I Am This Woman

I am — this close to signing up for two classes at the community college continuing ed program. In fact, I’m rather amazed at myself for even thinking I could do it, but the more I thought, the better I felt about it.

The classes? oil painting and piano.  !!!!

I might as well take a tatting class while I’m at it, and perhaps croquet lessons.

My rationale is that when I took photography back when I was teaching part-time, I was never busier but I also never felt more alive to be finally doing something that I’d always wanted to do. I’ve been saying for years that I “really should take piano lessons” and that when I was 50, I would take up oil painting.

Well, instead of the Italian class that I thought I was going to take (all of the times conflict with a previous commitment), I browsed the catalog and lo and behold, both oil painting and piano occur at times that are sensibly and ostensibly lunch hour and on a weekend.

Handwriting on the wall? or am I making my own destiny?

Did this start with teaching myself the three-needle bind-off and cabling? Can we blame this on knitting?

Maybe!

All I know is that creativity breeds more creativity. There is always success and failure when you branch out and try something new (I suck at knitting lace, but that will come at another time, perhaps), but it does something to your brain (wow, that’s real scientific), and encourages more risk-taking and creative impulses.

(Oh ok, what is going on in your brain is actually neural pathways being excited and warmed up, used to capacity, and even new neurons being mapped and formed. Use these pathways more often and, like a good dirt road, they will begin to be easier to drive over and more familiar shortcuts to places you really want to go. The somewhat more scientific explanation.)

So, maybe I’ll be painting, playing AND writing come fall semester!

Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.

The Waldorf/Steiner philosophy holds handwork in high regard for the development of the mind through motor control (ha ha, I almost wrote ‘development of the motor through mind control’ — Waldorf joke!). The theory is that handwork can guide the developing young mind as well as express some inner traits not seen in traditional learning methods. Teach a child to knit and you give them a peaceful way to contemplate abstract and spatial reasoning as well as mathematics and even sociology.

Handwork, such as knitting, sculpting, sewing, even gardening, washing dishes, kneading bread or chopping vegetables, gives the mind an immediate task to work on, while other areas of the brain are engaged. If the task can be accomplished by rote, the brain can also wander blithely off to mini-fantasy camp. (more…)

(36 of 50)

You know, even if we didn’t make it to all the “perfect” places in Austin, we made it TWICE to see my Knitting Guru, and that was solid gold.

She is a woman I met when I started attending the UU church and discovered that I was indeed a lifelong Unitarian but just didn’t know what to call it all those years. In 1995, I was pregnant and wanting connection, so I volunteered to teach Sunday School, after Guru J chatted me up and I discovered that we shared similar teaching philosophies.

I began to live for the days when she was able to stay after church talking and gabbling with me until we were embarrassingly the last folks to leave the parking lot, stomachs grumbling for lunch.

Eventually, I found my way to her house, which was filled with books and yarn and music and love. I soaked up the time with her, and mentioned that when I was 40 (which I regarded at the Age At Which Everything Would Be Over), I would take up knitting again. She looked at me a little askew and said, “why wait? I’ve been knitting forever since I was about 8 or 9.” Oh.

So I took up needles and tried again… and fast forward two years, and I have a baby in tow on the way to Australia on a lark, and my Make-Mistake-Snake on the needles on the plane. I completed this lovely snake toy for my child, having learned much about tension, switching from purl to knit and back again, dropping stitches, joining seams, slipping the first stitch on the row and counting each row each time to see that I did not drop a stitch.

Many thousands of conversations, games, visits, food, stories, books, yards of yarn and years later, and we were sitting around her table again tonight, talking a blue streak right up until I had to run out to dinner in order to get to sleep by 11 or so. And still we have conversations, knitting work and stories to finish and show/tell each other another time.

Tonight, I showed her my very favorite birthday present, a compilation art technique book that someone gave me thinking it wasn’t much of a gift, but it was better to pass it along than to toss it. OMG, both of us raved and drooled over it for an hour. She said, “Oh my, I LOVE THIS. It gives me SO many ideas!” EXACTLY! That’s the magic of it!

