Learning About The Law

Today we got a wonderful opportunity to both tour the new (and absolutely gorgeous) Federal Building in in our city, but also to spend some time in one of the courtrooms, hearing from and asking questions of a judge there. A mom in our homeschool group had set this up (what an awesome idea!) and so with some reading about the Constitution under our belts, we headed to the courthouse this morning.

The kids got to sit in the counsel chairs or the jury box, and asked questions of the judge. While for the younger kids I'm sure it was fun to see the courtroom, many of the judge's answers might have been a bit too involved (Asa turned around at one point and mouthed "I'm bored" to me). But for Mackenzie, it was just perfect. Strangely, because at his age I don't think I really gave a whole lot of thought to my future career, he's already considering "three paths: doctor, lawyer, computer programmer" (according to Mackenzie). So this was a great opportunity for him to hear from someone in the field of law.

Myself, I was really impressed with the questions he asked (and also impressed that he always remembered to preface them with "Your honor,...") He asked about the judge's background, why he became a judge, whether he'd ever looked back on any of his decisions and wished he'd ruled differently, and a couple other thoughtful questions. I was also really really impressed with the time the judge took out of what must be a busy schedule to meet with the kids, and with his very thoughtful answers. For instance, one mom asked what one piece of advice he would give to kids. I was sure he was going to say something cliched about following the law, but he thought for a time and said that he thought more people should say "I'm sorry" when they do something wrong. That our society has become increasingly litigious, and that often people are discouraged from apologizing by lawyers who think it will open them up to a lawsuit, but that we should return to owning up to our mistakes and apologizing.

He also talked about an interesting civil liberties case he ruled upon, which ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court, PGA Tour vs. Martin. This case involved a disabled golfer who asserted that the PGA could not deny him access to a golf cart to ride between holes. It's worth visiting that link to the Wikipedia site just to read through the Supreme Court's dissenting opinion by Justice Scalia (which has been nominated as one of the funniest Supreme Court rulings of all time).

All in all, it was a terrific opportunity, and Mackenzie came away saying "I wish I could just sit with that judge and ask him questions all by myself for an hour!"

Connecting the Dots

When you unschool your kids, there's no timeline on the wall (unless of course they want one), no chronologically organized curriculum to walk them sequentially through the events of our world. It's really up to us as unschooling parents to help them connect the dots of all of the various experiences that they're exposed to and things that they learn or know. As Kathy commented on a previous post (which I completely agree with), unschooling is not unparenting, and in many ways it is harder than homeschooling. There's no roadmap, and it takes a person who is themselves interested and engaged in the world around them and inquisitive about everything to be an unschooling parent.

Some dot-connecting happened this last week around here. Seemingly disparate things come together, sometimes organized and sometimes by happenstance. One thing that we're doing as a family is watching all of the episodes of M*A*S*H consecutively. We're currently at the beginning of the 4th season. Of course, no TV show in history probably commented more on current events - either directly or obliquely through an analagous relationship between the Korean war of M*A*S*H timeframe and the Vietnam conflict, ongoing at the outset of the series. So a lot of questions come up, mostly about the Cold War, communism, how the U.S. became engaged in those conflicts and how that relates to our current world situation.

Last Friday, we happened to travel up to McMinnville to the new Space museum opened up at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. I have to say, I'm very impressed with both museums, probably the most outstanding that I've seen in this country outside of the Smithsonian's collection. Of course, the history of the space race is simply steeped in Cold War politics, and the space museum itself even houses a large piece of the Berlin Wall. So those topics of conversation that we've been discussing regarding M*A*S*H were re-examined in the light of the Space program. Also Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech was broadcast on continuous loop there, which led to discussions about Kennedy, his presidency, and his assissination. Coincidentally, we had also recently watched an episode of Red Dwarf (Tikka to Ride)that had the intrepid space bunglers landing in Dallas, Texas on that fateful day and inadvertantly causing Lee Harvey Oswald to fall out of the window of the Texas book depository. We had also just read several library books about Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and death, right around the time of his holiday and Obama's historical inauguration, and that all tied in as well.

If the kids watched, read, and experienced these things in an intellectual vacuum with no one helping them tie them together, the effect in their own head might be less than cohesive. But with all of our disparate interests, from the kids' loving to watch The Simpsons (which alluded to the grassy knoll and the Zapruder film in the episode Marge in Chains) to our field trip to our M*A*S*H episodes to our library books, they have a pretty comprehensive look at historical events. Of course, this is just one isolated area of history but discussions and connections like these come up constantly in the course of our unschooling lives, and that's how the dots all get connected, not via a curriculum but one at a time while living our lives. And as Kennedy himself says so eloquently, we may choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept.