Hippo Love

For many years now, Mackenzie has absolutely adored hippos, even going so far as to have two hippo-themed birthday parties, sponsoring hippos through World Wildlife Federation, and getting an "Adopt-A-Hippo" for Christmas. The dresser in his room has been dubbed the Hippo Shrine. So he was overjoyed to find this wonderful video about a very special "House Hippo". Enjoy!

Measuring Up

Today Asa told me that if Mary Poppins measured me with her tape measure, it would say "practically perfect in every way".

High praise indeed from a daughter who only five minutes before had been giving me the evil eye about emptying the dishwasher, LOL.

Eid-e Shoma Mobarak (Happy New Year)

All over the world today, Persian people are celebrating Norooz (also spelled NowRuz & NoRuz in English characters). Timed to coincide with the first moment of spring (literally, it took place here at 4:44 am Pacific Time, but is different all over the world), this is the Persian New Year. Celebrations go for two weeks and include many activities, starting on the last Wednesday of the outgoing year, called Chahar Shanbeh Suri. On the evening of the last Wednesday, Persians light small bonfires and jump over them shouting:

Give me your beautiful red color
And take back my sickly pallor!

They also set up a Haft Seen, or table with seven items that begin with the letter “S” (Haft means seven, and Seen means “S” in the Persian alphabet).

The festivities end on the thirteenth day of the new year, called Sizdah Bedar, (Sizdah means thirteen and Bedar means outdoors). To escape the bad luck associated with the number thirteen, families leave their homes to head outside for a picnic, literally entire cities like Tehran empty out into parks and any scrap of land (including traffic medians) to picnic on this day.

This year, just before NoRooz, my sister Marisa and my brother-in-law Nickrooz (who is from Iran) journeyed down from Seattle to our house. In addition to celebrating Marisa's 40th (OMG!) birthday (can my lil' sis really be 40???) they put on a wonderful presentation for our homeschool group and neighbors on Nick's home country of Iran and on Norooz.

We started off with a Persian potluck, with every family cooking and bringing a dish from recipes my sister mailed me. I tackled "Shollehzard" or a rice pudding made with saffron, rose water, and decorated with pistachios and cinnamon (here, my sis and brother-in-law show the gorgeously decorated pudding, almost too pretty to eat!). The food was awesome, such a great idea to get us in the mood of an entirely different culture. Persian cooking is very distinctive, and my kids have gotten used to sampling some of uncle Nickrooz's dishes (his "green rice" has been a perpetual favorite).


After eating, they showed slides from their two trips back to Iran, showing the kids everything from markets and roads to ski slopes and playgrounds. They had put together a terrific presentation that really gave a picture of life in Iran, which is a bit different from the kinds of things you see in the media about Iran on a daily basis. The kids asked lots of questions. I think they were most impressed with the fact that the bazaar in Tehran is 12 miles long!


All in all it was a wonderful way to get a peek into a different culture, something you might not be exposed to every day. I've been grateful to have my brother-in-law Nick in our lives, because I have learned many things myself about Iran that I would've never known. It was nice to be able to share that with our friends and have a great evening together as well.

Curiosity Required

Asa just bought a stone at the market the other day with these words inscribed on it:

The life you live is the lesson you teach.

She picked that one out after looking through a whole basket of stones with new-agey inspirational sayings. It strikes me as an interesting choice for a nine-year-old, since kids this age are usually looking more inward than outward. But it also strikes me as an excellent phrase to take to heart as an unschooling parent. In fact, it could be the credo of the unschooling parent.

I was out on a run the other day when I passed a mother and two kids. They were by the side of the canal looking at a nutria (a large rodent that looks like a cross between a beaver and a rat, an introduced and invasive species I might add). The kids were asking the mom what kind of animal it was, and she replied that she didn't know. "But that's what you said last time!" one of the kids wailed. "Why don't you know now?" It's an excellent question, and one that cuts right to the heart of the biggest requirement for an unschooling parent: curiousity.

The life you live is the lesson you teach. If you are not living a life of intellectual curiosity, it may be hard for your kids to find the impetus to be interested in more than just their own small little universe - whatever that might be. Or worse, by not being open and actively engaged with their own curiosity, you may inadvertantly shut it down. I imagine the young kids of the mother by the canal may eventually stop asking such pesky questions.

In school, many of us remember that asking too many questions was penalized, either by exasparated teachers or more typically by the other students. A kid with their hand perpetually up is, more or less, frowned upon or outright reviled. You pick up unsavory knicknames if you don't learn to stifle that curiosity, and most kids learn to do just that. By 5th grade or so, they're way too "cool" to care.

