S2E4 | Unschooling: Trusting the Process and Letting Go of Control

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Cecilie Conrad: 0:14

So welcome again to Ladies Fixing the World. I kind of love my title for this podcast. It's very ambitious, let's fix it all. I am again honored to be with Sue Elvis Welcome and Sandra Dodd for a conversation about. Well, with the offspring of the conversation being an unschooling and I was trying to explain, before we pressed record, what we were supposed to talk about. I'm not sure I made a lot of sense, but now I'll try again on recording.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:55

So in the school system we have the grading system, we have a purpose, we have something. We think the kids should learn something specific and I've noticed that in general, in the way children are brought up, very often there is a specific goal or a specific standard um to the development or to the achievement of the children. So they are supposed to learn this math. Let's say they need to learn to multiply in their heads with all numbers under 100 and and then you measure it can they do it or can they not do it? So you put in an effort to teach them something specific and then you measure the outcome that you had planned for and and this means and it's not just math, it could be I remember when, when I had my first child, I was handed this little book, uh, made by the government, selling me uh, at what age would my child start to maybe crawl? At what age would it grab things with its hand? At what age would it start speaking? And so I could track the development of my child and see is she doing well or not? Is she hitting all the markers? Obviously, I hated it already back then, but the idea is the same idea.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:14

So this puts the parents in a mindset of judging and in a mindset of looking for very specific markers for development and also for education, and that is a narrow path. That's one problem that I wanted to talk with you, ladies, about today. And the other thing is there's this judgment all the time Are we doing good or not? So the child is doing something and my job as a parent is to judge it, to say, oh, you did well, not to say, oh, you had fun, or how was that, or can I join? It's always this judgment and evaluation and measurement of the achievement of what the child is doing. And I think Now I've talked a lot and maybe this is kind of a it's not a theme where I can say one word, because it needs a lot of explanation. One word, because it needs a lot of explanation. This is an observation I've done and also that I've done in my unschooling life that unschooling is leaving that whole paradigm and working from a different place.

Sandra Dodd: 3:31

Yes, before you were recording, though, you talked about pregnancy and childbirth that they expect you to like. In my case, it was gain more weight, gain more weight. You know, gain weight. With my first child, um, I, I ended up an overweight old lady. But when I was first pregnant they were like you don't weigh enough to have this baby, and that was irritating, but anyway, then they then they measure the baby when it comes out. How long is it, how big is it? My third baby was too small. They almost kept her in the hospital. They wanted to put her on an IV. You know so that.

Sandra Dodd: 4:01

So you start off with that. It's like here's the right kind of baby, there's something wrong with yours, and gradually you know what they're looking for. They want to, they want to not ignore a child who has problems that can be dealt with and that's good. But I think when you talked about judgment in one of the discussion before in writing, you had said judgment culture, and I thought it's not a real term, it's not like a term that we need to define or that we credit to anyone. But I think all cultures must have judgments because for you to survive in any culture, no matter how small or basic or how big and overblown.

Sandra Dodd: 4:45

There are things you can't do, there are things that aren't okay, there are things that are aberrant or dangerous or disturb others. So I thought that's where we were going with social expectations and pressures. And then when, now that we're recording, you're talking about multiplication tables and that's okay because they're cousins. What is more. What is more about a curriculum and schoolishness and school requirements, like, like the requirements of a government for what students must know before they can graduate. But the other is the everyday sort of people looking at you and wishing your kids would be quieter or I don't know what you know usually quieter, not be climbing on things they shouldn't climb on, not be disturbing the neighbors. So do you want to narrow that down, or is it that wide?

Cecilie Conrad: 5:44

oh, for me, this podcast is as wide as it it wants to be, because I think there are many things to explore in all areas, and I hadn't thought about these two things as cousins. Obviously they are.

Sandra Dodd: 6:03

So within the culture, there's the school. Within this culture, they expect children to I'll say, maybe a culture without school. They expect the boys to be able to hunt or the girls to be able to carry babies around on their hip, or you know, whatever it might be. They expect people to be making their own money and not be living with their parents when they're 35. I you know, I don't. It's different, different places. So what we can, what we can look at, is the fact that wherever you are, other people expect things yes, yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 6:52

At the same time, I find it dangerous to introduce this almost competition feeling you know, how young was your child when it started walking? How young was your child when it started reading? That these standards become markers that can make us look for specific things. I understand that if the child never starts walking, we have a problem Also if the child never starts reading. But the way I experienced it when I had my first child was quite overwhelming with things that accomplishments, things that were quite specific. You know, when the child is four and a half, it's supposed to be able to hold and use a pair of scissors. I can't remember if that was the age, but all of these things had to be lined up as tick boxes in my little book that I got from the doctor, which meant that if I had not been aware of it, I would have been looking for these things instead of looking for the unfolding of the personality and for the joy and for the staying in the present moment.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:25

And I think I realized that I personally grew up with a lot of this evaluation culture around myself, so that my value was as a person in this life was being mixed with well, how good were my grades and how beautiful were my drawings and how well could I play the piano. Not how much did I enjoy it. Does that make sense? And I think when they, when they live school, the children, they do things that are planned for them. They have a specific purpose these things, they're supposed to have a specific outcome. So you hand them a book and you know what you want them to take away from that. It's a little one-sided with math, because math is math. But let's say you give them a novel and then there's this plan what are they supposed to understand? And then you can do it right or you can do it wrong, but you can't do it your own way, not for unschooling.

Sandra Dodd: 9:31

For unschooling, you need to get away from that to begin to think about doing it right. So I think if you're still worrying about that, you need more de-schooling you or anybody who's listening Because unless you've stepped away from the curriculum and the school's expectations, that's a problem. But when you were talking, I remembered that what I was taught in college of education was about I don't know what they're calling it now. I just found statements of intended learning outcomes and that's when they say at four and a half, a child should be using scissors or something. But the name of that can change, but what it is is a statement of here's. Honestly, it's not about what the kids learn. In a way, it's what will get the teacher to earn a paycheck, because it never says a hundred percent of these children will will know how to use scissors. It'll be something like 70% of the children will learn to use scissors. If that happens, the teacher gets her check. You know what I mean. It's more to.

Sandra Dodd: 10:30

This is our goal, but they never in anything I've ever read about educational goals. Are they after 100% of these kids? Are they after 100% of these kids except maybe graduation from high school or whatever sort of late teens graduation that country has. That might say you need to do this and that and the other, but I don't think. I think you're not supposed to hold one student up to that list. You're supposed to hold thousands of children in statistical ways, or 30 children in statistical ways. They're more looking at whether their system is working and whether the teachers are working. So that's if you're looking at those lists that the government might have given you. You know here are our goals. If the kids are in school, that means here's what we hope the schools will be teaching, not if your child didn't learn this, there's something wrong with him and the idea of being behind in school or behind other kids.

Sue Elvis: 12:10

Unschoolers just really need to let that go, because their kids will probably be ahead and behind, depending what it is problem I found comes if you have to be a registered homeschooler but you want to unschool so that the school requires you to tick all those boxes for the outcomes. You have a list and you're supposed to mark down when the kids achieve the outcomes and that doesn't sit well with unschooling and I found I had to separate that from what we were doing and do what I called the behind the scenes stuff and just tick it off what I thought oh, my kids have done this, they've done this without actually letting it intrude into our everyday. It was just my record keeping, but when the the outcome, I couldn't tick them. What I used to say was we're working on that one, because it'd be another two years before we'd have to do it again and you didn't have to have all the outcomes ticked. But you had to look like you, look like you were responsible, that you were thinking about it, that you were taking note of where your kids were at a particular age and time. It was all rather a big nuisance to do, because to live the life we wanted to live we had to conform to the registration requirements. But to do that it was like a circle. You couldn't unschool because you had to fulfill the requirements. You, if you didn't fulfill the requirements, you didn't get your registration whoops to unschool. But we found a way around these things. But what I found really interesting was oh, years ago I had little youngish primary school kids, maybe young teenagers at the most.

Sue Elvis: 14:13

One of the people from the education department who came to see us was so impressed with what our kids had achieved and it was all the tic-t. He ticked all things on his records and then he said oh, he said, do you mind if we, if I just write down your kids are working on this particular area? He said I can't just tick it all, I need something to say that I've looked and your kids are haven't quite achieved something. They're working on this. And I thought, well, that's strange, if my kids have achieved it all, they've achieved it all. Why do you need? I think what it was was. Well, I assume that if you just tick everything, it looks like you've just ticked everything. If there's a couple of things there that you've written a note about, it looks like you have put some thought into it and you've done some evaluation and it looks, yeah, that you have. Um, yeah, you haven't just ticked it all and oh, I didn't care, I just said, do what you like.

Sue Elvis: 15:14

As long as they got my bit of paper saying, um, that I have another two years of registration, do what you like, and uh, and that's it. For another two years we'll. We will cheer as soon as you've gone out the door and say, wow, we've done it again. Now let's get back to real life again. So that, for us, was the problem with conforming to outcomes. But after oh, many, many years, I think we are registered homeschoolers. Maybe I don't know, I can't even remember now 26 years or so, uh, seven children, and we never compromised what we were doing because we found a way around that, what I used to do, my behind the scenes stuff. I got really good at record keeping and ticking boxes off which my kids had no idea about. So, yeah, that's what that.

Sandra Dodd: 16:08

That's where I um, that's how outcomes affected us did you ever add things to the list that you had done that weren't on the list? That would be fun. Oh, yeah, all the time.

