master something, gym something, gym leader of pokemon tournaments. So on saturdays there would there would be kids coming to play pokemon and he would be the one who ran all of that. So he would write a report for the store here of the supplies they had. There were little pins that they gave the people who had participated, and I don't think for the winners they got cards, card packs or something. So they needed to have the inventory to cover these things, and so he would write up here's how many people were here this Saturday. I think there weren't that many because you know if there was a reason he would say why, or he would just report what was happening, actually report what was happening, and then actually report what they actually physically needed to buy, what the inventory was and what they needed to order, which will take two weeks or whatever to get from japan, you know. However, it all worked. However, it all worked.

Sandra Dodd: 32:26

They needed to know and none of the people knew or understood pokemon didn't care, didn't like it, thought it weird. So they were really thrilled that there was this 14-year-old who was willing to do it. Yeah, and those were real reports because people needed the information. It was information that someone asked for and wanted. He wasn't practicing writing about Pokemon, so that's, I had never written a real report when I was his age.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:55

No, that's interesting.

Sandra Dodd: 32:57

That's what reports are.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:58

Somebody needs some information and you summarized it in such a clear way that they could act on it yes, it's the artificial element of the reports in school that's makes it so irrelevant that it becomes where's the motivation? And I was thinking the same thing when you talked before about learning to read that one of the really big problems with learning to read in a school context is you're being forced to learn to read when you enter the school system because it's based on reading. So it wouldn't work if you can't read. But as soon as you learn and it's not an easy job to learn to it wouldn't work if you can't read. But as soon as you learn and it's not an easy job to learn to read, when you're forced to learn to read, it can be pretty hard.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:42

Actually, as soon as you learn to read, they're telling you what to read. You can't just pick up whatever you're interested in, whatever you want to read, whatever interested in, whatever you want to read, whatever it and it could literally be whatever. But no, now the school system will come and tell you what to read. So you have to force your way through books you don't want to read, just like you have to write reports about rivers in france, which is, I mean, what can be less relevant for an American school child? There's no context.

Sue Elvis: 34:26

Maybe kids don't see the value in the activities that traditionally they're expected to do, so it doesn't seem relevant. They don't want to do it. But, as Sandra was saying, writing reviews that's not, that's real work. Uh, it's not something that somebody has made up to uh, make them practice skills or to force skills into them. And so my kids were learned to write what my girls did. They did a lot of writing for blogging. I had a blog, so they had blogs, and then we all did NaNoWriMo together and they wrote novels. They also had journals. We were big into journals.

Sue Elvis: 35:08

But all those things were chosen, even though we all did them. We all chose individually to do them and they were regarded as real work. Mum was doing them, they could do them as well. They could see the value. They enjoyed it. And what I found really interesting was when, every two years, we had to have somebody from the education department visit us to have a look at our evidence for learning and to approve another two years of registration, and instead of having the workbooks full of math exercises, english exercises, we had things like novels. They'd written blogs. Come and have a look at my blog. This is my blog. These are my blog posts. This is videos we've made and I think the lady who came was so encouraging and she always said oh, your kids are doing amazing things.

Sue Elvis: 36:09

And I thought it's not so much my kids are doing amazing things is that my kids have the opportunity to do amazing things, that they kids at school might be able to do things, but it's set up in a different way. It's that this is what kids are capable of doing. It's not that I've got abnormal kids. I think they're pretty good, but in the right environment, kids learn well. In the wrong environment, they kids learn well. In the wrong environment, they don't achieve all these things and at school, of course, they haven't got time to do what we're doing at home, which made me feel very grateful that we were able to keep our kids at home and to just learn that in that way. But I see both sides of it because, having a husband as a teacher, I can see the other side of it as well, but so grateful that we never had to do that one more thing in school.

Sandra Dodd: 37:08

Oh, sorry, no, go on in school. I think, even though it's partly, kids don't have the time to do fancy things, write novels, big things like sue's kids were doing. But I think there's also pressure from the other kids not to do cool things, to not wreck the curve and to just, you know, no, let's just go. You know, take our free time in the parking lot and act stupid and smoke cigarettes or whatever. It is that year that the kids are doing.

Sandra Dodd: 37:36

And I and I know this as a russian. As russian, why did I say russian? Wow, I want to sit and analyze what I. What just reminded me of russia because it wasn't this, an australian term called a tall poppy syndrome, and I don't think that happens with unschoolers that if somebody is excelling or standing out, that the other people want to shush them down.

Sandra Dodd: 38:27

And so I think with unschoolers, if an unschooler just has one specialty, one thing that he does, you know, builds rockets or something you know some little thing backyard rockets the parents don't say, okay, that's enough, only half an hour of rockets a week. They go buy him some supplies and let him build more rockets till he might be tired of it or he's done all the kits there are and he has some new hobby. But I think in school the other kids would be saying why are you doing that? Are you getting extra credit? Why are you what? What's the deal You're just showing off? There's a lot of pressure from other kids at school to not be special. Sometimes not not in every situation some kids luck out with a set of friends and teachers who let them bypass that. But the gen I think the general tone of being in a group of people all your age all trying to move through on this conveyor belt is the other kids discourage you from doing well.