In many ways, unschooling is easier than the sit-at-the-kitchen-table variety of homeschooling. Heaven knows, I know I'm not personally cut out to be the parent who enforces 10 pages in the workbook each day. But in many ways, it is tougher. Without a curriculum to follow and standards to be checked against, the unschooling parent can find themselves feeling like they are just drifting along and that their kids aren't "interested in anything". But if we take the time to engage in whatever our kids are doing, we discover that their interests can take us all kinds of places. My son's now four-year love of hippopotami came from a video game he used to like to play called "Impossible Creatures". We've since watched hippo specials on the Discovery channel, read hippo books, adopted hippos through the Nature Conservancy, he has a hippo shrine in his room, and a career as a wildlife biologist protecting hippos and their habitat is on his list of life's possible paths.

By having our own interests, our kids are often drawn into worlds that they might not venture into otherwise. I check out books and videos from the library that answer my own curiousity. Recently for me, that's been world religions and religious art, which meant National Geographic videos Inside Mecca and Inside the Vatican, books about Caravaggio, the Catholic Saints, Giotto, etc. Sometimes the kids ask what I'm reading and I summarize or read them excerpts. Sometimes over breakfast I read them a poem or show them a painting from whichever book I have at my place at the table. They almost always watch whatever video I'm watching. We discuss, we think about how what we've seen or read fits with our own experiences, and often these discussions bring us to more questions that we want answered.

For any one thing that kids or parents are engaged in, a thousand possible things spiral off. Every question that asked is an open door to walk through into unknown worlds. The internet and the library are our best friends in making sure that we follow up on things that they want to know about, and that their curiosity and interest are rewarded with finding answers and more information. Often, the answers lead to even more questions and we're off on another path of learning.

A Miscellany of Days

It's winter as usual around our place (drawing towards the end of winter with today's little taste of sunshine), and that means we've been filling our homeschooling days with lots of indoor activities, and getting outside whenever we can to get our gardens ready.

A sampling of what we've been up to:

Asa has been learning how to milk goats from the folks that we buy our goats milk from. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they also have seven new puppies on their farm, so every Saturday has been a combined goat milk/puppy petting extravaganza. Who can resist brand new puppies!


Mackenzie loves to hang out by the library bookshelf in our living room. But the problem around here is that with four cats, whenever you lie down with a good book, you become a convenient pillow for a feline.

We took a tour of the library with our homeschooling group and got to watch the robotic book sorter in action. We found out that on average, our main library receives about 6,500 books turned in each day. For a town of 130,000 people, that's impressive! I think we probably are single-handedly responsible for about 1,000 of those books. As homeschoolers, I can't think of any resource more valuable to us than our wonderful public library.

Whenever the weather breaks for a little bit, we head out to the enormous leaf pile for more raking. We're trying to get a good thick layer of leaves covering the area that we're going to use next year to expand our vegetable garden.

Mackenzie has asked me to teach him algebra. I think that's a blog post in and of itself - me, sitting at the kitchen table, teaching the kids stuff out of a textbook, just like real homeschoolers do!

We have our karate test coming up this Friday. The kids are testing for their next rank of orange belt. I'm testing for my (ulp!) brown belt!

And most excitingly, my brother-in-law Nickrooz and sister Marisa (known to all of us in the family as Meese, my name for her when I was three) are coming down from Seattle this weekend. Nickrooz is going to do a presentation for some of the families from our homeschool group about his native country Iran. We're going to do a potluck with Persian dishes, and he and Marisa have some slides from their last two trips to Iran. With Iran being constantly in the news, I think many people don't know much about the Iranian people and the country itself, beyond a few sound bites about nuclear weapons or Islamic extremism. Iran is a country with a culture that goes back millenia and I am so glad to have Nick as my brother-in-law, I have learned so much about his homeland! I'm excited to share that with other homeschoolers and also of course to have Nick and Marisa here and to celebrate her birthday.

And On The Subject of Caravaggio

Here's a funny kid quote...

I had the book of Caravaggio's paintings open on the dining room table as I was reading his biography and Asa started flipping through them, which led to long discussions of what most of the pictures were about. The longest by far was on his painting of the "Penitent Magdalen" because Asa wanted to know why this woman was so sad, what her story was, etc. I tried to explain as best I could what the painting was trying to represent about Mary Magdalen, but I had never discussed the term "prostitute" with my nine year old before, so that took a little deft explaining.

After which, she came out with:

"Well then, when she wants to become a mother she'll be able to really easily, because she'll have practiced a lot."

That one definitely had me almost ROTFLOL!

Book Review: M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio

M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio

Some books are so masterfully written that you almost don't have to be interested in the subject matter at all to get drawn into the story. I have to admit that despite having an art degree, I hadn't given much more than a passing thought to the artist known as Marisi, Moriggia, Merigi, Michelangelo Merisi, and simply M from Caravaggio. I've seen a couple of his paintings and they are quite stunning, but I didn't know enough about them or about him to feel as fascinated about them as I should've. Now I wish I could go in person and see each one of them, such is the depths to which this book pulls you into M's life and his art.