Sue Elvis: 16:18

Yeah, make the list longer the things that your kids didn't. Yeah, we did when my kids used to sometimes write things down. Uh, uh, they used to write. They used to enjoy, when they were little, writing their own reports, for instead of having somebody else write it for them, they used to sit there with their eyes glowing. I'm going to write my report and then write down exactly what they thought was good about being them and what they'd been doing, and that was really good fun, because they thought about all the wonderful things they had done and what they enjoyed, and they wrote it all down. I can do this, I can do that and I've achieved this. But oh, yeah, most times my kids were supposed to conform to their school which is the right word syllabus or curriculum, curriculum, I don't know. Do whatever the schools are doing, but most times they did things outside that which were a whole lot better. So, yeah, you didn't do the book report, but you, they blogged and they wrote about books on their blog, that type of thing.

Sandra Dodd: 17:31

So, I don't know how it is now, but for a long time in Pennsylvania they were very strict and and a certified teacher had to come and review each family um, I don't know once or twice a year and and one of the reviewers was an unschooler, so that helped. They needed to ask for her, but one of the options by the law there was you could keep a portfolio so you could either keep your tests, you could test the kids and keep the tests. That's what a lot of school at home families would do. It would be a portfolio of by subject matter, papers, by, you know, heart, art, history, book reports.

Sandra Dodd: 18:06

But what the unschoolers were doing, even before there were blogs, was keeping a scrapbook, and the scrapbook would have photos. They would have the ticket to the thing they went to to the zoo or the museum or the concert or the event whatever renaissance fair, you know, a state fair and then it would have photos of what they did or flyers of what they had done. So it was really like it was cool for the kids to look back at later too and when you look at that, how much a family could do in one day at a special event, a special place. There's just no denying that there was learning.

Sandra Dodd: 18:36

You don't even have to say what they learned, like we went to see, we we one family, had more than one family but one family that I knew had reported they weren't in Pennsylvania, they were I'm not sure what state they're reporting to, but they had gone out on a, on a sailboat. I lived on a sailboat for months and, you know, had a map of where they'd gone and stuff. You know things like that that must. If the parents are seeing it as a record of what they've done instead of just a report for the state, then that helps the parents to unfold and unschool to, to de-school themselves so that they so that they're better the next time at seeing what the kids could be learning without even leaving the house.

Sandra Dodd: 19:52

But there was a family of rabbits they watched grow up. Or there was a robin's nest outside a window. Or they got a new video game and made a map of Las Vegas or Washington or whatever the place was, and the game was a real place and so they looked at real maps. I've seen all those things happen and at some point something usually causes the parents to snap, if they haven't already, and go oh, oh, I see it now. The learning doesn't look like school well, we did something similar.

Sue Elvis: 20:26

It's that scrapbook, scrapbook idea by using evernote and putting together a digital, what I used to call our family journal.

Sue Elvis: 20:36

I had a real turning point. At one time I was really resentful about the fact we had to keep records and we had to keep account of the outcomes. And then one day I thought, well, if I turn it around slightly and look at it as can we do this task so it benefits our family, can we call it our family journal instead of homeschool records, and can it be something of value to us? Can we record all our adventures together, all write down all the books we've read, photos of places we've been, conversations we've had, so that we can look back at it. And yes, the education department can look at it and say, oh, look, I can see that your children come right, I can see that they're progressing in this area. But what we would look back on is, oh, wow, do you remember that wonderful day when we went to this particular place? And oh, do you remember that wonderful day when we went to this particular place? And oh, do you remember that book we read and that type of thing? And, yeah, we called it our family journal.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:42

I think it's amazing. I wish I did it. I remember in my early days of unschooling that I would also do some tracking of what we did. Maybe I wasn't even really unschooled, I didn't start out unschooling, I started out homeschooling. So I started out tracking things in the homeschool and then very quickly it became unschooling and I was tracking what we were doing, but to me it became this translation of what we were doing into the schooled, the education version of it.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:26

So and I noticed that I it kind of skewed my experience and my unfolding with the children, that I became slightly focused on what could I write about this while this was happening? And maybe I would push it to be a little bit more, something that would be worthwhile writing down. So I stopped writing down because I didn't want to have that kind of agenda. The other thing which is now we are I don't know 15 years down that road or 12, whatever. I admire that you've done it. I don't know where the time for it for me would be, because we're doing something all the time. So evaluating it, doing the scrapbooking, I mean I wish, but I don't do it because I'm always doing something more. So I'm never writing about.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:33

I'm very, not very good at looking back, writing about what we did, and I'm not very good at planning either. So Christmas is coming and it's freaking me out that I have to have presents, and you know because, because I'm very much in the here and now but I do think flipping it if you have to register what you're doing, because you're living inside a society that will come and check you. I think it's the best piece of advice ever to make a family journal and make your own story and make something that's has way more value for yourself, um than just trying to to to comply. To'm curious as to how you did it. Sue. You say evernote, but how, I mean, did it become little books? Do you have a pdf or a printed copy?

Sue Elvis: 24:43

or no, it's all online. I mean, you can uh print it out if you want to. I never did. But, uh, since our days of using Evernote, you can use a lot of different. You could do apple notes, or there's a lot of different um ways you could do it.

Sue Elvis: 25:03

But I used to just keep a, I think, a weekly journal because, as you said you, you have a, you're out somewhere and you're thinking what can I write about this? And then I used to think have I got enough notes for today? Um, we haven't done anything educational today and this is a problem. So I decided that I would make the time frame bigger and not actually record exactly when we did all these things. But I used to just add photos in odd moments, write little notes in odd moments. When my kids were watching documentaries, I'd just put a link into the notebook about if it was on YouTube so we could find it again.

Sue Elvis: 25:48

I think that a lot of people would say to me oh, that's time consuming. I couldn't do that, but for me it was worth it because I thought, if I don't do it, we can't homeschool in the way we want to, we can't unschool. I don't really like the word substituting, saying we're homeschooling, because I think that it's a lifestyle thing, but in the education department, we were homeschoolers and we had to fulfill those requirements. But so it was a lot of work and it was a lot on my part to not let, as you were saying, you start to you turn it around and you start to think what sounds good for the education department. Perhaps I could begin a conversation along these lines, so that, because we need to fulfill this requirement and to be more relaxed about it and just let it unfold and record what was there, but not that I didn't go away and think, oh look, we went out to this place today.

Sue Elvis: 26:49

Perhaps I can find some information online for my kids and just say, hey, kids, you know, we went to this place today. Perhaps I can find some information online for my kids and just say, hey, kids, you know, we went to this reservoir today. Did you know? Are you interested? And sometimes they say, oh, yeah, mum, I'm really interested in that. And other times they say, no, we've had the experience, we've been satisfied, we don't really want to know more. But I guess, cecilia, you find the same sort of thing as you're traveling around the place. You must have those sort of conversations where you're sharing knowledge between you, you're researching things that you've seen, but you're just not writing it down, whereas I would write it all down.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:29

Yeah, I think that's the main difference. I would write it all down. Yeah, I think that's the main difference. And also, as I don't have an agenda, a learning agenda, I more have a curiosity and excitement about things, and so does my children. We just follow whatever comes up, kind of thing. I recently had a little bit of agenda when we were going to the Tower of London, because, well, basically because it was so expensive, so that we know what we're looking at, because we're putting all this effort into going to this huge city and getting there and and and you know, buying the tickets beforehand and waiting in line and making sure we have a packed lunch, all the things. So it'd be kind of nice to know what it is, what's the big deal. So we, we did do a little bit of preparation, but usually we do it the other way around around. So we go somewhere, something happens, we see something, or, and then we explore it afterwards, and sometimes we don't explore it, sometimes we just move on and have a sandwich afterwards.

Sandra Dodd: 28:42

Lasts a long time afterwards for years. So just because they don't review it with you within the same day or two, 10 years, 30 years later, when they see something about it, they'll go. Yeah, I was there. I remember seeing that room or I know what they're talking about.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:58

Actually, we were just at an art museum I can't remember it was the victorian l, but I think and we talked about another art museum, which is the one in palermo in italy and sisley, where we had this very fun experience of walking through the galleries and it was mostly landscapes, paintings of landscapes from the 17th, 18th century, and my kids walked in and they looked at the paintings and said I've been there and they went to the next painting oh, I've been there. And then they went to the next thing. I think I've been there too. It was really funny. It was really funny and that that's true many of the places where on the paintings were places where they had been many, many years before.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:52

And of course, it's a lifelong thing and that's also why I can let go of it and say okay, you stared at whatever architecture or whatever and at some point in life maybe that will be a piece in your jigsaw puzzle of things you need to figure out. So I'm not that worried about studying the things we see in our travels. Our travels is just our lifestyle. It's the thing we like doing. Some people like other things a lot. We like moving around, but I would love to do yearbooks. I would love to write, but I think I don't know. It's just for me personally. It becomes very ambitious very quickly and then I need to walk away from it because otherwise it becomes just this huge project which is more or less just my agenda I didn't have to keep records in new mexico early on.

Sandra Dodd: 30:57

They were supposed to be tested three times during their years when they were nine and I don't remember which which ages exactly and I just didn't do it with my first and by the time I got to my third one I didn't even register with the state.

Sandra Dodd: 31:10

But the testing fell away anyway.

Sandra Dodd: 31:13

And if parents see it as school years, you know we're doing this thing and it is a replacement for school.