Sue Elvis: 39:31

I remember when I had my first child, and before she even got to school age, and I was reading all these parenting books by experts how to and there was one about how to make the most of the first three years of life so that your child in. I'm not sure of the title or the wording, but you're going to make a genius out of your child by playing with them in this way and giving them these experiences. And I do remember sitting down thinking do I really want my child to be different from everybody else Because she won't fit into the system? And uh, I look back and I think, oh, don't be stupid, sue. I mean, how could you have thought that your children are just your children and you, you nurture their abilities and their talents. You don't hold them back, you just follow their their, you know, lead, help them, uh, do the things that they want.

Sue Elvis: 40:21

But but at that time it was a little bit worrying that what if I had a child who stuck out and didn't fit into the system? But before she got to school age, I'd already decided that she wasn't going to have to fit into the school system because we weren't sending her to school. But yeah, I don't know whether these ideas originate with parents in the beginning, that they want to make it easy for their kids to go through the system, um, yeah, putting this instead of um. I guess standing out so that you'll get unwelcome attention or you'll be lonely because that was my big thing was they'll be lonely because they won't be part of the group, they'll just yeah. It's just funny how your thoughts change over the years. I mean, this was 30 odd years ago.

Sandra Dodd: 41:22

I've changed a lot as a person and in my thoughts and yeah, that was just one of the ones I had but at first you were looking through schoolie eyes because you you knew yourself from being in school how that could be disturbing and hurtful. But now you're looking through unschooling eyes and you're like they're not even in the system so it doesn't matter. And that's part of de-schooling is passing that hump where you're still looking at everything through that lens of school. You know what year, what was my child in? Third grade or fourth grade, you know. And then after a while you're like, ah, my child was never in a grade, they're just, they were eight or nine or that's all. I think that that was hard for me. I still sometimes. I made a joke about it once that I still.

Sandra Dodd: 42:11

There's an article called the School in my Head and it said I'd never wanted to go to Disney World, just Disneyland. Because Disneyland I could probably do 80%, maybe 90%, but Disney World is so big and there's so much stuff there I would have only made maybe 40 or 60%. And so for me, honestly, percentages are very important and for the past year I've been on a BiPAP machine at night I wear a mask and it keeps my airways airway open because of some medical stuff and they give you a score. They've made it like a game, but you know it's my game, it's school game. So in the morning, after an hour you can check your website and it'll say a hundred percent.

Sandra Dodd: 42:55

The other day I got 78 and I'm like what? I just wanted a recall. I wanted to call the company and go that why? And you know, actually get 100 or 99. So that's just me, that that is a scar on my soul forever, that if I see that number written down 100 I am happy and it's stupid, I know is that because you got your scores and percent?

Cecilie Conrad: 43:20

yes, 100 would be top. Yeah, because our scale was 13 was max so that's different, see.

Sandra Dodd: 43:29

So your condition is something else. When I see an analog clock, not a digital clock, but I see an analog clock that says three o'clock or 305, I get like this little moment of I can go home now and no matter how many years I've been home, there's this little conditioning in me that 3 o'clock is something cool.

Sue Elvis: 43:50

In a way, society is still grading us, as you just said. You get your score every morning after your night and I, like a lot of people, wear an Apple Watch and I get my scores every day. How many percentage? What percentage have I achieved my 100% on my exercise? Or perhaps I did 200%, which that always annoys me, because 200% I was brought up saying 100% is whole. There's no such thing as 200, um, but anyway, uh, and what really annoys me is that my apple watch congratulates me in the morning. Oh, congratulations, you achieved eight hours of sleep and I would be awake half the night because I'm in, I suffer from insomnia and I think it annoys me. I want to throw it in the bin. I think. Just measuring that you were lying down.

Sandra Dodd: 44:50

It knows that you were lying down.

Sue Elvis: 44:52

That's right. I'm lying there trying to go to sleep and I've been awake, I don't know. Maybe I got three or four hours of sleep and they're congratulating me and I think you have no idea, but it's that. I don don't know the conditioning to even go and have a look to see how I'm being graded today. Now, it's just I think, oh, it's an idiot, and I see how I sort of laugh at it and think what are they going to grade me today, when I've been up all night and I think Apple's watches have got a long way to go, but it's still how so many things in society are giving us scores every single day, whether you have screen time, um, yeah, your Apple watch, your health, your sleep hours, whatever it is when you shop they say you spent three dollars and two, something like that.

Sandra Dodd: 45:44

Yeah, yay for you.

Sue Elvis: 45:48

Oh my gosh, I like those ones that come in your emails and they say 50% off sale, and so you head off to go and buy something for 50% off and then you decide well, you got 50% off, so you can afford to spend another 50% somewhere else.

Sandra Dodd: 46:04

I thought you said you were good at math.

Sandra Dodd: 46:05

No, I do that too, I know, I know it's tricky I was trying to ignore all that I was able to calm down very early on and it helped that the government did not require us to report every two years or anything. But I saw how many things my kids were learning, accidentally, or just I I had no idea. I remember one day we got something in the mail that had Roman numerals on it, a movie or something that and I was going to. When the kids woke up, I was going to show them what that meant. I was going to explain Roman numerals to them because I knew they would care Kirby and Marty and so I got up and I said I want to show you guys something really cool. And I pointed at it and Marty said so I got up and I said I want to show you guys something really cool. And I pointed at it and Marty said oh, I know, that's a four and that's a six. I guess I had written down some numbers. And I said, and I was really disappointed, I was like oh, deflated. And I said how did you know? And he said Mega man and took off because they had video games where Mega man one, two, three, four, five, six and they were all Roman numerals. So they had figured it out themselves gradually over a couple of years and then once you have the idea, then you can understand nine, go, what's 10? X? Okay, then this must be nine. If this was four, this is nine. That's all they needed. They were, you know. That was done. They didn't learn it all of a sudden and I was disappointed that I didn't get to have the thrill of seeing them learn it, you know. But they never came and told me you know what? Look at this Mega man box. This is a six. Vi means six, and they didn't know it was called Roman numerals. So I got to give them that piece of news. But they knew it was some numbering system that they could figure out. Nobody told them they couldn't and they did, and I think it's trivia.