Part history, part in-depth art analysis, part detective mystery, this book is a just plain fascinating look into the M's world: the Rome and Italy of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the world of the Inquisition, corrupt popes, the Counter-Reformation, the world that ordered Galileo to stand trial for heresy for insisting that the earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. Into this world comes M, a wild and woolly swordsman who got into frequent squabbles and eventually murdered a rival in the streets of Rome, a lover of nubile young boys, an intellectual and a painter of an extraordinary and often shocking new style. Though many of his paintings were commissioned by the rich and powerful or hung in prominent chapels, others were rejected by the church powers or removed from view before the public ever set eye on them.

The author, Peter Robb, does a wonderful job of drawing us into M's world, of helping us understand how and why his artwork was so powerful in its time, and of sorting through the often scant documents and testimony as to what really happened to M in the various stages of his life. My only complaint is that there's very few plates in this book. As the author takes you into each one of M's paintings in depth, I found it necessary to go check a large-format book out from the library with good quality color plates of each of the paintings being discussed. That really helped me see in detail what the author was describing.

Now I wish I could go back to Italy just to visit each of the chapels and museums that house these works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Like any subject that one learns about in depth, it becomes more fascinating the more you know and understand. It's also funny how it awakens your eye to the particular subject. Since reading this book, I've seen several images of Caravaggio's paintings that wouldn't have stood out to me before. Last night we were watching the National Geographic special on Mecca, and they showed one of M's interpretations of Isaac and Abraham in the video. Before, it would've been just another illustration but now I've spent pages and pages in analysis just of this one painting, so the image is so much more meaningful.

In short, if you have any interest in art, history, or just like a great non-fiction read, pick this book up. Be prepared to become immersed though, it took me quite a few weeks to thoroughly absorb all this book has to offer.

Italy Day 8: Part 1:: Biking from Perugia to Castiglione del Lago

This is one of a series of entries from my travel diary of our Italy trip last fall. This entry is from Day 8, September 22, 2009, our second day of cycling:

9/22/08: Perugia to Castiglione del Lago: 25 Miles
I just got out of one of the best showers of my life. I think the shower alone was worth the hotel room. Tons of hot water, big fluffy towels (which are not that common in Italy, where thinner non-fluffy towels are more common). After 25 miles of hill country biking and all afternoon exploring around town and climbing the castle with the kids, I was really ready for a good shower.

This was a terrifically beautiful day - fair and warm with big puffy clouds and a nice breeze. We left a little late after situating all of the gear for the first time in the trailers. Going down off the big hill of Perugia was fun and a little scary, especially when we rocketed into a tunnel, still wearing our sunglasses! Back down at the train station, we stopped for groceries at the Coop (pronounced Co-ope) store. The bikes attracted the first of many onlookers, and older gentleman who only spoke Italian and French. This was a bonus for me, since French was the first foreign language I learned, it's often the case that the first word that pops into my head when I'm reaching for the Italian word is French anyways. Between the two languages we managed to have quite a conversation about the bikes and our route to Firenze (Florence).

Despite the fact that drivers here are fast and zip in and out of lanes like crazy while using their horns profusely, they have been everything from polite to incredibly enthusiastic to us. Even when we are totally in the way, no one has honked at us except in a friendly "beep beep" way with a wave or a thumbs-up. One family pulled up by us and enthused in rapid Italian saying "Complimento" over and over. I have not felt nervous or afraid on the bikes here, despite no bike lanes and the closeness of cars, trucks, and buses. I find myself wishing that American drivers could all take a crash course in Italian cycling hospitality!

Our route from Perugia to Castiglione del Lago went southwest over some rolling hills. The sign for hills here looks like, well, a pair of breasts, and quickly earned the knickname "Boobs Ahead" from the Biking Clevenger Family. Soon there were familiar groans when we spotted another Boobs Ahead sign, knowing that meant another hill to climb. Most of them have been mild and rolling hills though, nothing too serious yet. We turned north toward a small town called Mugnano, and off of the main road.

We stopped for a picnic lunch in the shade of some olive trees by the side of the road. After lunch we set off again, went past Mugnano and some fields with grains and sunflowers, then up and over a small pass. From the top of the pass, we could see Lake Trasimeno below us. There was also a small shrine with the Madonna and Jesus at the top of the pass. We have seen several of these soo far, usually at the summit of a pass or hill. Maybe she watches over cyclists offering up their prayers to make it up the hills.

We descended to the road along the shore and followed it along the south and western ends of the lake, stopping to take some photos at a small park along the way. A nice person offered to take a family photo of us, which shows how pretty this spot was. From the park, we could see the town of Castiglione del Lago to the north, jutting out into the lake on a promontory of rock, with the castle at the very tip standing over the lake. It looked a long ways off in the distance, but that's our destination for today.