Sandra Dodd: 31:22

I mean, I could talk about that for a long time too, but if you just see it as that, then you would feel like you need to discuss all these things before they're 18. It all has to be finished like a complete set. Everything has to be completed. But if you start to see it as a continuation from when they were toddlers and said what's that, what's that, what's that, what's that, if you see it as a continuum from that to when they get so old they're starting to forget things you can be much calmer about the timeline and about whether you review a museum or an activity if if you don't in the absence of state requirements, it's easier if you have state requirements, even if the parents themselves can get to the point where they see it as as with more longevity than just this semester, this semester, this school year. That will calm them down about what they're reporting to, because you're working on it. Whatever it is, you're working on it.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:19

And also if they can see it in the way you just said before, sandra, that they have to be able to cut with scissors at four and a half, which is an arbitrary number I threw out, just saying it again. That's just on average. That's just what we're aiming for. That's just most of them. They don't all have to be able to do that. That would be very, very nice. Just like you know, they don't all have to be able to read when they're seven. They don't have to all be good at math or know the history of the world. Some of them will pick it up and others will not when we put them through the school system. And that should be the same with the unschooled children, and I think it might be easier for the unschooling parents to know that, whatever, they don't all have to do the same thing. They don't all have to pick up everything from all corners and they don't all have to do it in a specific time frame.

Sandra Dodd: 33:23

Even about the scissors, even if it's a made-up example. If a curriculum says scissor use at this time, this small print on the the what's the word for lesson plans? On the lesson plans that the teachers have been given or have written, it's going to be small motor skills, following directions, safety, things like that. Like there are subparts of scissor use for the school's purposes. So they have a big checklist, longer than the parents see, of the things that they're looking at. They want to see if that child has the ability to do something fine with fingers, because if they can't it might be a sign of a disease, things like that. There's more going on at school that unschoolers don't need to know about, they just need to. They can step away from that and not worry about the age and the scissors, I think, because if a child can put lego together, that's that covers most of what scissors needed, except for the safety issue.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:23

I guess they don't pitch themselves in the lego unless they leave the lego out where you walk at night when you need the bathroom, when you step on it. That's not so. You don't let them the lego out where you walk at night when you need the bathroom and you step on it.

Sandra Dodd: 34:33

That's not so you don't let them have lego, I do let them have lego I was joking I hate stepping on lego.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:43

It hurts. I was trying to make a joke, I like.

Sue Elvis: 34:47

I like this words um, they're working on it if you're going to talk to somebody official, because there's certain skills that you hope your kids are going to pick up along the way, like reading and writing, but at different times, and I remember my second son. Well, my first child was a daughter, and she learned to read really quickly by herself, and I remember when she was six, she had was reading uh, all the Anne of Green Gables novels by herself, and, oh, I was just so obnoxious I thought I was one of those really obnoxious parents that threw that into the conversation. Yeah, my daughter is reading Anne of Green Gables, my daughter is reading Anne of Avonlea, you know, and she's only six, and all the people around me probably thought, oh, what a terrible friend she is. Amore is boasting that my kids are doing this, they're doing that, and I thought what are they doing wrong? Why aren't their children reading like my child? Yeah, I was obnoxious. I had something to learn, though, because my son next one was a son, and at our first registration visit when he was six, he wasn't reading, and I thought, well, what's wrong, why isn't he reading? And I thought, well, what's wrong, why isn't he reading? And I thought, well, it's all right. It's all right, it's the first registration visit. Nobody expects him to be reading. I won't be able to show up and say my son's already reading, but he won't be behind because he's only six. They don't expect six-year-olds. That's the beginning of homeschool registration. So I was all right then.

Sue Elvis: 36:35

And then over the next two years, as the two years disappeared, and just before the next registration visit, I started to panic because he still wasn't reading. He loved books, but he wasn't a fluent reader. And then I thought, well, what am I going to do? How am I going to explain this to the registration person when she comes to visit me? And I thought, well, my plan is that I'm going to say he's working on it. He's not there yet, but he's working on it and he enjoys books and he listens and we read together. And I made a big, long list of things that he was working on. And it was really funny that a week before the registration visit he came to me and said mom, can I read this book to you? And I thought, oh look, he can't read, but I'll sit down and listen. And he just read it straight through. He knew it and the registration person came in when he was eight and he was a fluent reader and maybe he wouldn't have been, maybe I'd had to have gone till 10.

Sue Elvis: 38:17

But I learned a lot then about confidence, as well as patience, that our kids all develop in their own time. But we have a role as parents to maybe stand up for our kids and recognize them for who they are and not push them into somebody else's idea, so they don't have to be who somebody else says they should be at a particular age. But I had to have the confidence to say that when the registration person came, this is okay, I know my son, he's working on this, he knows this, this and this and there's not a problem. And I wonder sometimes whether, as far as registration goes, a lot of parents get very, very uptight about it, very nervous. What if we refused our registration? A lot of it's to do with confidence, knowing your kids, knowing how kids learn and being willing to stand up and say it's okay for my child to be exactly where they are. He doesn't have to be obtaining this outcome. We're working on it. Does that work for us?

Cecilie Conrad: 39:42

I think it could be interesting to talk about reading now that we are touching upon it, just because we have no specific plan for this conversation as such. Reading is such a big marker it really is and in the schools the children kind of need to learn to read really quickly because the whole way it's structured the school is based on the children being able to read. So if they can't read you can't really move on, and that makes sense. But it's also made it an expectation that you can read when you are, let's say, seven.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:22

Now, where I come from, you start school when you're six and if you can't read by seven, you have a problem because you simply can't follow what's going on and you'll need a lot of help all the time and you can't do the things you're supposed to do because you can't read. So you need to learn to read first, and that makes sense. If I was a school teacher and I had to take care of 25 children at the same time, I probably would do more or less what they do in the schools. I'd have to sit them down.

Sandra Dodd: 41:00

If you wanted to get paid, you would do that, but you're talking about school again, and a step up from talking about school is talking about school at home. Yes, so unschoolers are listening and you're saying that's important. I would do that. I'm afraid that they will relax into keep on.

Cecilie Conrad: 41:15

Oh no, yeah but then let me finish. I would do it because I would have 25 children and and I mean in all logic of that, they would not be mine, so I'd also have someone to be accountable to. Um, but as I am not putting my kids in school and you're right, sandra, we should talk to the unschooling audience. They do not need to learn to read when they're seven or five or 10. It's not a required skill for their life and I think a lot. I've talked to a lot of unschoolers who stress about this. You know, my child is not reading and I'm trying to unschool, but can I really not teach him how to read? Should I sit down with the alphabet or they kind of cheat they feel. So they're unschooling, except they're pushing pretty hard for the reading. And also there's the mother-in-law and there's the school system that has to come and give them permission to homeschool and there's the whole thing. But really I've taught most of my siblings to read. I'm the oldest of a lot and we were all in school.

Sandra Dodd: 42:31

You helped them learn, I helped them learn.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:34

I agree, yeah, but I was like doing teachy kind of things, talking about letters and sounds and stuff.

Sandra Dodd: 42:42

So you were also in danger of turning them against reading. I think encouraging teaching or saying I taught someone to do this is also potentially harmful to your audience. I agree I'm trying to be harmful to you that you still believe that you taught people to read, instead of seeing that you said some things that might have helped them while they were learning to read.

Cecilie Conrad: 43:03

We sat together, and they wanted to, and I wanted to, and we did something, and the outcome was that we could read Donald Duck together. It's true, I wasn't necessary, the one no.

Sandra Dodd: 43:17

That's an important thing to remember too is that there are kids in school who can get A's in reading. You know, when they get grades or whatever percentage or whatever that they are in their reading class got an A. They may not be able to read a word, but they did whatever pre-reading exercises were provided to them. And when I was six I went to school. I didn't go to any preschool and I really loved my teacher because she was paying attention to me, she liked me, she actually listened to me, and most of the adults in my life had not. They had their little routine things to get me to be quiet and go away and I started paying attention then. And I paid attention with every teacher I ever had, because I decided when I was six that when I grew up I was going to be a teacher. I just wanted to be her, but I figured out later, you know, and I paid attention to be her. But I figured out later, you know, and I paid attention to what she was doing and why and seemingly how. You know. I was just saying why did she do, why, why, why? How did they set this up? And I could see really early that reading readiness, as they call it now. Here was rhyming words, using words, telling stories, answering questions. All those things are considered at school reading Because school is required to teach reading and school knows that of those kids who are all six, only some percentage of them will learn to read anything. And even then they usually probably have a first grade reading book that only has one syllable words, that has no nothing tricky, no consonant blends, no silent e's, even at first only words like dick and jane. Dick and jane books jane has a silent e, but most of those words don't even have four letters. There are three letter words as much as possible, and if a child can only read three letter words, you can't hand them a magazine and go look at this article about your favorite movie. That's not something they can read. So there's reading like an adult reads and then there are all these other stages of chopped up bits of reading that are accepted in school.

Sandra Dodd: 45:19

So when I was first dealing with homeschoolers and they would go, my child reads, my child doesn't read, I would say what do you mean read? And it would kind of irritate them because some of them meant they could read the one book that the parents had been going through with them over and over. Hop on Pop or Donald Duck or whatever. This is our reading book. He can read this book. That's not reading.

Sandra Dodd: 45:39

Reading I used to say reading is if I need to leave the house and I leave a note that says I've gone to the store and we'll be back in 15 minutes, that my child could wake up and read that. Real reading for real information, for real people. And a lot of little kids in school would not be able to read a note from their mom saying I went to the store, I'll be back in 15 minutes. If it doesn't have a picture for a clue because that's another thing about books it says you know, there's a picture of a cat and a butterfly. I'm just looking for the cat and the butterfly in these 10 words.