Sandra Dodd: 47:50

Trivia for kids is something that's not going to be on the test, but trivia for adults is what. It's not going to help you pay your electric bill. But at some level everything is trivia. It's just these little bits of knowledge that you didn't have to know. Have to know, like meaning, what's going to be on a test and so that's what things that are going to be on a test. That's not trivia, that's very serious, like algebraic equations, like knowing parts of speech, like knowing verb tenses or whatever. And when you come to real life, when you separate from school and you look the other direction, verb tenses are trivia. People just speak the language and they know if they're saying something already happened or hasn't happened. They don't have to know terminology to be analytical about. So being analytical about grammar is like algebraic notation Diagramming sentences is fun if you like words, it's terrible if you don't. And so there is trivia in school that's called important knowledge and there's trivia in the real world that actually is fun and important knowledge.

Sandra Dodd: 48:57

And I think no matter what a child is interested in, no matter what hobbies or games or interests or discussions they have with their friends, every piece of information they pick up goes into their own model of the universe, their own grid, their own set of connections, and gradually it fills in geography and history and it's all different. People who live where I live will know a whole lot about the border between Texas and New Mexico, like where it is, which towns are where, why. Some know, why some don't. People who don't even live you know, live thousands of miles from me don't know or care in New Mexico or Texas, doesn't matter. There are reasons for borders, that some are rivers and some are a line on a map drawn later elsewhere for some reason.

Sandra Dodd: 49:47

Then you can look at other countries and you see a country that's all wiggly and you go this is a really old country, this developed gradually. And you see one that's all choppy lines. You go, oh, that's later, there's a 19th century country, and I think that's just something that develops, like any kind of storytelling develops, that they see similarities and differences, which in school would be called comparison and contrast. On the borders of these countries, california has a straight line at the top, drawn with a pencil, and every one of those straight lines. You see, you could look it up and see why, what happened, that there's a line, and that's kind of fun if you're interested in that sort of thing, if you're interested in that kind of history and geography. But little kids figured out what I'm saying now.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:45

Nobody told me in school because it's a local trivia. But then we're back to that idea of context, that learning happens in a context and because of a context and because of a curiosity or a thing that actually happened or a person we met or a place we saw and it made us ask a question. Maybe we asked it to Wikipedia, maybe we picked up a book, maybe we talked to someone, and it's, in my experience, very beautiful what collections of knowledge happen to be inside the heads of my very different children, to be inside the heads of my very different children. It evolves in a natural way, grows like a plant, whereas a curriculum is more like a systematic machine, teaching and with full of tick boxes of things to know. And do you know them 100% or only 70%, which is lame, right? Um, but it also I think maybe most people get that right it's not hard to understand that living in life, you would come across things that would. You would pick up knowledge from these things.

Cecilie Conrad: 52:06

But the our critique people criticizing the unschooling choice or questioning it just would be like but how do you make sure you cover it all? That's a question I've had many times. How do you make sure they learn what they need to learn. How do you make sure you cover it all? How do you make sure they learn what they need to learn? How do you make sure you cover it all? So, of course, we have to question the question what is it all and what is it they need to learn?

Sandra Dodd: 52:32

It all is what no one will ever learn. Yeah, exactly.

Cecilie Conrad: 52:37

Exactly, but maybe we all have a piece of the puzzle, maybe we all learn a special perspective. Maybe we all come a piece of the puzzle. Maybe we all learn a special perspective. Maybe we all come up with some. I mean, we had a headline when we began this conversation about connections and how learning happens, and what did I write?

Sandra Dodd: 52:54

Unexpected places. Yeah yeah, Joyce, Federal has an analogy Like. I'll try to look for it too for a link. And Sue, I hope you find that link for the list of places you find math. That would be good, Okay, but Joy says it's like a million-piece jigsaw puzzle and some people really want to work the border. But some people find the pieces of this cat and they're off working on the corner on that one piece and I think that's a good example. Somebody else is going to collect all the red. They're going to be making a pile of everything that's red and see if it matches together.

Sue Elvis: 53:31

I think that we're all so individual and we all have different interests, different talents, and we all complement one another. So we're meant to work together as a society. We're not all supposed to be exactly the same, but we're supposed to find our place in the puzzle. Like you say, we all connect in so that we have our individual skills and knowledge. But parents can be too concerned about having that general skills that everybody has and then nobody gets a chance to be the puzzle bit that they're supposed to be, and I think society then misses out because, yeah, we can't do everything, but we can do what we're passionate about and what we've got the talent for. Well, if we aren't stretched to, we'll do this, just in case, and we'll learn that just in case, and we'll learn this because somebody else has told us that we need that. And then and that's what I love about unschooling is that when you let kids follow their own passions and their own strengths and skills, even when we go back to university and the children of mine that went to university got into university because they were passionate about what they wanted to do it was easy for them to persuade the university that they were in the right place and then when they went to university, they did well because it was their subject. Uh, they were well ahead of other kids that came from school who you know I might do this, I don't really know, just like I was at uni. Oh, someone said that this is a good thing to do and I might get a job.

