For all you writerly types out there, I recently discovered the Just Write Blog Carnival. The latest edition, in which I am proud to be included, is good reading about different aspects of writing. And, I really like this.

Go to life, not school.

The carnival is ending the year with a smile on its face, thanks to all of the submitters and readers who have accessed it and helped it grow since the first edition in August. I just got Dayna Martin’s book–Radical Unschooling: A Revolution Has Begun–and read her words: “We are on the leading edge of new thought . . . [and] of parenting.” I hope this carnival is serving to promote that message.

So, fellow edge-dwellers, here is this month’s carnival.

Life at Home

Barbara Cameron presents Balance from her blog, Three Girl Pile-Up.

Samantha from ninth street east brings us Flags.

Out in the World

Sunnymama offers Parenting at Work from SunnyDayTodayMama.

Country Living comes from Samantha at ninth street east.

Inspirations

I find these words from Matt Hern, in Deschooling Our Lives, to be inspirational:

I know dozens and dozens of unschoolers and homelearners who come from every imaginable sector of society. Refusing schools is a real possibility for everyone, which in no way limits a person’s options for the future.

Dark Nights of the Soul

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. –F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m glad everyone is sleeping well; the unschooling must be working!

Encounters of the School-y Kind

You’re Not Really An Unschooler Til Somebody Calls The Cops comes to us from Angel Robinson at Roots and Wings.

The Stone Age Techie presents Freedom and Music.

Beginnings

SunnyDayTodayMama brings us La-la-la-lah!

Passages

A Few Updates comes from Jena at Yarns of the Heart.

Miscellaneous

Pamela Jorrick of Blah, Blah, Blog presents Self Directed Learning

Sara McGrath of Unschooling Family Life gives us It’s a wonderful life, unschooling.

And muddy bare feet presents Whole Life Learning.

***My head is bowed in thanks to all who contributed posts this month. As the holidays start to creep up on us, let’s skip over to February 1, 2010 (Wow! 2010!) for the next carnival. That means submissions will be due by January 31, 2010.

***Please help our unschooling friends in the UK by reading about why English home educators are being threatened and by signing this petition. Thank you!

***To contribute a post to the next edition of The Carnival of Unschooled Life — which will be here at The Expanding Life on February 1, 2010 — use the carnival submission form.

Thank you all and Happy New Year!

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has written a really wonderful essay called The Other Education. Although I often disagree with Mr. Brooks on politics, I couldn’t agree with him more on the ideas he writes about here.

The alternative education in my title is not charter schools or learning online; it is what Brooks calls “our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard.”  That sounds like unschooling to me.

While Brooks devotes his essay to the effect that Bruce Springsteen has had on his emotional education, the article made me think about how unschoolers learn: via connections, via random introductions to works of art that sometimes lead to in-depth, self-directed study that is intensely personal.

When I was about twelve years old, I had a friend named Leah, who lived in the charmingly named section of town called Strawberry Hill. I assume her neighborhood was once a field of wild strawberries, since, according to my mother, every part of the area I grew up in used to be a field of something or other:

Me: What was here when you were a little girl?
Mommy: (as if it was unimaginable that I did not know this) Oh, it was just a field. A big field.

But getting back to Leah, I loved going to her house because there was a record player,

1960s record player, for those unfamiliar with the object

and there were lots of 45’s.

This is a 45 record, which one played on a record player.

The 45 that caught my attention was I Am a Rock, a song written by Paul Simon and performed by Simon and Garfunkel.

I Am a Rock opened up a new “curriculum” for me, one that combined psychology, such elements of  poetry as alliteration, and the angst of young adulthood. The last thing in particular was a subject I would “study” throughout my teen years, using a “syllabus” of popular singer-songwriters.

I don’t  know if Leah ever knew it, but it got to the point where I accepted invitations to her house almost solely to listen to I Am a Rock. There was nothing wrong with Leah; she had just become the gateway to my “classroom.” And the benefits of my “class” had superseded whatever I was getting out of playing board games with her.

As Mr. Brooks writes, our alternative, unscholarly, serendipitous education–our unschooling–often comes as “a byproduct of the search for pleasure.” He also states that such learning is “indirect and unconscious.”

My goodness, lots of people, including Mr. Brooks, really do get the concept of unschooling, whether they realize it or not. Now if only they could un-get the school-y part and acknowledge that everything necessary can be learned in a personal way.

One last thing: if you read this post and didn’t know what a 45 was, you now owe it to yourself to learn that this thingie is what enabled one to play a 45 on a record player. (It was very upsetting when you couldn’t find a thingie because that meant you couldn’t listen to the 45.)

You press the yellow plastic thing into the center hole of the 45 before placing the 45 onto the record player.

What little girl doesn’t love her mother’s shoes? I noticed just the other day that I favor low-heeled, pointed-toe pumps for special occasions because that’s what my mother wore. And my daughter has special memories of traipsing around in her grandmother’s shoes; I think that’s something little girls are genetically programmed to do.

Sujean Rim has written a delightful book about a little girl and her mother’s shoes. It’s called Birdie’s Big-Girl Shoes, and it’s as adorable as a pair of patent leather Mary Janes with bows on the straps.

Ms. Rim used to be a shoe designer, so she is writing about what she knows. The illustrations in this book are gorgeous and whimsical, classy and cute. And they show as much knowledge and love of little girls as they do of stiletto heels.

The story is as sweet as Birdie herself. (Are those big eyes not precious?) No need to worry that this book will turn your little girl into a shoe fiend with hammertoes and bad posture: in the happy ending, Birdie decides she likes barefoot shoes the best (with painted toenails, of course).