Sandra Dodd: 46:10

So I think a lot of homeschoolers who haven't been teachers, who haven't been analytical about how education, how government education works, what they're looking for, what they're measuring and all of that, will say her child is six and can read, whether it's Anne of Green Gables or anything. They don't know what they're picturing. So they're picturing novels and magazines and newspapers, which, or you know now it's. Can you go on YouTube and find something and look it up and read the notes. But that's another thing to remember. Kids don't need to learn to read now to get the information that they can get these days, and there was one little girl. One mother told a story recently that her daughter was learning to spell. She needed to write down something about Girl Scout cookies for some report. She was writing about Girl Scout.

Sandra Dodd: 46:59

You know real Girl Scout cookie information that she was writing for her leaders and she said hey, siri, how do you spell? Or you know whoever she. Hey, siri, how do you spell? Or you know whoever. She asked Alexa, how do you spell? And she said her sentence and the mom thought that the girl was going to.

Sandra Dodd: 47:17

I can't stop it. Okay, sorry, sorry, siri. So she just looked because the words came up on the screen. Yeah, she just copied it from there. Yeah, and I remember being a kid and I'm saying you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket, so you have to memorize all these multiplication tables. I do have a calculator in my pocket and it would tell me out loud, disturbing, whatever I was I was doing if I asked it.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:44

So yeah, so that's part of my story, that um about reading and teaching to read and letting go of my agenda. Of my children and my siblings reading was that my second child. So my first child learned and my second child refused to learn, and then it became my first step into unschooling. My first child was in school, as you know. So my second child was not in school and he couldn't read and he didn't want to learn to read and he refused to learn to read and he was actually 14 before he started reading. And that was a very, very beautiful learning journey for me of letting go.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:32

Meanwhile, my third child learned to read and I had paid no attention to that because I was so busy tearing out my hair and being worried about my second child and only by the fourth one, who is 12 years almost 13 years younger than the first one I had learned to let go and my fourth child. I have not had any agenda at any point of him learning to read. I only noticed that he didn't until one day he did, and that's actually my main thing. I would like to share with upcoming or new coming unschoolers that my experience is that I've wasted a lot of time trying to teach and I've wasted a lot of time being worried.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:29

My second child, who learned to read at 14, chooses his genes according to the pockets being big enough for his Kindle, because he's carrying that around all the time. He's the most avid reader, I think, of all my children, and he hasn't been able to stop and, as Sandra said, there are so many other ways of getting information these days. So it wasn't like he was suffering in any way before he learned to read, and I see today also that he has developed some skills that I think he developed because he couldn't read. Early reading is a cheat sheet in a way. It's a way to know that you can forget because you can just flip back and read it again. But if you can't do that, because you actually can't read.

Sandra Dodd: 50:39

You have to pay attention to what you're learning. At low day and and some of the girls gave did presentations about girl scouts in other countries and they assigned holly china, which is goofy because china doesn't have girl scouts. And I told her so I said only hong kong. So holly's like how that that they said. And they also told her to color the flag blue and I said the chinese flag isn't blue, it's red. So Holly's thinking I'm not very respectful of her Girl Scout leaders and I wasn't.

Sandra Dodd: 51:08

But she finally did look up you know Girl Guides in Hong Kong, which did still exist because Hong Kong was in transition and she couldn't read. So I helped her find the things. We went to an international grocery and found some Chinese snacks you know common children's snacks in Hong Kong that might be put at a party and she took those and shared with people and they. But for the speeches they went up and stood at a podium and spoke and the girls who could read, who are ninth graders who are reading at a fourth grade reading level, which is sort of two syllable words, blends and silence are okay, but no four or five syllable words. Blends and silence are okay, but no four or five syllable words. So they're up there and this one girl couldn't even pronounce juliet low.

Sandra Dodd: 51:52

She had written her report from encyclopedias or girl scout handbooks or whatever. She wrote down what she was going to say. She couldn't read it back out. She was stumbling, reading phonetically things that she herself had written. Holly couldn't possibly do that. She could have written and we used to write. She would dictate stories to me and I would type them and she would illustrate them and she could read those. But that wasn't really reading. That was reciting what she had written.

Sandra Dodd: 52:18

So she went up and gave a talk about how there weren't actually girl guides in China, because China didn't allow it. But she's talking about a little bit of the history of Hong Kong as an English colony and they have girl guides from those days. They still have. It'll be phased out. And she knew these things of this little minor story and just spoke it. She looked at the audience and she said what she had to say and she knew what she was talking about. And so that day I looked around and thought reading is not helping these other kids today, because none of the other speakers were good. They were all reading from a piece of paper badly, it's interesting.

Sandra Dodd: 52:56

I had a son, kirby the oldest. He didn't read. We didn't have much in her. I tried three reading lessons when he was little, two and a half, and I quit Because I was trying to impress my mother-in-law. It wasn't working and it was making him very, very sad.

Sandra Dodd: 53:08

I was bribing him with ninja turtle figures oh god doing that I kind of poor guy, gave him a break and I let it go. But he was learning a lot from video game magazines that he would get. At first he just looked at the maps and the pictures, but he started reading the captions and I heard him when he was maybe 16. In a group, a larger group of mostly older people were over at our house playing D&D or something like that magic cards and they needed directions, read. And he read. I overheard him from the next room reading to people. One of them had a college degree. They had all finished high school and here he is, an unschooled kid. He was reading perfectly well. He could have been a newscaster. He was reading with inflection and clarity. He could tell which words to emphasize and it it wasn't a performance, it was informational. They needed the information. He gave it to him. They said, okay, good, let's play.

Sandra Dodd: 54:00

But I remember being impressed that day because I've heard adults even reading for audible. You you know reading books for sale will say a when they're reading. And then we saw no human being speaking English naturally says a or a and there is no accent where they say I saw a horse and a butterfly and a car, not a. But people who are reading out loud will say it like they learned it in first or second grade because they don't have the concept, they don't have the principle that reading aloud is to read, that even reading from writing is to reproduce that language, that writing is a way to preserve language in an odd form, in a dried up form that can stay there for a year or a hundred years or 500 years, and then someone can pick it up and bring it back out into the air alive again living language. But for many people in school, reading aloud hasn't resulted in living language. It's resulted in awkward sounding out.

Sandra Dodd: 55:03

So I've seen that avoided with most unschoolers. Sorry, Sue, go ahead.

Sue Elvis: 55:08

No, I no just thinking you were saying about you wanted to impress your mother-in-law. Maybe and I think that can be a problem that we'd want to impress like I was influenced by my daughter, who could read at six who could, who was a very good reader at six and she had comprehension as well. She talked about it all, she understood what she was reading and she could read it out loud to me and that was impressive and that made me feel good. I'm doing a great job here as a parent and also I haven't got my kids in school, so that I've made a good choice here. I'm doing well. And it was about me.

Sue Elvis: 55:49

And sometimes I think that if we can separate how we're feeling about it and concentrate on our children, have confidence in them and let them develop in their own time without worrying about what other people are saying about our children and that's the difficult bit is isn't your child reading yet? And if we can say, no, he isn't, but he can do, you know he's as we were talking about. He's a good speaker, he remembers stuff, even if we don't even want to give a case that he's doing other stuff, even if we don't even want to give a case that he's doing other stuff, we just say no and have confidence that our children will develop in their own time. And then I was thinking about if we don't do this, if we get worried and start to be influenced by what other people are saying to us and thinking, then our kids might pick up on that as well. I'm behind, I've got a problem. My mother wishes I could read, and how does that make our kids feel that they're a problem? Because their parents aren't willing to let them develop in their own time and become, because we all have our own pathways.

Sue Elvis: 57:09

And yeah, just thinking about that, how we can have negative feelings as parents and impose them on our children and make a problem for our children and maybe it works negatively. We're so worried about our kids and they're learning. Come on, you've got to learn, you've got to learn but is that actually adding to the problem? Now, children are worried about it. They're not enjoying reading. They're looking at it as a task. They're looking at it as something that they are failing to do and it's going to influence the way they feel about themselves and maybe also the way they're feeling about the task that they're not able to do right at this moment, but they're working on. It's going to happen sometime, but are we actually going to make it that the time? Are we delaying when they will learn it, because we're actually having a negative influence in their children?

Cecilie Conrad: 58:09

Well, there's several things here. There's the is it about me or is it about the child? And then there's also the pushing and not pushing. The evaluation do.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:35

How worried was I when my 12 year old didn't read for him not about my ego maybe being what would I save, the neighbors asked, but more, and how bad did it make him feel that I was worried about him, feeling you were a late reader, and how much did that add to the? It's two different things, I think, and I was trying in the beginning of the conversation to talk a little bit about this thing with our agendas and our evaluations of their performance as humans. Evaluations of their performance as humans and, obviously, if it's just one thing, and and in in the big scheme of things, we, we are just on the journey of life with them and we enjoy with them. When they enjoy and we and we can see them the passion and and, um, yeah, the journey and the things they do, not necessarily looking for outcome, just looking for life then maybe sometimes reading or being able to ride a bike or other markers can be things we look for, and and maybe it's okay I've got another example.

Sue Elvis: 59:47

It's not reading, but in another area, is swimming, and we live in a culture where kids learn to swim young because the weather's good, and that's just the culture. You have swim parties and things. And before thinking I was a good mother, I enrolled all my kids in preschool swim lessons and my son, first son, he had a bad experience. The classes he enjoyed day one, he enjoyed day two and I think day three was put your head under the water day and the teacher had I don't know a few children in the pool and she insisted that all these little kids, I don't know four or five year olds, would put their heads under the water on that particular day. They had to do it because she had her program and the next day, once they put their head under the water Next day, they moved on to something else and he got frightened and he did it because I don't know, but he wanted to. Like I was encouraging him, I felt I feel really bad about it later. You know you can do it, you can do it. He did it, Put him off swimming for years.