Sue Elvis: 55:24

And, uh, and they haven't got that background, not just the knowledge that they've picked up, but the drive, the motivation to go there and want to learn more, as you were saying, cecilia, about going to university, because you love what want to go and have fun time and love what you're doing, and it doesn't pay just to go, because you think it's the next step. And I think parents a lot of parents I've talked to feel that the next step is 18 and their child. Yes, we'll learn school, but I want them ready for university. And when I say, but kids can learn anything anytime and go to university at a later age, uh, that's not good enough. That it's true that kids can do that, um, but it's sort of um, not when, not us so much, but people have been given this idea that next stage starts at 18, and if you're the parent and you're helping your child. Well, that's where you've got to help your child get to by 18.

Sandra Dodd: 57:18

So they're using the same code that the students do.

Sue Elvis: 57:20

Until they're 30, you know, and do something else.

Sandra Dodd: 57:29

It's taking the school model. They're still living in the grid that the school created.

Sue Elvis: 57:35

Yeah, and it doesn't matter how many times for some people that you say well, how about delaying university? How about getting a part-time job or doing something else? How about if your child's not interested, say, in learning their prerequisites? Well, don't force them into it now, because they might change their mind. How about leaving that and recognizing that you can learn anything at any age? I think it's too much to let go of sometimes that it's parents can't do that, some parents can't do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:20

I'm in that exact spot right now, with a 16 year old and an 18 year old who both say they do want to go to university, where that preparation for university after unschooling or as a part of unschooling is becoming relevant. So it's just funny, you talk about it because actually I'm doing it, I'm looking at exams and because that free education you can get, you can only get it if you have the equivalent of a high school degree and there's no way around that. I think I'm trying to find ways around it, but I'm afraid they will need a high school degree. They don't have to go to high school to get high school degree, obviously, so we can unschool that, but they will need a high school degree. They don't have to go to high school to get a high school degree, obviously, so we can unschool that, but they will have to take exams. But I think it actually is the end point of something I've been pondering while we've been talking, and that's do we trust the process. So we talk about how they learn all these different things and it's surprising what they know.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:22

One of my favorite stories is the one from the Louvre in Paris when we went to see the Mona Lisa. The kids were small. Um, and it was a very hot day, and it becomes very, very hot inside the Louvre and you can't take off your t-shirt, not even when you're seven, because it's France and and so the only escape is to go to the basement because it's cooler there and they have the. And now I'm in trouble every time. I have to tell this story in English because I can't say this word. Right, bear with me. Egyptology collection. No, that was it, was it? Oh, okay, so they've got a great collection of, you know, mummies and stones and all kinds of things from from all the stages of Egypt. And we went down there. We saw, okay, let's see that, because it's too hot up here.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:19

And, uh, my, then I think eight or nine year old son, who could not read at the time, started to give us all a guided tour on the hieroglyphs, and I was pretty blown away because I knew that he's quite knowledgeable and and I knew that he's interested and curious. But I also thought I knew what he knew because he couldn't read. So I'd seen the documentaries with him, or I had told him the things he knew, more or less, or I've overheard the conversations with other people he'd talked to, but this I didn't know. He knew it and it was quite not just two pieces of information. I was quite surprised about how he could go into the nuance of one hieroglyph and say, look how they changed that part.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:01:14

And that happened actually 300 years later when they changed the religion. And it was just so interesting and I was on my first steps of unschooling it's my oldest of the three unschooled children, so it was the first years and it was very, very interesting how, ok, I don't know what happened here, I don't know how he knows it, but he clearly does and it was a very interesting day at the Louvre which, yeah, we just hadn't seen it coming. Which, um, yeah, we just hadn't seen it coming from that point of kids collecting all sorts of information like knowing the english term roman numerals, yes, um, but you didn't know they knew and you didn't know where they got it before they told you.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:02

It becomes this random kind of collection of knowledge that has been contextually relevant to the children while they picked it up during their life. And the question, the de-schooling question, is do we trust that process? Are we afraid that they are missing out on something important or that we should have pushed for something? Or? You know this question, I get it all the time. How do you know that they learn what they need to learn? And the answer is because they. Everybody always need learns what they need to learn. That's how learning works.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:43

I also see now in the other end of the line it's never going to stop unschooling, but they are now at a point where no one would expect them to stay in the school system much longer. I see that they find holes in their knowledge and they patch it. They sometimes feel, oh, I know all this over here and I, I can do this, but there's a big black hole here. I, I, I need something to link it. And then they start exploring because now they are old enough to to take that metal layer and to to also be a little more structured and say not just pick up knowledge, because it happens in a more organic way, but sometimes sit down and and and say, okay, I, I actually want to know everything about this and I need it organized in my mind and I need, I'm going to make a list, I'm going to make a book, I'm going to figure this out, so that that to me has been a relatively new thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:03:57

I'm lying because it happened 10 years ago the first time, but because it happened 10 years ago the first time. But I see it now as a system with all four of them that letting go, and for me to just trust the process and say I'm sure you will always have the information at hand that you need in the moment. And if you happen to be in a moment where you need information you don't have, that's a moment to learn and you'll find it. I see now how they, as they are older, go into being aware oh, I actually need to improve my French, or I need to know about all the rivers in France. They don't. But whatever it is, they can come up with something and say now, I need to know this and they will start studying it in whatever way is relevant.