On the way into town, we passed this place:
and I assured the family that I had not booked us into "Casa del Mutilato" for our night's stay. We reached the old walled part of the city, and the bells of the church began to toll solemnly over and over. As I walked up the main street into the Centro to find our hotel, people in dark clothing began to file out of the church bearing flowers and then a casket. We waited until the funeral procession wound away down the street before we walked the bikes up to our hotel.

Our hotel, La Torre, looks wonderful. It is very close to the castle which has the kids excited of course. The owner (Signore Lucarelli, here in this photo with Wayne and the kids) has been extremely helpful and friendly, especially considering that the hotel is on many floors with not much room to store such large bicycles and trailer/suitcases. As Wayne did some maintenance on the squeaky trailer wheels, a small crowd again grew around the bikes, including a family from Germany who asked a lot of questions about the bikes and our itinerary. Signore Lucarelli found us a place in a courtyard across the street to safely store our bikes and trailers, so we are all settled in and ready to see the town and castle. Castiglione Del Lago literally means "castle of the lake", and one reason we wanted to come here is the beautifully picturesque castle at the end of town here. The kids are very excited to go explore!
Continued in part 2...

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.

Italia Day 7: Biking Side Trip to Assisi

This is one of a series of entries from my travel diary of our Italy trip last fall. This entry is from Day 7, September 21, 2009, our first day of cycling:

9/21/08 Perugia to Assisi and back: 30 miles

Today we decided to ride the bikes to Assisi without pulling the trailers, just to shake everything down before we head out tomorrow towing everything along. We didn't really have a route picked out since we didn't plan on biking this part, but between the maps I brought along and the GPS we muddled through, only hitting a couple of snags along the way near the big freeway because there's only a few places that you can cross it.



After we descended down the enormous hill that Perugia sits on (knowing we'd have to come back up - gulp!) we could easily see Assisi on the hill across the valley. There was a headwind most of the way and only one short but steep hill in between. Between towns along the way were olive groves and fields of sunflowers that were already drying now in late Sepgember. You could imagine how beautiful they'd be in full bloom. We decided not to try to bike up the steep road to Assisi but parked our bikes at a parking lot at the bottom where they leave the tour busses and we walked up.

Assisi was a beautiful little town, lots of small picturesque streets and lovely views in every side out over the Umbrian country below. We went to the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, which is a fascinating place. I wish I could've taken photos inside but it is a very holy place and no photography allowed. The basilica is built on a hill on two levels: an upper basilica and a lower basilica, right over the top of each other. It was begun in 1228, immediately after St. Francis was canonized and only a couple of years after he died. Pope Gregory IX himself laid the cornerstone. St. Francis' tomb is here beneath the church and is the aim of a steady stream of pilgrims.

To me, this is the one Catholic saint that I was very interested in visiting. Patron saint of nature and of animals, Italy's first poet, and founder of the Franciscan order, he went against the overbearing opulence of his day and lived in poverty working with lepers and preaching to common folk. He wrote in his own Umbrian dialect, not in Latin, so that common people could understand his words. The kids and I read several books about St. Francis including Brother Sun, Sister Moon: The Life and Stories of St. Francis and his own hymn set to pictures, Cancticle of the Sun. The basilicas are frescoed with scenes of his life and death, including one of him receiving the stigmata which looked like laser beams were shooting him from heaven - that required a fair bit of explaining to the kids, who were not familiar with the idea of stigmata and were wondering why God would want to shoot poor St. Francis. On the lawn outside the basilica, the word PAX is spelled out in clipped hedges and inside is a big wooden sign painted with the word Peace in many different languages.



After visiting the basilicas, we stopped for pizza in a small place on an empty street, watched nuns go in and out of a convent up the road, and watched the local dogs, cats, and pigeons roaming the city. The kids have taken more photos of pigeons than anything else in Italy. Their photo albums will look like "The pigeons of Rome. The pigeons of Perugia. The pigeons of Assisi. The pigeons of Firenze"

After wandering the lovely and mostly empty streets of Assisi, in the afternoon we biked back to Perugia. We knew it would be quite a climb back up to the town and we ended up pushing the bikes up the steepest parts, but it was fine. It took us about four hours total to go the 30 miles round trip including all of our stops and detours.

Tonight we ate dinner at a little place down the street from our hotel. Eating "early" (7:30) here has the advantage of a nearly empty restaurant. We ended up next to a couple from Calgary who were very nice and we chatted with them for quite awhile. And now with plenty of food, I'm feeling tired and ready to turn in. 30 miles on the tandems feels more like 40 or 50 by myself (especially with pushing up those hills).

Italia Day 6: On To Perugia

This is one of a series of entries from my travel diary of our Italy trip last fall. This entry is from Day 6, September 20, 2008:



The second panic moment of our trip was today. I guess every adventure has to have a panic attack or two. Our first came the morning of our flight from Portland when Wayne called the airline and heard that our flight to Rome was cancelled. As it turns out, only the part that originated in Texas was cancelled due to the hurricane there, and of course we arrived in Rome as scheduled.