Sue Elvis: 1:01:03

He didn't want to go anywhere near the water and every time he got invited to a swim party with kids, he couldn't swim. All the other kids were in the pool having a great time and he would be clinging to the edge. He was a non-swimmer. And I remember when he got to about 12, he came to me and said mom, I would like to learn to swim. And so we went.

Sue Elvis: 1:01:22

I went to the local swim school.

Sue Elvis: 1:01:24

I explained his history of swimming and got the most fantastic gentle teacher and with his cooperation he learned to swim and it was just such a fantastic achievement that he wanted to learn and he'd faced his fear and he had somebody on his side helping him and it was one of those life skills that he was so glad he had achieved. But the point was that for those intervening years he was put off swimming because of somebody pushing. And I wonder if something like that would happen in other areas, like reading or writing or whatever. Or like that would happen in other areas like reading or writing or whatever, if we push too hard at the wrong time, we turn a task into something, or a task, a skill, into something which might be advantageous to acquire, or even fun to acquire or interesting, and we turn it into something that is frightening or a burden or you've got to live up to it. It's not purely something you want to learn anymore. It's got all these other things attached to it, which turns it into something formidable, something that's not enjoyable anymore.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:44

It's interesting, I think, the fine line. I'm dead sure that the reason my second child didn't read until he was 14 was resistance. It was because we were pushing when we decided that that he could be homeschooled. Well, my husband and I both made mistakes. I felt that this child was not necessarily cut out for school and that he would be overwhelmed by school once it was time for him.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:03:20

My husband didn't want to homeschool, so I thought okay, the least I can do for him is to teach him to read, because if he can read before he starts school, then he will not be overwhelmed by school and by the task of learning to read and how hard it can be. So I pushed bad idea, I cannot recommend it. And then we decided to homeschool. But my husband panicked and said okay, you can. You can homeschool, at least I can handle that. You'll homeschool for the first six months, maybe a year, but then you have to teach him the things they would have learned in school. So I had to teach him. I didn't actually, but I tried frequently to do homeschooling around the kitchen table and the reason we became unschoolers pretty quickly was I failed. It didn't make sense. But I did push for reading and I know that for a fact that the reason he didn't read was because he refused. He was he's he was. If you're telling me to read, I will not. If you're telling me to jump, I will sit down and and yes, we can completely ruin it, like the swim class could ruin it for your child. And where's the I mean with reading? I am nowadays a hundred% sure that it's very hard to stop children from learning to read. They will read. They live in a culture of text. They live in a culture where there are so many written things that of course they learn to read. They all learn to walk and they all learn to read. There's no stopping it. So it's a complete waste of time and a potential threat to their reading journey to try to push them.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:05:15

We can answer question. Yeah, they say when they're little what's that? And you say that's an apple. And then they say what's that? And you say that's your grandmother. And at some point they say what's that? And you say that's a bee. And and you know that's your grandmother. And at some point they say what's that? And you say that's a bee. And you know it's not like it's not toxic. But, on the other hand, having the agenda and pushing for it and doing all this teaching that I've done with my siblings and I've done with my first children. I was trying, I thought it was my job. I really did think it's my job to make sure my children read. Now that I'm older and wiser, I know that was a waste of time. They will learn to read and also, equally, with the swimming.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:05:58

I come from a swimming culture in a different way from you, sue. I come from a culture. I come from a country where you cannot be very far from the ocean. I come from a culture. I come from a country where you cannot be very far from the ocean. I come from a country of 400 islands, so there's a lot of sailing going on and everybody learns to swim. When I was a child, swimming was in the schools. We learned to swim. You have to be able to swim, you have to be able to survive falling out of the boat. That's basically it. It's cold, we don't swim for fun and no one has a pool, but you have to be able to swim. That was just a golden standard when I was a child and I hated my swim classes with a passion. I hated everything about it and I still don't like swimming to this day. My children have learned to swim when we have lived in houses with pools. I haven't taught them I haven't, but if they have access to water to swim in and it's fun, they learn.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:05

Same thing with reading water to swim in and it's fun. They learn same thing even if there's not trauma or pressure or fear involved. There's something called the observer effect. I think it's only been known since the 1960s or 70s and they talk about it in psychology and in biology too, even in biology labs it's. Things are different if the subjects are being observed than if they're not, and I don't know how much of it is, how much they know or aware or they're being measured, so that the idea of have, of trying to see what people or animals will do, watching them changes what they do, yes, so that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:44

So in unschooling, the best thing to do about that is not to watch them do things but do things with them. So the things that are being done are being done. Parent and child, whether it's talking about things or going to a museum or something. The parent shouldn't say there's the museum, I will stand here and watch you look at it. That would affect the way they look at the museum. But if the parent goes side by side and says, oh, I know what this is or what is this and the child might know, then it's not there. You don't get the observer effect and there's. I think both of you are very valuable to your listeners because you have four, four children at least. You know you're saying well, in my third one, in my fourth one, because many unschoolers only have one child, it's their one shot and so for them.

Sandra Dodd: 1:08:28

The more stories they can read or hear about people relaxing after their first or second child into the magic of seeing it occur on its own whether it's swimming or reading or math the more confident they can be, because that's why it's important for unschoolers to share their stories and what happened, and so sue had. I'm kind of jealous that sue's daughter could read that much, that well, that early, and there might be some things she missed out on because of that, or maybe not. I don't know if she went into, if she was in a play, if she would have been too dependent on the script, I don't know, and different people are different ways. But I think I have a child who seemed really late at the time. She was 11. I thought because she was a girl she would read earlier than her brothers because statistically in school the slower readers are usually boys early on. And no, she learned at a later age, but when Holly had not had any problem taking in information in her life at all. She had a really big vocabulary. She understood a lot of things about people and places and her favorite movie for years maybe still was Stand by Me, and it's the adventure of some boys who go to find a dead body and the book that it's based on is called the Body, and so she watched that show from the time she was three, sometimes when she was little, every day and that was just the thing that she had on in the background when she was doing other things. She loved it, she knew all about it. There was a lot of 50s rock and roll in there. She's still really interested in 50s rock and roll, so for her that that became sort of a garden that a lot of things grew out of. So she time passes, she's 11.

Sandra Dodd: 1:10:12

She had a friend who lived a few houses over um cousins of another unschooling family we knew, but they weren't unschoolers, they did school at home. So they one family had moved out of town and they had moved into this house. Just as we moved, we moved to this neighborhood and we're like we'll be in Brett's neighborhood. Oh, he's just moved. So that was sad. But Holly hung around with his cousin.

Sandra Dodd: 1:10:33

The cousin was nine and the parents were pressuring her to read. She couldn't read at all, so they had some Judy Blume book for her that her mother said you have to read this book. And she was at the point I said she couldn't read it all. She could phonetically sound things up. So she's trying to phonetically sound out a book which was not comprehension for her. It was one more word, another word, another word, another word. So she was getting nothing out of that book. Holly said Holly wanted to play with her and she said I can't play because I have to read a chapter. So Holly said I will help you so we can play. So Holly said read to me. So she's reading to her. Holly's seeing the mistakes she's making and Holly's learning to read by watching, you know, following along in the book as her nine-year-old friend is butchering these words and stuff. So Holly, gradually, to help her friend, is learning to read so that she can play. Well, holly read Holly. Finally, her friend is tired of dragging herself through this book and Holly wanted to know what was going to happen in the book. So she finished it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:11:30

So I bought Holly a copy of the book at the used bookstore. She said we're reading this book, but can you get me a copy? So I did. So she read that one and she read one more by the same author, and I think those books are usually read by kids who are about her age or a little older, but those were her first books. And then, from the same bookstore, she said do you think they have a copy of the Body? And it's a Stephen King story, a Stephen King novella. And I said they might, but I don't think it's a book by itself. I'll see. And it's one of four or five shorter stories in a. It's not that short, it's a of four or five shorter stories in a. It's not that short, it's a novella. So it wasn't long enough to print it as a freestanding book. And so I went and bought that for her and she read the Body and it's not written for little girls. And she got everything.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:23

And I used to teach English in school. That's what I taught. So language arts, literature and all that. I've seen hundreds of kids Plus. I paid a lot of attention when I was growing up, so I've seen thousands of kids come up against that Like read this, analyze it. Let's talk about what it means. What was the author thinking? All that kind of stuff a lot of kids never want to do. That it's like look, I read the damn book. I'm not writing a report, or you know, if I write a report it's going to be stupid and don't ask me any more questions. You know they just have that. They get to the point where they think reading a novel is torture, it's horrible, it's school. They can't wait to grow up so they never have to read a book again.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:59

Holly said oh, this is so cool, mom, because when he's writing the things that the kid wrote in the in the book they show it visually. You know this, the the author, the narrator, is one of the kids, so he's talking about when he was a kid and he was a writer. And in the book there are these like I think in this. In the movie they may only show one of the stories, so they show it as a story, but in the book it's right, it's written and she she sees the difference in the styles of writing for him pretending to write as a kid. And then the narration picks up again and she came to show me that and I was so impressed that she saw that and that she wanted to talk about it. Also, as she's reading it she's saying I can see why they didn't put this in the movie, because it would have been really hard to film it, or why do you think that the movie had this part, and I said because they could do something visual with it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:13:51

In the book it's just somebody was thinking, telling you what somebody thought, and so after that, holly loved well, at that point, anything she read. That was a movie. She had already seen the movie and that's the way she read the books. People who read the books first and then see the movie, they complain and complain and they're very sad that the movie wasn't true to the book.