Sandra Dodd: 1:04:53

When my oldest was five or six, my mother-in-law said are you going to have him tested? When we said we're not sending him to school, are you going to have him tested? And I said no and she said how will you know he's not behind? And I said well, I know he is behind and she, just like you know, like I said, in some things and in some things he's ahead. I didn't say so is every kid in school in some things, and in some things he's ahead. I didn't say so is every kid in school? Because we already talked about some people being, you know, good at everything except math or whatever. And I liked when Sue said something about people working, living in systems and some people know more about some things than other people.

Sandra Dodd: 1:05:28

Holly and Holly when Holly was really pretty little maybe seven or eight, I don't know, maybe nine she went to the mall with her brothers and there were some other kids that they knew and they were there. So I wasn't there, like I let them out and I thought Holly's so little, but Kirby was probably 11 to 12, right. So I said just stay together and I'll pick you up at two o'clock or sometime. I said, said okay, so they got down there and they realized the boys didn't have a wristwatch, that didn't find a digital clock and the boys could only read digital but Holly could read analog. And there was a big clock on the wall at the mall and Holly was the only one of them who knew what time it was, who could tell them when it was almost time to be picked up. They were so relieved. Holly was proud of herself. I was impressed because I hadn't thought about that, to give them a time and then not have a way to know.

Sandra Dodd: 1:06:19

That was pretty great. And there was another example of people trusting, depending on other people and real writing. Marty and Kirby used to be in a game. I know the year of this story exactly because of what it is. Marty said he was 10. It's 1999.

Sandra Dodd: 1:06:37

And we had one of the first IMAX, like the first. You could see pictures on the internet. It was a big, bubbly looking thing like George Jetson's TV, and Marty was in there playing a game that was on AOL called Alliance of Nations, and it was a role-playing game in text. So they're just writing text to each other. You apply to join, they put you on a team, you're in a world, and both Kirby and Marty played this.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:01

So Marty used to sit in the room and say how do you spell go? How do you not go? You know, but whatever word, how do you spell this? How do you spell being? How do you spell attack? And we would just spell it and he would write.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:12

One night it just happened. I mean there's so many older people in the house than he was. We had another roommate, so there were three adults and a and a and his brother who would spell for him. But one night it just so happened, he was playing and no one else around and he told me the next day that he was just guessing how to spell things and one of the other players said dude, you write. You write like a 10-year-old. He said I am 10. That's really funny, because they would never. He thinks he's insulting some other adult right for not writing. Well, but here he was playing this game well enough that the other adults who could stay up after 8 were playing and they didn't know he was a kid. So that was so cool because he had spelling help and now people can just say, hey, alexa, or hey, siri, how do you spell. So that was cool.

Sue Elvis: 1:08:09

Going back to what you were saying, cecilia, about kids filling in their own gaps. I was thinking about university and having prerequisites to get into courses. And I remember when my second daughter, my fourth child, she was thinking about medicine and she went and had a look at all the requirements and decided that if she wanted to get in she would have to have some open university units, she would have to do advanced maths. So she decided she would do advanced maths because she had a purpose for it and she did the whole course and did really well and then she changed her mind about medicine, did really well and then she changed her mind about the medicine. But the point is that if a child wants to do something like go to university, then they can do things that perhaps they wouldn't have chosen to do, so they can move on to the next stage. But it's voluntary that she decided that this is what she wanted to do and I guess it depends on how important that university degree is at that particular time to what a child is willing to work towards.

Sue Elvis: 1:09:24

And I always wonder that if we push kids to fulfill those requirements, whether they'll do very well anyway, because they won't be motivated to do it, but maybe at a little later time.

Sue Elvis: 1:09:36

This is important to me. I want to do it and they'll learn it faster and better because that's what they know, what they want to do, and sometimes I have found with university degrees some of it is jumping through the hoops in order to get on the courses and doing things that not necessarily is all of the subject matter interesting or even down to. You have to conform your thought patterns sometimes and give the right answers just so you pass the test or pass the assignment, and it's not necessarily how you agree with it. They don't want free thinkers sometimes. They just want you to power it back. The coursework and how kids decide whether they're going to do that. Is that what they're choosing to do in order to get to the other end and get this piece of paper, which must be important in some way to them, to go on to whatever they next want to do? But yeah, I just wonder what you think of that, about that kids can agree to do things that they not necessarily want to do in order to fulfill the next stage?

Sandra Dodd: 1:10:52

I think any homeschooling family can do the same kind of damage that school does if they're not careful not to do that. And you can't make a kid learn something you can't press a child to. You can press them to enroll in a math course, but it's like trying to push a rope. Somebody wants to pull a rope. They can get the whole rope in there where they are, but you try to push a rope in and it's not going to go well. So I think that with math or anything, if someone is in there going, oh man, my mom made me learn this, I'm stupid class, I'm going to take this class.

Sue Elvis: 1:11:25

Their head is full of that and none of the math is coming in so I it goes back back to what you were saying, well, I think, in our discussion earlier. Pre-recording is that you can't force learning, and I think a lot of people don't realize that it's like. I always think it's like forcing kids to eat. You can't really do that either. It's an active activity, not a passive one, and anything you try and push into your kids that they don't really want, well, it's not real learning and with food it can make them sick, like if your whole body is like trying to expel or avoid or prevent.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:07

You're as likely to throw up as anything, and I think the same thing can happen with learning. Whatever the throwing up would be, you know it. It's like ugh. No, no, oh, I know what the throwing up is. After that, you hate that subject.