Today started out with a flurry of activity and lots of trains and stations. First we rolled our luggage over a thousand cobblestones up to Roma's Termini station, about a mile and a half from our apartment (map above for route of the Walk of the Clattering Suitcases). Then it was the train to the airport to get our luggage, the train back to Termini, and then the train to Perugia. One reason to learn some of the language of the countries you travel to: we had to help some Americans who were unable to read the train schedule because they didn't know that "Bin." (for binario) meant the track number. Train schedules here are great - very straightforward for the most part once you get the hang of it.

Today's moment of panic came on the train from Roma to Perugia. We had asked the conductor if there was one stop or two stops for Perugia, because one of our maps said two. The conductor said that there was only one stop for Perugia, so it caught us by surprise when the train stopped at "Perugia San Giovanni", which did not look like a major station at all. Wayne already had his GPS out and it was saying that we were only a couple of miles from our hotel, so all of a suddent at this whistle-stop station we had to make a split-second decision to throw all of our heavy bike-laden suitcases off the train and disembark.

As we debated this plan, the whistle blew and the train started rolling again. Now the GPS was telling us that we were getting further and further from our hotel. The train maps were totally ambiguous, seeming to say that only the smaller regional trains went to Perugia San Giovanni. According to one map, if we missed the right stop for Perugia the train wouldn't stop again until it reached Cortona (which we should be hitting on our third day of biking!) So we were all panicking a bit at that, wondering how we would get back to our hotel. As it turned out, all was fine and the train stopped at the main Perugia station next. From there, we lugged our suitcases onto a bus and up the very very steep hill to our hotel.

The Hotel Iris is great and our room is very nice. They also have the nicest receptionist ever. She asked Asa to help her translate some email and help with her English (which was great to start with), so Asa got to sit with her down at the front desk while Wayne started putting the bikes together in our room. The hotel is very pretty, as is the town. Asa got this photo with her favorite receptionist on her own camera. She was really sad to leave this hotel, everyone there was so friendly and helpful to us. Especially as we were about to set up our bikes in their hallway. They were really great.

Today's moment of humor came when Mackenzie called out from the bathroom something about "these foot washers are great!!". "Foot washers?" we asked... "yeah, come see!" Well, you can just guess what he was washing his feet in. Or if you've never seen one, this is what's known as a bidet. And...um... it's not for washing feet. Although, having one large pre-teen boy, I have to say that a foot washer would come in mighty handy!

With feet nice and clean, the kids and I set out to explore the town while Wayne assembled bicycles. The town is so steep that you take these underground escalators to get from our hotel to the town center. The escalators go through this amazing underground city. Apparently in 1540, Pope Paolo III captured the city and to punish the rebellious Perugians, he built the Rocca Paolina (his papal fortress) right over their houses, churches, stores, etc. using their buildings as his foundation. So although the fortress is now gone, the underground ancient city still remains beneath it, and you can take these escalators up through it and wander the ancient streets, all underground now. It is amazingly cool, the kids and I were blown away! Poor Wayne missed this as he was still putting bicycles together.

The kids and I went up into the old walled part of the city on top of the hill, looked around and went into the local church and of course got some gelato. It's a bit windy and cold though, so we wandered back through the underground city to our hotel. There we had the most wonderful dinner at the restaurant at the bottom of the hotel. Just excellent food, yumm.

Wayne was the hero of the day, assembling four suitcases of assorted metal pieces into two fully-functioning tandem bicycles. Tomorrow: biking to Assisi!

Unschooling and Testing

Issues about taking state-mandated tests have come up on several lists and discussions I've had in the last couple of weeks. I typed this up about how we've dealt with the state-mandated testing for homeschoolers in our state, and thought it might be worth sharing in case other unschoolers have these issues to deal with. In general, I don't find testing to be a terribly onerous burden on homeschoolers since in some states you have to present quarterly portfolios or have your homeschooling overseen by a teacher or something like that. I'd rather have our kids be able to be educated however we feel is appropriate and then just deal with a day of testing very two year as opposed to other hoops that we might have to jump through.

As far as the testing goes, I wish we didn't have to do it, of course. But I also believe that in life there are things you have to do that you wish you didn't have to, and at some point, that's just the reality of things. So we talked with the kids about the testing, about how it's one day every two years that we just have to do in order to have our whole wonderful unschooling lives the other 729 days out of those two years. We talked with them about what the test would be like, and offered to get some practice tests if they wanted to do them. No pressure to say yes, just an offer. The kids were interested. We actually had fun going over the practice tests together, I photocopied a ton of bubble sheets and we filled them in in crazy ways, but then I showed them how to make sure you were filling in the answer for the right question too. We read through the questions together and had fun picking out the wrong answers that are planted there to make you want to choose them ( like if the right answer is 321, they'll have 312 as a wrong answer).