Sandra Dodd: 1:14:09

But Holly, because from three to 11 had been still picking up information from stories from being read to, from watching movies, tv shows, when she saw that some of those are based on books, she was very accepting and patient and forgiving about what you can't put into a movie and the book might have taken if you put every detail in four hours to make a movie, but if you just want to make a 90-minute movie, what parts do you keep? It didn't ever make her mad that they had left things out of a movie, which I think is a great emotional advantage in life, because I was the kind who was like, oh, this stupid movie, they could have done this, but Holly didn't have that. It was so calm and mature and analytical and me knowing what they teach in school, their comparison contrast, all of the years of comparison, contrast, thinking and reporting and logic Ding. You know my mental checklist done.

Sandra Dodd: 1:15:08

So Holly sort of jumped from non-reader to okay, that'll do you till ninth grade. That gets you through, you know, ready to start high school. I didn't tell her that, you know, but in my English teacher, heart of hearts I knew that she had, just just from reading that book and comparing it to the movie, had just done years of what they hope that kids in school will do. So it wouldn't have happened if I had pushed her to read earlier, and she was my third. So I'm saying again for the people who are listening, who only have one child, try to benefit from the sorrows and mistakes of other unschooling parents who wish they hadn't pushed a kid, except for Sue Elvis, whose child didn't give her the chance, raced ahead and started reading novels.

Sue Elvis: 1:15:59

But I think that set me up for expecting all my others to be exactly the same. So it was problematic because then I began to worry about what was wrong with my other kids or what was wrong with me. So I had that delayed understanding of how reading helps.

Sandra Dodd: 1:16:23

Sorry, I missed that If she had been your only child, you could have just basked in that pride for life. So if someone only has one child who learns to read early. Just think what you want to think about it.

Sue Elvis: 1:16:37

And then I could have had a blog and I could have been totally obnoxious telling everybody that we did everything perfectly. Having seven children that I write about certainly gives me a lot of scope for admitting mistakes and learning different experiences, because they're all different and there's always something to learn about them. So I might have had a child who read very well at six, but after that, you know, all went downhill and I'm not saying it all went downhill with my kids, because, of course, all our kids are very individual. They've all have their own talents, they're all wonderful people. It went downhill as far as I had a lot of learning to do. I thought I knew it all, so that I suddenly realized that I didn't know it all and started listening a bit more carefully. And, yeah, just reading and just spending more time with my kids.

Sue Elvis: 1:17:42

And I think that a lot of we're talking about where our kids should be at a particular age, and it's listening very carefully and seeing what their needs are at a particular age as well.

Sue Elvis: 1:17:56

Some will have that need to read and others won't. They'll be have a need to do something completely different. And then there are times, I think, when we feel that our kids do need to do something like. They do need to learn to swim because we're going on this holiday next year and they need to be able to swim. And then it all gets a little bit complicated when we bring in our own expectations and heap those upon our kids. And I think that talking today that being a parent isn't easy because there's so many expectations that other people put on us and then we put the expectations on our children and at the beginning we have no knowledge and we're listening to other people instead of our kids and we just want to do our best for our children, and I think a lot of sometimes. It's very sad how the things that don't benefit our children they don't come from a place.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:19:00

They come from a place of wanting to do our best for our children and it's sad that it doesn't work out that way at all well then, it's a good thing to listen to that, this podcast, 10 points for everyone, still listening, no, but really I mean you won't be the front, but behind you, two wise ladies with all the mistakes I've made. Oh god, I've made a lot of mistakes and I mean I usually say all parents love their children and most of what they do they really do it with the best of intentions and to the best of their capacity and in that respect they should be forgiven. But really it's a fine line to just want the best for your children and and and between that and just making these mistakes. We and for me it's really been a mirror to become an unschooler to understand when do I have an agenda that's actually helpful for my child? If we can keep talking about that for a bit, I think it's a big deal and I think a lot of reading is being destroyed by parents and destroyed by teachers and destroyed by the agenda of getting them to read.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:20:18

Early Reading is also a theme where, as soon as they learn to read, they are told what to read. I don't remember which of you said because, I will admit it, I'm getting tired Talking about this. You know that you have to read. It was Sandra. I think you have to read this book at school and then you have to write a report and you can't wait until you're old enough to get out of school and never read a book again. I've been. I come from a family of avid readers, both my mom's and my dad's side. We all read books all the time and have big libraries and enjoy literature and talk about literature. It's a big deal and, of course, this part of life literature I wanted, I would love for it to be part of my children's life. I feel they would really miss out if they're not reading books, reading novels and poems and plays and all these things. It's a complete, it's a perspective. It there's. There's nothing like it. On the other hand, if I am to judge whether they read a book that is behind a movie they saw or the, the judgment of the literature and my agenda with what they are supposed to read.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:21:43

I remember my first one. She learned really early. I think it was funny. She was a school child. She started school when she was six and the day she was six and started school she said now I'm in school, now I can read, and it was true. Then she could read.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:02

In the beginning she read the same book 11 times. I was a little what's up with that? Um, not that, it wasn't really a problem. And then, maybe within the first year, she read a specific novel. And I just talked to her yesterday and she was reading it again same novel. She's now 25 and she said, yeah, this novel, I tend to read it every two or three years. I just really like it. It's like comfort food for me. I read this novel. And she has this thing with her journey with literature that she just likes to read the same novels over and over.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:40

And who am I to judge that? I think it's really is a problem that first we push and push and push like crazy and we make them hate it by pushing so much and we make them feel stupid and we spend so much time worrying and pushing and being annoyed or not annoyed. But I mean, we could have done so much better with our time than trying to teach children to read who don't want to read or who are not ready or who just doesn't enjoy at all that we're doing this pushing and then, the moment they learn, we tell them what to read and now they have to read all these things they don't want to read. That doesn't make any sense. What if they just want to read? I said the word just so. I'm not going to complete the sentence because that would be judgment.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:23:26

Me and my siblings. We learned to read Donald Duck. We read Donald Duck in the summer breaks and that's when we learned to read. School was a waste of time. In the summers, in the family vacation home by the west coast of Denmark, in the old Donald Duck from our parents' childhood, you know, under our blankets in the wind, we learned to read together. That was how we did it and that was when it made sense.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:23:50

And I remember my dad saying that when he was a child he learned to read in school and there was these novels like Ennard Blyton kind of novels. We had some similar ones in Scandinavia Also. We had an I Blyton translated. When they wanted to read that, him and his siblings, they were told that was not literature, that was a waste of time, that was like low class. So they also had that experience, just like we had. Our parents said are you just reading Donald Duck? How about you read something serious? Why are we? Well, I don't have to ask the question in this context, but I just want to put out there that if reading is a tool we want our children to have and we allow for them to take that tool in their hand when they're ready for it, maybe we should also allow them to use that tool in the way that makes sense to them.

Sandra Dodd: 1:24:49

Definitely, definitely, because you can do the same damage where you try to control them until they resist your control. It's not good for the relationship, it's not good for them reading. I have a page on my site called again I think I'll send you the link that you can put with this Yep, it's exactly about parents complaining about a child watching something over and over, and so I love that subject because I would always say, oh, is there a record album that you've listened to more than once? And they go yeah, more than 10 times, yeah, maybe, how many times 80, 100, some Beatles album or whatever they love?

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:27

I go well, when somebody's a Shakespeare professor, how many times do you think he's read Romeo and Juliet? Because you don't know something really well, thoroughly, in and out, unless you've read it many times. Nobody, I don't care how smart they are, how good they are at. My husband's really great at watching a movie once and knowing all the characters' names and what order things came in. That's good, that's a good skill. But he wouldn't be teaching film with a movie he'd only watched once.

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:55

So people will go to see the same art over and over the same painting. If they live in a town with a painting they love, they'll go again. They'll get a tourist that they need to take somewhere. Let's go to the art gallery because they want to stand in front of that painting again. There's architecture that people go to repeatedly Same thing. They want to stand in that place and feel how that building feels when you talk, how it comes back at you. So it's natural for people to repeat things. People have gone to church and sung the same songs a hundred times. You know, gone to the same church over and over and loved the beauty of the statues or the architecture or whatever it is the organ. So repetition is natural to humans and control seems, unfortunately, natural to parents. So they want to tell their children no, no, don't read that book again.

Sandra Dodd: 1:26:44

Why are you only reading this? Why are you watching that show again? Why are you watching reruns of Star Trek, the Next Generation? That would be for people my age, because it's a really good story and there are so many good little scenes. I want to see it again. I want to see Worf say I am not a merry man when they're all dressed up like Robin Hood and that you know it's funny Right now. Now, I think, the big repetitive show that younger people are watching is Big Bang Theory, but that show is really good. The characters are great, the writing is fantastic. So to think that we know what our kids like, or should like or shouldn't like, better than they know what they like is a little bit obscene from an unschooling point of view. Leave them alone.

Sue Elvis: 1:27:31

What about underestimating kids? Like, we're talking about reading and you, sandra, were talking about books, dick and Jane. We have those readers where they start off with two and three-letter words and they progress up the series and I might be on book 12C in the series and that's my grade. My child is reading at this level and we all say we all are. Many parents, when they start out with their kids, will buy these sort of books as readers to help their kids learn to read.

Sue Elvis: 1:28:11

And with my second son the one who I agonized over the fact he wasn't reading at six, I started off with these books and then one day I realized that those weren't the books he wanted to read. He wanted to read proper books, books that were interesting, books that weren't written for his level of reading, but real books. So I asked him what he wanted to read and we found books that he wanted to read and he got so excited. And how we read them was. He wanted to read them, so he would read the words that he could read and then I would fill in all the gaps and I didn't require him to sound out any of the words. If he wanted me to say the word, I said it and then we just carried on and it was a joint reading experience.