Sue Elvis: 1:12:19

Exactly. Well, that's what I did with my university degree. I got on the course I wanted to do an arts degree not creative arts, writing, literature and I was told that science would be a better subject for a good as a girl, obviously, but wanted more women in science and there'll be jobs there. That was a good thing to do. Fairly, I was pretty good at passing exams and all that. So that's the way I went, not knowing any better.

Sue Elvis: 1:12:54

And when I got to the end of the degree, it was such a relief and I remember getting all my coursework on that last day, all my notes, my textbooks, everything and I threw it all in the garbage and I remember thinking nobody is ever going to make me learn anything, ever again. Oh, and I'd had enough and I all that, all those years of working, and I just threw it all in the bin. It was worthless to me and I didn't want to learn. I just had enough. I just wanted to sit down and I thought, no, I just, I don't know.

Sue Elvis: 1:13:31

I had this idea that I could just have a life where nobody would make me do anything, and that included learning, and I didn't realize that learning was so interesting or that I'd ever want to learn again. I just wanted, in some ways I wish that I'd been the child at the bottom of the class with lower, so people had lower expectations on, because I felt that I'd been the child at the bottom of the class with low, so people had low expectations on, because I felt that they had a much nicer life than I did at the top of the pile, always being pushed, pushed, pushed and I thought I don't get a chance to enjoy life where all those people at the bottom, who nobody really has high expectations for at the bottom, who nobody really has high expectations for they have time to do things because they can go and play, because they say well, they're not going to get a good percentage in their exams anyway.

Sandra Dodd: 1:14:23

And that really affected my curiosity and I yeah, as you were saying, sandra, I think that there are adverse consequences of trying to make kids learn and it can last a long time what I think you're talking about is the burden of a great potential that if you, if, if others have declared that you're going to be great you are so smart, you are so good at science Now you have a responsibility. There's a religious aspect of that among Protestants in the United States. It may not be in Denmark and it may not be in Australia, but that is the idea that if God gave you a talent, you have an absolute duty to fulfill that, to serve other people. That if you know how to play piano, you have to play piano at church. If you're good at medical things, you have to be a doctor and you have to save children who have cleft palate. You know that they like aim so far and say that's what you can do.

Sandra Dodd: 1:15:36

So for me it was. You didn't cure cancer. So the kids who had the great potential are blamed for whatever other people imagined or projected that they should do. So then they make up a fake test and you fail. That's horrible. It's horrible and you're right.

Sue Elvis: 1:15:56

Nobody who's just making average grades ever has that pressure put on them and that guilt, and I think it's a feeling of of having failed your potential and then it's not necessarily that I came out the other end with being a genius anyway because I didn't want to do it. It's that some parents say, oh, it'll be worth it, they'll thank me later on for push, push, pushing them because they'll excel, they'll be able to do wonderful things. But I think children in my case, you try and get out of it, you? It's uncomfortable. I didn't want to be there. I didn't really have the passion. Maybe had their brains, but not the passion or the motivation to fulfill the expectation. And it wasn't that. It was yeah, it wasn't a sign that it wasn't clever enough, it was a sign that my heart wasn't in it. And and then when you push kids like that, they're not going to thank you later and they're so lit up about the things they do love.

Sandra Dodd: 1:17:13

That's great. I think whatever lights kids up and makes them take that deep breath of this is so cool or oh, I didn't know that, that's so wonderful. That's where you can almost see learning happening, where you see them react to a painting or the Egyptology stuff in the basement or a game or whatever they're doing. I also wish about something Sue said about her son, who started in the medical field and then ended up driving a tractor or I take back, ended up who was working medical and is now for a while perhaps driving big trucks in a mine. I wish that there was not a prejudice against people switching jobs, because switching jobs as an adult you learn so much and to work with someone who's been in the same job for 40 years isn't as cool as you've been there for 30 years. And here shows up somebody who used to be a rodeo clown and then was a helicopter pilot and now he's going to work with you. It's like, oh okay, this guy will be a cool guy to have around he'll have.

Sandra Dodd: 1:18:19

He knows things we don't know. I just wish that it was. I don't know what's the problem with it. Is that people ask little kids what are you going to be when you grow up? It's it's seen as a being, as you will be a doctor or a teacher or a rodeo clown. I don't know.

Sue Elvis: 1:18:36

Oh, I love that question. Sometimes, zoe, people will say that and the child will say I want to be a ballerina or I want to be an astronaut. And I think kids, they don't think in ordinary terms, they're like superheroes I'm going to be a superhero. And parents squash the child and they'll say well, you know, you're not going to be an astronaut. How many people ever go to be an astronaut? And gradually, over the years, kids' dreams shrink. But kids, I love how, when they start out, they believe anything is possible and maybe they won't become the ballerina or whatever, but they should be allowed to dream and they will find out in their own time what, what they are, where they are supposed to be in the world, it's. We don't need to tell them you don't have the talent for that or whatever, but kids should be allowed to dream and we don't have enough of that. I think it comes out.