Such a treasured friendship. I am truly blessed, and to that she would say, “oh well, you know, it’s just what we do, isn’t it? No big deal. Glad to see you anytime!”

And later, my darling child said, “J is so sweet.” Why? I prompted. “Well, she just UNDERSTANDS what I’m into. She listens.”

Wow. Yes. That from a 12 year old who is priming himself for a typical but very non-conformist teenage (just like all teenagers). For both of us, we have a role model for very different (but really just the same) reasons. And that is just awesome.

Now all I can think of is what should I make her! I have a very good idea. Heh heh…

(31 of 50)

My son has been alternatively-schooled and unschooled 11 years, and in public school for not quite one year. He was in a non-traditional daycare and kindergarten (Waldorf-inspired and Waldorf-proper) for the first six years, then in a charter school for five years that emphasized community responsibility, consensus building, theme-driven multi-year curriculum and individual responsibility.

The one lead teacher he had for the last three years of the charter school was, as it turned out, NOT a good fit for him in that last year, though I didn’t see it at the time (so much other stuff going on). I know better now. My son is what he is, and needs the kind of learning environment that he needs, and a teacher who does not make reasonable accommodations IN A SMALL CHARTER SCHOOL is a bad thing.

We unschooled for six months, exploring together what he wanted to learn, but mostly decompressing from that bad teacher. Last October, I enrolled him in a public school in a move that startled me but seemed to be the right thing at the time. The decision was twofold: as his main educator, I was failing him. I couldn’t find the right combination of approach, topic, method or structure that suited him (including NONE), motivated him. Some dedicated home educators said that I didn’t give him enough time. But the need for change was immediate. And thus as his parent also, I was failing him.

However, when I thought about more and more and more structure, I realized that I did NOT want to replicate school at home. I had a job to attend to, and as flexible as working from home is, it does require one to actually work. The much-ballyhooed “working alongside each other” was not working for us, and having me as the teacher and parent was confusing and stressful for the lad.

Unschooling was not working (at least not fast enough for my son’s well-being); I did not want to do “school-at-home” (even brief attempts at workbooks and lesson plans were met with tears and anxiety). So, why not share the responsibility with others to be the teachers? Oh, hey, there is a system for that. It’s called “school.”

I wanted to see how he would respond in addition to seeing how he would do when pitted against the mainstream school of thought, standardized testing and all that rot. Sixth grade was an ideal place for that to happen because, in reality, sixth grade is pivotal developmentally but not academically. It was a great learning lab for all sorts of reasons. If it didn’t work out, then we could also go back to Plan A, or move on to Plan C, D, E, F…

Sixth grade worked out just fine. Not great, not awful. Just fine. As it should be. He got the full experience of social mores (public school really is a funny sort of island tribe!), teacher nonsense and teacher wonderfulness (esp. librarian wonderfulness!). He learned cool stuff in math and science, and has emerged as bright and skilled in most subjects (completely “meh” in mainstream art-teacher art). He has learned the game of homework completion and the consequences of not doing it and not caring about it. And because of the ungraded foundation he had in the non-traditional schools, he is not a little trick monkey working for The Grades. The numbers on his papers were like weather reports to him, and me, and we dressed and reacted accordingly.

And now we are moving on to seventh grade, and I’m going to take the same attitude: it will be a learning lab. We’ll see what works, and what doesn’t, and if it doesn’t work on a catastrophic level, then we have Plan C, D, E …

So anyone who says, “oh, I can’t imagine homeschooling,” “homeschooling is too hard,” “I bet you got sick of it” or “kids need to socialize with other kids” will get a polite smile from me. Ditto the folks (much more rarely) who say, “public school is evil,” “I would never do that to my child,” or “You’re caught up in the establishment, man!” They really have no clue what we were and are doing, and I don’t have time to fill them in. Join us in the journey and conversation, see all the shades and colors of learning, be a supporter and a partner. But heckling, however well-meaning, will be ignored.