Sue Elvis: 1:29:03

We read it together, but it was a proper book and I think that was the turning point with his reading is that he wanted to read because the stories were so good and he wanted to read them, and that I was not making him read them, but we were in it together, working as a team, to read the book. He knew that I would give him any word he wanted without saying well, you should know that by now or send it out, try it. I told you what that word was two pages ago. Have you forgotten? I just sort of gave it to him and that was the turning point. He really started to enjoy the reading and, as I said, just before his eighth birthday, when the person came, he didn't even need me sitting next to him to help him. He read the whole thing and that, I think, was the deciding factor on his reading was he read what he wanted to read, which wasn't readers designed for his reading level?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:30:07

readers designed for his reading level. We had a lot of those books for the beginner reader, partially mostly because my husband was writing. He's written 22 of them, fun little stories. My husband likes to make projects so this was one of his projects. Can I do that? Can I write a story that fits this framework of the beginner reader? There are like number systems to it if it's supposed to be sold for the schools, and he did a lot of that. So he was part of a publishing company and we had a lot of these books. We got them for free. I had them lying around. I bought some more when my second child didn't read and I had that for as long as I had the project. I did have the project.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:30:55

I'm not proud of it, but I'm honest. They can have their. So for my three-year-old at the time when my second child was not learning to read, my third child was three. She picked them up and learned to read by herself because they were lying around, because I was trying to push another child to learn. I'm not, I'm not even I think any. Anything with a good story, anything with a nice drawing, anything with text. It could be the. I'll be back after 12 sticky note on the bridge. It could be signs it can be.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:31:36

There's a lot of chat going on in computer games nowadays. There's a lot of text messages. There's a lot of words everywhere that kids will read when they learn to read, and there are many different reading journeys and many different things they can pick up when they start reading. If they start reading literature, some of them never do. Some people never read literature, and that's I don't personally understand it, but there are lots of things I don't do that other people are passionate about. So it kind of makes sense. I think the important thing is that we don't make judgments, and we don't even make judgments about the. What did you say? In English? It was Dick and Jane, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 1:32:26

Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:32:26

Yeah, so of, of course it's dead boring. But I remember once in my schooling journey I read a book. I simply hated reading it. I had that experience Sandra talked about, where I just couldn't wait to get out of school so I would never have to read that book again, and I was an avid reader. At the time it was in high school, I was maybe 17 and I had to read this book.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:32:57

Today I would consider it a quite good book, but it wasn't voluntary. It was my teacher who said I had to read it and I literally fell asleep every time I had to read that. I sat down with it and I fell asleep. I could not read it. I could not read it at all. And we were handed this book. We got a month to read it and then we were supposed to, you know, discuss it and write about it and stuff. Like I just could not read it. And I sat down in the canteen and I talked with my friends and I said you know what, guys? I can't read this book. I fall asleep all the time, and lots of them had the same experience. I actually had to to order it at the local library, pretending to be blind, uh, to get it as an audiobook, because back then you know you didn't have audible, especially not in Danish.

Sandra Dodd: 1:33:48

Um, it was really really hard to go in and pretend to be blind, isn't it?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:33:52

I'm joking well, I pretended I was. I was uh borrowing it from my grandmother. I'm joking no, no, I couldn't pretend I was blind, but I had to jump through some hoops. Is my point to be allowed to get this book as an audio book because I had to jump through some hoops? Is my point to be allowed to get this book as an audio book because I had to read it to pass the class?

Sandra Dodd: 1:34:12

Nowadays it's easy If a child needed to read a book. Even when I was in college in the 1970s I had a hard time reading Shakespeare. I would just get lost. I didn't pay attention to who was on stage and that. So I used to go to the fine arts library and they would play them on records. There's somebody in a booth, you had the paper from the card catalog and they go and put the records on and I would read along.

Sandra Dodd: 1:34:33

So now I have professional English actors reading to me and they have sound effects like a radio show. If the wind's blowing, the door's open door slams shut, whatever. You got a clue who's in the room and it was better to hear somebody who knew what it was supposed to sound like, knew what it was supposed to mean to read it to me. Yeah, and I wasn't wasting my time reading excellent and stuff like that. You know stage directions. That really didn't make that much sense to me. So nowadays I wonder if, if the if joe isaac in in australia is keeping some stats, she twice has gathered stats and made graphs of what age kids learn to read. I can link that too if you want, and I think that may could potentially become a later year. I mean nowadays, I think it could skew older, because even the people who are listening to this instead of reading about unschooling, I think a lot people at a lot of ages are doing more listening than they are reading.

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:29

I am lately. A friend of mine just lately gave me a book and I went oh, that's great, it's got pictures. I can't sit and read a book anymore. My glasses aren't good enough or I just don't have the ability to sit still that long and not comfortable. It's too big a book for me to read. The bed right, it would fall on me, me. So I, even I who have read a billion books and and was kind of a reading addict kid who would have a book under the desk, I can't. I don't anymore. But I listen to podcasts. I'll look things up, I'll read supplementary material. I'll go and look up, you know, I'll read wikipedia or I'll go and read historical documents, letters or studies about something, but but my primary these days has been discussion to podcast and books on, books on. I started to say books on tape, but you know tapes long gone, but audible audiobooks how about what?

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:19

actually because I want to take notes, I want to write in the margins or something. If it's a, if it's a non-fiction, sometimes I buy it to mark or find passages. The other day I bought um a kindle edition so that I could quote a section because it was a. We've been having a discussion on my facebook page about whether everybody gets the chills from music. If you hear some music that you really like, give you the shivers. It turns out that that's not universally so there's some unknown percentage of people who don't ever, and my husband's one of them. But I didn't know that till recently. So we're talking about that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:54

And then I'm listening to a novel and there's a long description of someone who went to her very first concert you know, classical music concert and she describes getting those feelings and just described really clearly by a good writer. So I really needed to quote that. I didn't want to transcribe from listening, so that. So the written word now has become secondary to me in a way. In a way, I mean, I still write fast and I like to write, but not everyone ever did. Some people never did not everyone ever did.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:37:31

Some people never did. To me it has different purposes and I find I like sobering up and finding my focus to concentrate on reading a book. I rarely do so in an actual book. I read on my Kindle or my other e-reader, and recently I've actually begun reading on my phone, because the new update on the iphone or maybe the one before you can press and hold a word did you know that? And then you can look it up right away. There's no, I have to type it into wikipedia, and because I speak several languages, my phone apparently know that, so they give it to me in different languages. Even so, that enhances my understanding. I read a lot in English, but it's not my first language, so sometimes when I look a word up and I get an English explanation, it's not really coming deep into me and it's just so nice.

Sandra Dodd: 1:38:24

Can you set that? Can you set it to translate? Well, it does so spontaneously, I don't know.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:38:30

I mean, I get. I very often get. When I look up a word, I get an explanation in English, obviously, as it's an English word, but then I also get an explanation in Spanish randomly, because I also speak Spanish, and then I get an explanation in Danish and then I get the Wikipedia post and if it's an object, I get a picture of it. So it's just so wow. And I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens right now. It's a very complicated language for me. I'm not that fluent, there are lots of words, it's an old book, so it's just so useful. So I actually just read on the phone. What I don't like about that is that I can't do the marking of, like I would do any way and actually also reading someone. We don't use audible, we use something else. But some of the books, the literature books that I'm reading, I can read them with my eyes, but then if I have to get up, because maybe I want to go for a run or I need to cook a meal or something like that, I can switch and just continue in my ear. So it doesn't really matter whether I read with my eyes or continue with my ears, but I do think and I don't know, maybe this is another discussion for another time that I've noticed over the last years that my ability to focus is something I have to work on. Whereas 20 years ago I would grab a book and read it and be lost for hours, now I have to pay attention and it's not helping that. It's the phone. I've got it right there in my hand. I could just send my daughter a text message, I could just look this thing up, I could just check my email, I could do all the little things. So I have to stay focused. But yeah, I don't know if I'm venturing into a different conversation.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:40:32

I wanted to say something about Shakespeare that I think is more important or more relevant. I know that Sue and I both have read Shakespeare with our children in our unschooling journey and that we like Shakespeare, both of us. I don't know your relation to shakespeare, sandra, other than what you just said, but I know that I cannot read shakespeare alone, that it's too hard but maybe also not made for it, and that's another thing about the parental um agenda and and ambition on behalf of the children. If we think, oh, they should read Shakespeare because it's Shakespeare, yes, but how do you really want to experience this? If I'm passionate about Shakespeare, which I happen to be, I am so because I find the stories epic and I find the language really funny and rich and poetic. But I can only unfold that in real life with other people.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:41:37

I have never in my entire life read Shakespeare alone. It doesn't make any sense to me. I have to play it out. We can be two or three people, so we have we play several characters each or we can just be two persons reading it out loud together. But it's it's. It's not for me. And I like to say this because it becomes very ambitious. If we're having this discussion on reading and unschooling and suddenly we're saying Shakespeare is here, shakespeare there, shakespeare again, my fellow unschooling and suddenly we're saying Shakespeare's here, shakespeare there, shakespeare again my fellow unschooling parents might become go from being chill to being very ambitious again and it might put a pressure on and I think reading should be fun and it should be something we like doing and it should make sense and yeah, we made a mistake with Shakespeare at the beginning by just getting a book, and we did read it in parts, but the turning point for us came when we actually started with the play rather than the book.