Sandra Dodd: 1:19:46

They look at ballerinas, they learn things, they process that over the years. Sorry, go ahead.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:19:52

No, I was just going to say that I think this question can be really suppressive for the teenagers. So it's. It could be a fun, dreamy question if it's open-minded and you're talking to a five-year-old, but it can be a really, really annoying question when you're 17. If you're 17 and unsed, it's as if what you're doing right now is not good enough. What do you want to be when you grow up? And as if what I am here and now, right now isn't a fulfilled life. As if what I'm doing now is only about what it is preparing me to do 10 years down the line. And, by the way, what I'm doing 10 years down the line is what I'm going to continue to do for the following 35 years, which is quite the big choice to make when you're 17.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:20:44

It's fake, obviously, because you can change career many times, but they get this, and mine happened to be in that age range right now. They get this and mine happened to be in that age range right now, and they get that question all the time and it's really annoying for them. It's, it's and, and it makes them quite uncomfortable, especially when it comes from outside the unschooling world, when they have to talk about you know what. I'm happy with what I'm doing right now. I feel my life is great and fulfilled, and I don't with what I'm doing right now. I feel my life is great and fulfilled and I don't know what I'm going to do 10 years from now. I can tell you what I'm doing next month. That's not an answer that is easily understood by grandparents and doctors and extended family or whoever we meet who who don't really grasp the unschooling, and is it based on an idea of of life falling in these chunks where?

Sandra Dodd: 1:21:51

what their parents did. If the parents ran a home, they were going to grow up to be an undertaker. If their parents had a ranch and they were raising cattle, they were going to grow up to be a rancher. I think for a long time it was just that. What does your family do? What have been? What do you guys do and I think that's what it's based on is when you, when you are made to go to the university by your parents, what do you think you're going to study? I don't like it. It's so schooly, schooly. Do I need to tell you guys what a rodeo clown is?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:24

Because I said rodeo clown is what everybody knows. No, I know.

Sandra Dodd: 1:22:27

I'm not sure I know exactly. It's a safety officer. I think it would be a fun story. They're dressed like clowns but they're really there for safety. So they don't usually even pop out until there's a dangerous situation.

Sandra Dodd: 1:22:35

So if there's a guy riding you know Bronco, so he's riding on a horse that has been caused to try to throw him off, ok, if that horse is getting a little out of control or maybe even not. Maybe there are sometimes the rodeo clowns hide in a barrel, because they have barrels on the rodeo grounds for running around, and sometimes there's a clown in one and he'll pop out and peek, is everything fine, he goes down. So it's like a funny sideshow for the people who are watching. But what he's really there for is if that guy gets thrown out. When the guy gets thrown off, he runs and distracts the horse, leads the horse back away to keep that guy from getting stomped.

Sandra Dodd: 1:23:11

Or people are riding bulls and the bull's getting too mad. Same thing he tries to separate the rider from the animal if it gets dangerous or when the guy's on the ground. They don't always end up on the ground, but if he ends up on the ground he's there to quickly separate them. So it's only done by people who are really smart, really quick, really brave, really strong, and it looks like they're just farting around. They make it funny. They make it funny like you know, but they're really there to protect lives.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:23:44

Interesting. I did not know that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:23:47

It's an interesting, weird job and it doesn't last long because it's so physical it's like being a stuntman. You can't usually do it your whole life because you get bad knees or whatever. But I realized after I just threw that out there it might be something everybody knew. But then I thought it might not be something that many people know because rodeos are fading in popularity too.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:24:10

Do we have rodeos in Europe. I've never seen one.

Sandra Dodd: 1:24:14

I don't think so we have them.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:24:18

Well, I haven't seen everything. I don't know.

Sue Elvis: 1:24:21

I don't know for a fact I know there's a lot of jobs that I feel young people can go and experience like that while they're young and gain a lot of not just all sorts of a big range of skills not just I'm going to be able to save somebody by distraction, but lots of social skills-confidence. All that but one in here in Australia would be the jackaroo and the chillaroo going out to the sheep stations and cattle stations and working on those. So you go for a bit of an adventure and be totally different environment to probably where you grew up. And what are those words?

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:22

Sorry. What are those words mean? Tell those words again.

Sue Elvis: 1:25:25

Jack Aru, like kangaroo Jack Aru and Jill Aru, so the girl and the boy version. But to go out to cattle and sheep stations and I guess like being an odd job person but learning all the skills on these stations I guess in the city you would, I don't know you could do. They have a lot of. I've had some friends whose children have gone out to cattle stations and looked after the children, because parents are busy doing the station jobs and the kids need some kind of care and so they like nanny work and there's the potential there for young people who don't really know what they want to do yet or don't want to go to university, to go out and try some of these things and I think it's all good experience and all good stories.

Sue Elvis: 1:26:22

You think, looking back, you think you could tell your kids. Well, you know, years ago I was a rodeo clown audio clown. I just I think, yes, so many possibilities if you're not so concerned about following the traditional pathway and if you can trust and let go and just experience, learning in all sorts of different ways and environments and adding to what we've been talking about, adding to our personal reservoir of knowledge and skills. That makes us us yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 1:27:01

That's what I was thinking of Sandra.

Sue Elvis: 1:27:03

when you said rodeo clown, my mind just went to jackaroo.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:27:10

I think it's funny how these things are often talked about as gap years, or you just said it, sue, and I know you probably don't mean it on a deep level, but it's a thing you do while you figure out what you want to do for real.