It was also really kind of fun just seeing all the stuff the kids knew how to do - like Mackenzie knew how to do averages because we had a Clevenger Family Great Rootbeer Tasteoff one night where we tasted 6 different kinds of rootbeers and each gave them a star rating and then we averaged the star ratings to come up with our family's overall favorite. And he knew measuring from when we built the chicken coop, and so on. I pointed out how they had learned these things from their everyday life and isn't unschooling cool?

We just treated it like a big game. On test day, we made sure to go to the park and out for ice cream afterwards, to have something to look forward to. Basically in our unschooling house it's just treated as a hoop we have to jump through. We try to make it as fun as possible, but acknowledge that sometimes in life you just gotta do what you gotta do and enjoy the rest. I never showed him the results and he never asked to see them. Asa takes the 3rd grade test this year and Mackenzie finished the 5th grade test last year. We'll do it the same way for any future tests.

And one thing I've noticed is that my kids' reaction to tests is not the same as mine. They own their own journey and its very different than mine when I was a kid, simply because they are unschooled. They have no pressure to perform on the tests, the tests can be something that they simply experience, the tests don't define them or who they are and their self-esteem is not tied to any outcomes. This has been a nice discovery for me, so I don't worry so much about the testing like I did at the first.

IDOLizing Our Time Together

One thing I absolutely love, love, LOVE about unschooling is how the kids interests often draw me in to things I wouldn't necessarily seek out on my own. Recently, Asa has gotten very into watching American Idol. Now this isn't a show I would normally turn on. I've come across it a few times in the last years, but always just kept on switching by. Asa is, of course, our resident diva, and it's a rare moment that she's not singing. So American Idol is right up her alley and she's been known to ask more than once how many more years until she can audition (the picture of her below is from her 5th birthday, and now that she's going on 10, she's only got 6.5 years to go)

So this season, I said I'd watch it with her from start to finish. We just got unlimited texting on our family's cell phones this year too, so Mackenzie pointed out that we could even vote this year. So we made popcorn and got comfortable a couple of weeks ago and settled down to watch the auditions together. I don't think Mackenzie would've turned this show on in a million years but he has even gotten to look forward to watching.

One thing that's been very immediately apparent is that there are a lot of people out there without very much self awareness at all. And a good handful more who could use to learn a few things about graciousness and humility. I told Asa that if she ever goes on the show, I hope to heaven that she's one of those people who are not only great singers (of course) but who don't go in with the world's cockiest attitudes like the show owes them something, but with a positive spirit and a graciousness, whether they get picked or not.

I'm looking forward to seeing the people that have been picked and how they work their craft of music, and looking forward to learning more about this profession that my daughter so aspires to. I can't wait to see who moves on and who drops off and the ins and outs and whys of it all. And I wouldn't be so interested if one of my kids wasn't. There have been so many subjects like this - whether its Mallet steam locomotives or Celtic fiddle playing or robotics that my kids have drawn me into. The great thing about being an unschooling parent is that you're learning all the time right alongside your kids.

A Rose By Any Other Name

What is it about the term "unschooling" that causes people to covet it so much? So much that they are willing to wrap it, like a blanket over whatever homeschooling philosophies they might embrace and try to make it their own?

Our local "unschooling" list has erupted into fevered discussions over the term "unschooling" due to my offhand comment when someone posted a recommendation for a flashcard memorization website to the group, that such a thing really wasn't all that useful on an "unschooling" list. I mean, would you post a Monsanto pesticide recommendation on an organic gardening list? The flashcard mentality could hardly be more toxic to unschooling.

Some quotes from the website that was posted:

"The purpose of electronic flashcards is to enable students to master a large mass of course content."

"all courses of study, whether it be mathematics, social studies, science, or language arts, are reducible to tiny fact units "

"The system works very well for 98% of the content taught in schools, from preschool to graduate school."

I especially like that second quote about everything being reduced to tiny memorizable fact units. Yeah, that REALLY fits with an unschooling philosophy, doesn't it???

Of course, if you try to defend any definition of unschooling that remains relatively true to the nature of the philosophy, you're being "elitist" and "non-inclusive". Would it be equally uninclusive to say that eating meat "isn't vegetarian" or praying to the god Baal isn't a "Catholic practice"? Terms or labels only have meaning and usefulness when they have a definition. If I call myself an auto mechanic because I know how to knit sweaters, does that term hold any meaning whatsover? Why not just release all words in the English language to mean whatever they want to. That way if I said "I'm cooking pizza for dinner" my husband could equally take that to mean "I'm taking a train to Guatemala". Wouldn't communication cease to exist without definitions and meanings?

So for the record, unschooling, by definition, means "child-led learning". Not flashcards, not memorization, not grade levels, not curriculums, not a world divided into subjects and reduced to factoids. If that's not what you're doing, fine! More power to you! If you use an eclectic approach and you're totally happy with it and your kids are thriving: GREAT! But please, just don't call it unschooling.