Sue Elvis: 1:42:44

So that I remember we first watched I think it was Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and Kenneth Branagh he just brings those words alive and all of a sudden, what words on the page didn't mean anything, but watching Kenneth Branagh say them in the context of the play, it just oh wow, that's what that means, and I think shakespeare is meant to be watched.

Sandra Dodd: 1:43:11

Yes and yes and when you hear not just you heard, it wasn't just kenneth brana, it was seeing who he's talking to. So when they're acting it out, he's looking at somebody and you can see who overheard it, because that's all really important, mm-hmm exactly who who heard this? Who knows this plan? Who knows, but who overheard it? Because that's all really important Exactly who heard this? Who?

Sue Elvis: 1:43:31

knows this plan.

Sue Elvis: 1:43:33

We do. We love words and Shakespeare is full of wonderful quotes that you know. We used to write them down and then use them as insults and things. We had a rule in the family you can never insult anybody unless you used a Shakespearean insult, because that was fun and so we loved the words. But what we also used to do was turn the captions on sometimes so that we could read along when we wanted to, because sometimes the words go a bit fast or they're so fluent in it that you miss some of it.

Sue Elvis: 1:44:06

So instead of looking at our books and looking up at the screen, we just watch it. We have the captions on screen, but after we're talking about re-reading, re-listening, re-watching things over and over again and I think we've done that so many times with Shakespeare that you become more familiar with the words and each time you understand a little bit more. And I think our enjoyment started coming when I realised that we didn't have to understand everything on the first watch or the first view, that we could just absorb what we could absorb. And then next time we watched it we would get something a little bit more. And then next time we watched it, we would get something a little bit more and then watch a different uh production.

Sue Elvis: 1:44:52

Different actors are different, as you were saying, sandra, about which scenes have they cut? Which scenes have they put in? How people, how they adapted, how this new production adapted Hamlet's play, what costumes and the conversations we used to have spontaneously by just watching shakespeare together, comparison um evaluation uh, did they have a particular slant, for a particular reason? Like uh henry v, now who um lawrence olivier, I think they cut out a lot of the negative scenes for the British because it was produced during the war as a bit of propaganda and that was a slant they had on it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:45:43

But in Laurence Olivier the thing that they do really wonderfully is that it starts off on stage sort of clunky, bad staging, not great actors. And in the play, in the text of Henry V, they're doing that. They're saying imagine large armies, imagine a huge field, and so that gradually moves out from the stage to a movie and then at the end it turns back into the stage gradually, which is really awesome because that's what Shakespeare wanted, says for the audience to imagine. And so they did it visually really beautifully in that one, in that Lawrence of Olivier. Otherwise that's not my favorite, but I love that part of it. Otherwise, kenneth Branagh, all the way.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:26

Exactly, I think we have to link to specific uh versions that we've been talking about. I've not been watching a lot of Shakespeare movies. Actually we read, we just read the books.

Sandra Dodd: 1:46:40

I, I can, I can't. I couldn't read Shakespeare in college, even though I was an English major. I wanted to, I needed to, and I had grown up reading the King James Bible. So if any of that thou hast, you know, didn't bother me a bit, I could read it just as well and comprehend it as well as modern English, but I just couldn't catch the rhythm in the characters. And, furthermore, if you see something like Henry V, the Kenneth Branagh version, there are characters who have accents that I had no idea. There's a guy who's Welsh and a guy who's Irish and a guy who's Scottish, and it matters in the story. They're comic characters. If you don't get it, you slide on by, but they're insulting each other about their cultures and the stereotypes and I couldn't have read that right. But anyway, as to repetition, unless you've seen it many times, and preferably many different versions, you're not an expert, you don't really know it, and so I think that's true of any kind of art, music, literature you need to really deep, dive and repeat.

Sue Elvis: 1:47:45

But that's a pleasure, isn't it? That you never get to the end of it, that there's always something else to enjoy, something else to learn about, some other word that you didn't notice last time. That's the pleasure of returning to things more than once, and also about, as we change as well, that you've probably all had the experience of watching things that you saw when you were younger, as an older person, or listening to music, and sometimes it's good and it brings back good memories, and other times you think, oh wow, what did I ever enjoy in this? This doesn't make, yeah, it just I'm a different person to the person I was when I was watching it the first time around. The example of that is the British TV series the Goodies, and my husband and I used to watch that and enjoy that as uni students, and then, I don't know, maybe 10, 20 years ago, we saw it online and watched it and we thought this is just rubbish. We weren't the same people and we didn't appreciate it anymore.

Sandra Dodd: 1:48:59

When I first read Charles Dickens, I read Oliver Twist and I was maybe 12 when I read it, and so I was about the same age as the title character and I. It was for me an adventure, a kid adventure. And then I read it when I was grown. It was like, oh, his poor parents. And then I read it when I was old and went what the hell are these teachers thinking they're doing? You know, my perspective and who I identified with changed as I got older. So I it's not enough to watch it over and to read over and over. You have to read it every few years. There's an actor named Christopher Lee and he was mostly in monster movies, but he said he had read the Lord of the Rings every year. It's just a thing he sort of had on his schedule. He read the entire series every year. So when Peter Jackson was going to make a movie of it, he was very excited. He said I want to play gandalf and he said, ah, you can be saruman.

Sandra Dodd: 1:49:49

So that was sad, as he knew the book really better than any of the other actors, probably better than the director, but they made him play the bad guy because he was already a typecast bad guy. But that's interesting that that in telling that story he he's telling everybody in the whole world that's. Yeah, I think he said since the 50s or the 60s he had read that series every year it's interesting.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:50:12

Actually, I I forgot, but now you remind me both of you that we talked about this repetition and how we can sometimes judge our children for repeating things like why watching the same movie over and over, why reading the same book over and over? Why are you maybe playing the same video game hours and hours and hours? It's the same movie over and over. Why are you reading the same book over and over? Why are you maybe playing the same video game hours and hours and hours? It's the same thing. And actually I don't think anyone really particularly enjoys looking at a wall that has just been painted white, waiting for it to dry. We don't like to to be bored. No one really likes to be bored. So if a child or an adult is doing something again, it must be because there's something there to find something new, something interesting, some, some I don't want to say development, because we don't have to grow all the time some joy, something that we want to need from it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:51:18

And, as you said, play the same golf course. People will go to the same golf course again and again and again. You've already played this golf course, yeah, but I got to go play golf or tennis. People will play tennis when they're already good. You're good enough to beat just about anybody. Why are you still playing tennis? You've done it. Why don't you stop? But they like the feeling, they like the running around.

Sandra Dodd: 1:51:36

My husband and I, very many mornings we'll play an old video game from. We have a Nintendo 64, and that's all we use it for. I remember it's a Super GameCube. I don't know what we have. I'm sorry to all the Nintendo people, but it's Dr Mario and we've played it for years, since our kids were little. It's a pattern game and we will sit and play that, play three games of it and just talk about our lives. We used to have a hot tub and we sit in the hot tub and talk. We don't have the hot tub anymore, so now we play Dr Mario. We don't know who's going to win. Neither one of us is having to slow down to let the other one catch up at all and we're cutthroat. And other people come over and watch us and they don't even know what we're doing. It's like, wow, oh, wow, I didn't know how to do that, like we know how to take the little piece down and up and turn it in like spelunking, and so it's just fun, for it's a thing to do.

Sandra Dodd: 1:52:23

While we're talking, there's a game I've played for a long time called Plants vs Zombies. I remember playing it with some kids in India. One of them was doing nothing but showing me where the money and the suns were that I needed to collect. She would point at the TV. It was on a big TV. The other boy was analyzing a zombie's coming. He goes this guy needs one more of these. They're advising me about what I plant, and as a team of three it worked really well and I thought this is a good game for three. So I've been playing this game. I don't know how long. I don't know how long it came out, but that was probably 15 years ago I was in India, I don't know 11, 12 years. I had been playing it for a long time. Then I still play it by myself Sometimes, if nothing else is going on.

Sandra Dodd: 1:53:03

I will pull that up and I will play a couple of favorite scenarios. There's dark, there's water, there's all kinds of stuff, and I will play one that I know I can win. But what if I can do it faster than last time? So for me it's almost like a meditation. It's a thing I can do. I know the optimal plants, so sometimes I handicap myself and don't let myself use one. That's an experiment. But sometimes I use the best plants I know and just see how fast I can do it. It's not important, it doesn't need to be done, it's not like real gardening, but it's a soothing, mentally stimulating, colorful, familiar thing. And I think sometimes with any kind of life I was going to say with unschooling sometimes kids need a big, exciting new day to see things they've never seen. But that makes them tired and they have to sleep a long time. But sometimes they might need a day where nothing's new, where they're at home, they're watching things they've seen before and you fix them food that you know they love, that they've had a hundred times before.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:54:00

So, sometimes something's very familiar and soothing is restful and healing comforting, and then you think you have nothing to write in that report. That day was wasted for your report and actually it was not. Yeah, man, we've been around a lot of things. My two hour mark is up and, as I am on the side of the planet where it's getting late, I will admit I'm becoming tired, though I love these conversations. I didn't know it was that long, sorry, thank you. Now, and what I also feel randomly, I can share this with you. My husband was kind enough to turn on the heat in the van before I started recording, but apparently he just put it on, keep going not too hot. So I'm tired and the heat is just knocking me out. And also, we've been recording for two hours. So I think we should not try to round it up because we've been to so many corners of amazing, interesting things to talk about. Maybe just say thank you for sharing your wisdom with me today and I'm looking forward to next time we talk thank you, cecilia and Sandra.

Sue Elvis: 1:55:23

As always, I enjoyed the conversations with you it's been amazing, thank you.