How lucky I am that the children’s librarian in my library puts extra-beautiful picture books up on top of the shelves for display. Otherwise, I might never have seen Birdie’s Big-Girl Shoes, and my daughter and I (the 16-year-old and 51-year-old picture book lovers) would have missed out on an afternoon of smiley good feelings.

I hope Sujean Rim keeps writing children’s books. This one made me so happy!

A while ago, I posted A New Plan, and I meant what I wrote at the time. But, things change, sometimes very quickly. What changed for me as I trotted along the path of my new plan was that I missed blogging.

I discovered that I am a blogger at heart.

So, now I’m a two-blog woman, a blogamist instead of a bigamist. For unschooling and life in general, you can find me here, and for all things political you can find me there.

And I’ll be looking everywhere for things to blog about. Hope I see you!

And that’s the new new “new plan.”

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

I first discovered Cathy Thorne’s cartoons while Google Image searching for a cartoon to use on this blog. She graciously allowed me access to her web site of cartoons, and I fell in love with them.

Now, Cathy has informed me that she has put together a book, called Cartoons About Women (and the people who love and annoy them). I plan on buying it myself, and I think it would make a great holiday gift for some special, quirky, opinionated, lovable woman in your life.

You can buy the book here, and here’s a sample of Cathy’s work, in case you’re one of the poor souls who haven’t seen it before.

. . . to submit a post! The December 2009 edition will be here on December 1st, which means that I need your submissions by November 30th.

The categories are:

• Life at Home – What’s been going on in your unschool-y household?
• Out in the World — Where have you been lately and what happened while you were there?
• Inspirations – Who or what has inspired you in your choice to unschool?
• Dark Nights of the Soul – Do you ever have doubts about this “great adventure?”
• Encounters of the School-y Kind — Do you ever run into people who think you’re a radical/hippie/threat to American values because your kids don’t go to school?
• Beginnings — Imagine everything around you getting blurry and swirly as you go back to when your unschooling life began . . . and tell us about it.
• Passages — Tell us what your unschooled kid is doing now that she’s on her own.
• Miscellaneous — Tell us . . . anything about living an unschooled life that you want to share with other unschoolers!

Please visit here and click on the red “Submit” rectangle to send me your post. Merci vraiment!

Go to where the silence is and say something.
–Amy Goodman

I’m sure that that Amy Gooodman of Democracy Now meant something having to do with social justice when she said that, about finding a wrong that needs to be righted and speaking out about it. But I have found a way to relate her excellent words to to unschooling.

It’s pretty simple:

1. Live your life, not the life somebody else tells you you have to live. In that way, you will achieve silence–the silence of your soul, in which you realize what it is you want and need to do.
2. Use your natural mind’s abilities to bring yourself to whatever that thing is.

The part that most people never get past is getting to “where the silence is.” But people have been getting there for centuries. Yogis have done it, monks have done it, saints have done it, artists have done it, scientists have done it.

Even in this world filled with meaningless noise and the clutter of over-consumption, you can do it, too. And then, you can “say something.” You can say your unique, unprocessed something.

Isn’t that what self-actualization really means? And isn’t self-actualization the goal of unschooling? The goal of living? I think so.

I’ve had a longing for months now, to reread a classic novel. I stand in front of my bookshelves, looking at the spines of paperbacks from the 1970s, asking myself, Tess of the D’ Urbervilles? Sense and Sensibility? As I Lay Dying?

I think I’m craving a classic because real life has been a lot about minutiae lately. My husband’s play and doctor appointments and food shopping–life’s been about how to fit them all in and cook dinner, too. There hasn’t been much stirring language.

But wait–there is always stirring language. Just yesterday, I told my husband I couldn’t live without him. And my daughter and I rhapsodize about the beauty of our cat and the antics of the birds and squirrels every single day.

Until I can make a decision about what to pull off that shelf–Tender is the Night? The Grapes of Wrath? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?–I must remember to notice the classic things happening right here: the enduring theme of life and death, the riddle of identity, the struggle to be pure in a corrupt society, the mysteries of love, and the ever-shifting boundaries of past and present.

Our lives are books, too, you know.

Today is a day set aside for honoring war veterans.  Every war veteran has already received the biggest honor he or she could ever get: surviving the war. Every war veteran has also received the biggest curse he or she could ever get: surviving the war.

I was never one to organize kids into groups that sent toothbrushes and greeting cards to soldiers fighting overseas. I’m glad other mothers did, and do. My focus with my child was always on the casualties of war. I discussed, and still discuss, these kinds of things:

• War is hell.
• Innocent people die in wars.
• Soldiers suffer physical, psychological, and emotional damage as a result of wars.
• War devastates countries where people live.
• Real soldiers are very much like toy soldiers, being manipulated by others.

The best thing we can do for veterans, in my opinion, is to end wars. I dislike the fact that so many historical periods are defined by wars. When my daughter was enamored of the American Girl historical fiction series, we would refer to Felicity as the “Revolutionary War girl” and Molly as the “World War II” girl.

I do not think of my daughter as the “War on Terror” girl, and neither does she.  I do not think of myself as the “Vietnam War girl.”

I hope all the veterans can be proud of their service today, and then go on to think of themselves as something other than a war-related person. I thank them for doing a job I never want to do, but I see them as more than soldiers. I see them as fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and cousins and house painters and truck drivers and singers and business owners and cat lovers and baseball players.

And peacemakers.

Crowds including children dancing and carrying flags of Allied nations during a spontaneous celebration of Armistice Day & the end of World War I. Location: Paris, France. Date taken: November 11, 1918.