Photos From Robotics Regionals

For those of you following this year's robotics odyssey, the photos from our day at the Regional Tournament are now up on our robotics team blog: Veni Vidi Roboti.

This Sunday is the state tournament, so we're practicing every day and getting everything ready for that. The kids are really excited and probably more than a little nervous, but I know they'll do just great.

And That's No Hogwash

So today I got to hear this about my daughter: "She's the kind of student every teacher dreams about having in a class."

Which is kind of ironic, given that this is only the 2nd classroom type of class she's ever taken in her life.

I remember when the kiddos were little and people were so worried that unschooling was going to prepare my kids for a life of freakish outsiderness, that if they ever wanted to take a class in something, they'd be completely unable to do things like sit still, pay attention, raise their hands. Because goodness knows, you have to start learning how to do that kind of thing in kindy you know, or you'll never learn it.

Turns out it's all a bunch of hogwash, or codswallop, both of which are excellent words to toss out frequently. My favorite teacher ever in school used to shout "Hogwash" at the top of his voice whenever a student got a wrong answer. He also used to twirl his eyebrows into strange little pointy things and he reminded me of Frank Morgan, who played five roles in the Wizard of Oz including of course the Wizard and the gatekeeper of the Emerald City.

But I digress. I guess my point, if I happened to have one, was that the things we think are necessary to start drilling into kids' heads at a young age really aren't. And at any point if they really want to do something they'll learn whatever they need to know in order to accomplish that thing. And chances are, since they want to be learning it at that point, it will come effortlessly as well. No hogwash there.

Enter the Crazy Week

One week from today until the robotics team goes to the State championships. I've got a million details going through my head, and the kids are getting excited. They've polished up a couple of programs and added a couple more, added a few details to their research project presentation, and now it's just down to making pit table decorations, costumes, and stuff to hand out to other teams. Fun stuff! But for me, it includes making sure I've got all the paperwork, directions, hotel reservations, bins, boxes, and stuff ready to go. Enter the crazy week!

Life, Unschooled

I realized the other day that this started out to be my unschooling blog, but that I rarely write about unschooling anymore as a subject. Come to think of it, I don't really think about it that much either. Rather, as time has gone by, it has gotten more and more normal just to live our lives - all four of us in this family - pursue our passions, and not really think that much about schooling in any sense. When the kids are younger and unschooling is newer as a concept, I think there's a tendency to be on the lookout for times that "learning" is occurring, to maybe have some anxiety that the right kinds of learning will occur by the right magic milestones, and to make sure to provide the right kinds of educational opportunities. As the years roll by though, it becomes plainly evident that such vigilance isn't needed. The kids are always busy, always pursuing so many different and exciting opportunities, learning becomes self-evident and not something to be chased in circles like a dog with its tail.

But since I know a lot of folks read this blog who are in various stages of unschooling, beginning to unschool, thinking about unschooling, or thinking unschooling is just plain crazy, maybe its time for a little update on how all of that works now that the kids are (ulp!) 12 and 9.

So here's what we've been up to lately. Firstly, robotics is still on the front stage since the team is going to the State competition in 10 days. So that means team practices for about 5 or so hours a week. Plus, Mackenzie has been working on one really tough program and spending extra hours on that. He put in three hours today on that program alone, and with the help of team member Tiff they finally got it completely debugged and working perfectly. Since this program uses variables, timers, loops, sensors, sub-routines and case statements, it's easily the most complex single program they've ever attempted. It's cool to watch the kids get completely involved in something and really work through the tough spots until its all puzzled out.

Speaking of hard work and fun, Asa had a great time in the musical production of Scrooge this December. She played Martha Cratchit, and can be seen here singing her heart out (far right) over Scrooge's coffin. Interestingly, that's exactly the part I played in a version called "Ebenezer" when I acted as a teenager. For this spring, she just auditioned for the musical version of Beauty and the Beast and she will be playing the part of Chip, the little teacup. There's nothing she loves more than singing, dancing, acting, and hanging out with other folks who love those things so the world of theatre is right up her alley. She can also be heard rocking out with her new Karaoke machine (thanks Santa) at all hours of the day, and has asked me more than once how old she has to be to audition for American Idol. She's got a gorgeous voice, so I wouldn't put it past her someday.


Mackenzie is more of the quiet and introverted type, so theatre is not for him, but he got a bow for his birthday from his Uncle Nickrooz and Aunty Meese and has really been enjoying using that at the archery range that Wayne set up down near the creek. When bad weather strikes, he's usually curled up with a book and a cat, or else playing D&D with friends, WoW, Chess, building Lego inventions, or his own game inventions. He recently approached me with an idea for a book that knocked my socks off, and he and I will be working on that together.