Sue Elvis: 1:27:29

He became a station manager, started off on something like that. But even if you don't want to, it does give you skills. It's not just delaying the time, it's picking up different skills along the way, which is a better way of filling in time than studying for something you're not really interested in to go out and have a big adventure. I'll be right back. We should actually wrap up. I just looked at my clock. We're not being very good at sticking to the time. If, if, yes, but was here, he would be. We're having an interesting conversation, but we're coming up to the hour.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:17

I think I'm going to say that soon, because I'm getting really hungry. It's 8.30 and I haven't had dinner. I haven't had breakfast either.

Sue Elvis: 1:28:26

What I haven't had, breakfast either.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:29

No, no, no. And also, I mean I've booked you for an hour, I can't keep.

Sue Elvis: 1:28:36

It's not my fault that you and Sandra are so interesting to talk to.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:41

And you no, it's great, it's great, but I think we have to schedule another one.

Sue Elvis: 1:28:49

My connection has been I'm just apologizing. I'm just apologizing, I'm just yawning.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:58

We have to cut. Here I say the word cut Okay all right, thank you, it was fun.

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:02

I have more stories, but I am full of more stories. No, no, no.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:29:06

We're not ending like that, we should just. We're just talking about ending, if you're willing, just so that we don't cut in a weird way. Can I tell one more story?

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:15

Yes, please do Okay. A long time ago a mother wrote to one of the discussions and she said my son only cares about World War II. He doesn't care about anything else. He just reads and watches movies and studies about World War II. So how can I? What she wanted us to do was tell him to stop and do something else. And so I did an analysis and I can.

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:38

I can send you a link to what I wrote that time about all the things that he would learn and know. And that's that's one of the first times that I had thought of how to generalize one piece of knowledge to the whole world. But I did another one on Elvis Presley. One time I said everything's educational. Somebody said, yeah, what about Elvis Presley? And I just jumped on it. All the things that if you didn't do anything but be an Elvis fan, all the things you would know.

Sandra Dodd: 1:30:02

But about World War II, I said then he'll know why people go to war. How do you get people, how do you get young men to want to go? What do they need? They need food, they need clothes, they need equipment, they need places to stay. And I just went on like that, Like all these things that he will know about this one war are generalized to other wars. Well, if that's how they did that, how did they do the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, what was needed? Why? How? How are communications? Because that's different war to war. How are communications? Because that's different war to war? All the things that you learn when you really focus on one subject or one topic end up applicable to all other things. Because you're not. Because World War II itself involves a lot of geography and politics and technology, and roads and bridges and all kinds of things. The rivers of france, probably.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:30:58

I don't know even that it made me think I've been wanting to say something for a while. Actually, I am not sure I can wind it back to where it started, but one. One of the things I see in the unschooled children and young adults I know is how their knowledge is organized in a very personal way, instead of this installed so somewhere in someone making a curriculum or writing a textbook, there will be a logic to how you organize the information about, let's say, the Second World War or chemistry or whatever. But the kids I know, because they've been absorbing information in their own individual way they have each their own way of organizing their information. So this child will probably organize a lot of information in his life based on what he knows about the Second World War, because he was passionate about that at one time in life, something wrong with that, maybe even recipes, maybe even his love life, maybe even the way he chooses to play soccer will be based on something organized around what he knows about the Second World War. And I think it's such a fantastic way to get that kind of skeleton or structure to your knowledge that it's based on things you were passionate about and and things. So maybe we actually hear it, because it has to be kind of the end of this very long 45 minutes we've done um, we can circle back to uh, the connections and how learning happens, or whatever. I've got it here. But the connections and how learning happens or whatever. I've got it here. But the connections and the surprising ways. Because once you know something, once you've got that skeleton, I'm very often impressed when I spend time with young people about things they know, and sometimes it's based on Pokemon or soccer. Or I've got a child very passionate about dogs and all the things she knows about dogs sometimes makes her know about rivers in France or details of the second world war, or today it was Winston Churchill, it it. But her, her way of organizing the things she knows comes from who she is and what she's been passionate about in her life the books she's been reading, the people she's been talking to, the dogs she met in the street.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:33:42

And we lose that if we use the curriculum. We lose that if we think that knowledge is a one-size-fit-all thing and not just do. We lose the passion and the motivation and the contextual learning where things actually make sense for the learner. We also lose the individual perspective, the unique way of looking at the world and understanding the world that we all can have if we get to learn in our own pace and with our own passion and in our own way, which means we lose a lot of IQ points if you want to score it that way, we lose a lot of great insights and connections. That can only happen in the brain that started organizing everything based on soccer teams or world war or even rivers. In france maybe there are kids passionate about that um, or pokemon and yeah, I don't know where my point. I've been sitting on this um contrast between organized and structured learning and then this organic learning that happens. It happens in a person. I think that's the difference.

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:01

Maybe because you draw it in.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:07

You see things that you want them inside you yeah yes, instead of like layer them so that you can get your 100 in the multiple choice thing and then forget about it, throw it in the bin when you're done yeah yeah, well, are we tired and hungry now?

Sue Elvis: 1:35:33

I'm ready for breakfast. I think you're ready for dinner.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:35

I am, it's very late in Europe.

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:38

It's rush time, here we're spread across the world.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:41

It was lovely to spend time with you, ladies.

Sue Elvis: 1:35:44

Thanks.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:44

Oh, cecilia.

Sue Elvis: 1:35:45

Sandra, it's always a pleasure to talk with you both. I come away feeling yeah, my brain, I'd add some more bits of those knowledge into my own system. Lots to think about after our conversations.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:36:00

Yeah, thank you, thank you.