One extremely happy development in having older kids is that they have gotten inspired to try some cooking. Asa checked out a kids' cookbook from the library and has so far made guacamole (really good!) and her own sushi. The first attempt at sushi didn't go so well (a couple of forgotten ingredients didn't help) but this time around was delicious! I'm looking forward to more of her culinary adventures. Wayne has started baking bread for the family and he and Mackenzie made Cinnamon rolls for Christmas Eve. Yummmm.

And as for the rest of our time, there's always gardening, long walks, family game nights, karate, trips to the library, the art and science museums, plays, concerts, reading books together, hanging out with our 15 animals, and lots of other fun stuff. In other words, just living life together and learning along the way. Life, Unschooled.

Italia Day 5: Roma: The Vatican

It's been awhile since I posted one of these. Here's the journal entry from our 5th day in Rome. I start off with an example of jet lag in action:

Wayne: "Where are my socks??"
Us: "You're holding them in your hand."
Wayne: "How did they get there?"

And a quote from Asa while we were walking: "How far is it to those sixteen chapels anyways?"

It was about 2 miles from our apartment near the Pantheon, as it turns out. This photo is of the bridge of Castel Sant'Angelo, where we crossed the Tevere (Tiber) river.


So on to the Vatican. Today is a rainy day in Rome and I discovered that my rain jacket doesn't work all that well. I got soaked on the walk over. Luckily the body heat generated by the 80,000 people crammed into St. Peter's (the line went around the entire piazza) quickly dried us off. St. Peter's itself was so overwhelming it was underwhelming in a way: so big, so much decoration, and unfortunately so many people that it was hard to feel impressed, strange as that might seem. Probably if you arrived in November and it was nearly empty (if it ever is, anymore) then it would be more affecting. The kids were fascinated by the Swiss Guards in their colorful uniforms, especially when they changed over with much hoopla and presenting of arms. The thing that I found to be the most affecting was really that it hits home that Peter was a real person, who really died and was buried there. And he was a disciple of Christ. So I guess in a way it made all of the Bible stories I learned as a kid that much more real, just being able to stand there in that place. All the fancy swirling decor on the altar is so much frosting on the cake, but Peter was a real person and he's really buried there.

We ate lunch from our backpack under the great columnade at the edge of the Piazza, protected from the rain at least. The kids took a hundred more photos of The Pigeons of Rome, which will figure prominently in their personal photo albums. After lunch we mailed some postcards and got ready to trek through the rain to the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican museums, which are actually a good ways away from St. Peters.

The Sistine Chapel was definitely truly amazing. The scope and talent and creativity displayed by Michelangelo there is really overwhelming, especially considering he was pretty new to the whole fresco business not to mention still fairly young. I'm glad we got to see the ceiling post-restoration because the vibrant colors make the whole thing so much more affecting. It doesn't really come across much in photos, it's of course hard to capture the scope and the enormous amounts of detail. (Post trip note: Michelangelo: The Vatican Frescoes is the best book I've found, incredibly thorough with gorgeous photographs and lengthy descriptions, history, and explanations of each part of the ceiling frescoes.) I could've easily stayed another hour or more just taking it all in. I also noted that there were several nursing toddlers and nursing older children pictured, although I have heard that some of those nursing breasts were covered up in the pre-restoration ceiling for "modesty".

We also went through the rest of the Vatican museums. The kids really loved the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman galleries, and we got the audio tour which they always love. The museum itself has little in the way of explanations or presentation of the artifacts, so without the audio tour you'd be left guessing about the details of anything there. It did make me appreciate the trend in American museums in the last 30 years or so toward more interactive exhibits with description and presentation all helping to give some context to what you're seeing. Between all of the different exhibits there at the Vatican, it's huge of course and takes hours to wind through all of the galleries, it's pretty mind-boggling. Note to parents who might bring young kids there, once you start down the one-way U-shaped museum wings, there's no easy outs. And no bathrooms either that we noticed.

Personally I liked the sculpture gallery best. I had a flashback to art history class at several points. Suddenly statues that you've only seen on slides or pages of a book are right there in front of you. I especially loved seeing Laocoon and his sons with the serpent. I was always struck by the emotion in that statue and its so much more affecting in person. Asa too found it to be very sad. She really loved the sculpture gallery of the animals, taking lots of photos there. Mackenzie especially liked the statues pertaining to Greek mythology. They were both very engaged and patient considering that we were on our feet for about 7.5 straight hours. Good thing these kids have stamina!

The kids got a kick out of these signs. Italians seem to love to use signs with drawings instead of a lot of text. I'm sure it helps in such a place where people come to visit from so many different cultures and languages. But this particular sign started our trend of purposeful misinterpretation. The kids dubbed this one "Nose Picking Allowed" and "Funky Dancers on Stairs"


Tonight we went for some great pizza on one of the small streets near our apartment. Now we're packing up to leave Rome tomorrow and head to Perugia!