No, I’m not planning on republishing a second edition of CSL’s A Grief Observed. I’m going to post a second edition to a journal post I wrote 5 years ago, on August 2nd. Time passes, things change. So, even though the underlying thought that I had then is still relevant and worth saying, I’m not sure that some of the details necessarily are.Without further introduction, here it is:

Sunday, Andrea posted that it was the fifth anniversary of her grandmother’s death.

I was raised in a society where emotional expression was frowned upon. We mustn’t let anyone in on the extent of our emotions (in this case-grief). Of all things, emotion needs an avenue of expression. In turn, it becomes necessary, to stay the course, that emotion itself becomes the undesireable thing. So, what I wanted to talk about was the belief that grief is bad.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where grief did not exist. The reality that we live in is that we don’t. Grief occurs when we have loved and lost. Since this world is a place where we lose people and things, the only way to eradicate grief is to never love. And that would make any world a terrible place.

It is important to recognize that grief is proportional to the love and not to the loss. In the case of this particular loss, one lost a wife, others a mother, grandmother or great-grandmother. Many lost a dear friend and still more an acquaintance. Each of these terms describe the relationship and love (however inadequately) held by each person.

A man of many sorrows is not one to be the object of pity. It would be far better to envy him. He has been blessed with many things to love.

If we undertake to silence the expression of grief, we are silencing the expression of the love rather than that of the loss. When you are visiting at the funeral home or attending the funeral the loss is clearly evident to everyone present and requires no expression at all.

Nothing frustrates love more than denying it a means of expression. Frustrated love can consume you. So, of all the emotions, grief over a lost loved one must be expressed. The necessity has been pressed upon us by the situation at hand. The opportunity to do so has a time limit. If we are capable of suppressing the expression beyond the end of the funeral services, we have passed through the time when our resistance was lowest. To deny that immediate opportunity is to risk leaving the love forever frustrated.

And, yes, there were tears. In time, many fond memories will soften the loss. But, the love will remain, because it has taken its rightful place
by expression and because it was born out of the same fond memories.

And it has.

Andrea detailed her day according to the clock. She thought it would be interesting for me to do the same.

12:00 – unsuccessful at going to sleep due to heat
2:30 – I finally go to sleep
9:?? – Sarah calls, Andrea talks to her for a couple minutes
9:35 – Emma talks to me, I respond non-commitally
10:00 – I get up
10:30 – I start trimming the hedge
11:00 – I’m sweating profusely and decide to finish to a certain consistency and leave the hedge for cooler temps
11:20 – I reach that point in the hedge and decide I should eat breakfast
11:35 – I leave to go to the building supply store to find out if they were the ones who left me a phone message on Monday (to tell me the items I ordered are in)
11:45 – I stop at Tim horton’s for a coffee but don’t stay
11:50 – I get to the building supply store and have a bizarre conversation with customer service but in the process did find out that they had called me
12:15 – I start to rip apart some more of the bathroom
12:45 – start lunch cooking and ask Meaghan to turn the stove off when the timer goes off
12:50 – continue in the bathroom while lunch is cooking
1:15 – I stop and eat lunch
1:25 – I start back in the bathroom and come to the conclusion that I need a different cutting tip for the dremel tool.
1:30 – I go to Canadian Tire and pick out a set of tips
2:00 – I start back in the bathroom again and make much better progress
2:50 – I had collected up a whole assortment of tools and it was getting difficult to navigate through them.
2:51 – I put away the tools I won’t be using again for a while
3:20 – I’m still working in the bathroom but have gotten to a point where it would be ok to stop
3:23 – I start cleaning up debris and tools
3:25 – Andrea and I go pick up sink and tub
4:00 – we get sink & tub in house
4:05 – we go pick up Sarah from work
4:20 – back home, we discover (porcelain) sink has crack
4:27 – I call the store
4:35 – I take sink back to store, get another. I open the box on this one & check it one before taking it.
4:55 – I realize that somewhere in all the lifting of porcelain items, I had irritated a disc and a few muscles in my back
5:00 – I get an irritating but brief call from a telemarketer
5:10 – because I know where the telemarketer got our info, I call customer service for the company that we deal with and requested that they not provide our personal info.
5:15 – Andrea massages my back
5:20 – using a few pillows, I find a comfortable position on the couch
6:25 – Andrea wakes me up by asking, “Are you ready to eat supper?”
6:50 – I start back at the hedge
7:15 – I decide there are too many insects having their supper on my legs
7:20 – I switch from shorts to pants
7:25 – back to the hedge
8:00 – Addison comes out to give me a hand and cleans up the trimmings
8:45 – I get to another good spot to stop trimming the hedge
9:00 – have coffee, and take a few minutes to rest
9:30 – talk to Andrea outside while I take the clothes off the line
9:45 – take tub and sink upstairs
9:50 – I give Emma her 10 minute warning
10:00 – I say to Emma, “Let’s go have stories.” Emma says, “I want Meaghan to read me stories.”
10:05 – Emma says, “Daddy, I need you.”
10:06 – I get to her room and she says, “I need you to read me stories.”
10:29 – We count to 10 (which is often the last thing we do before I say the final goodnight).
10:35 – I relax for a few minutes with Andrea watching ‘The Shopping Bags’
10:55 – Emma comes downstairs to get a drink
11:00 – Emma stops in the living room on her way back to bed
11:01 – Emma says, “‘The Shopping Bags’. I love ‘The Shopping Bags’. Which one is it? I want to watch it.”
11:05 – Emma goes to bed. Andrea notes that the channel was running 5 minutes off
11:10 – I go to the bathroom to get cleaned up for the night
12:00 – Andrea starts drifting off to sleep
12:20 – I get up to write this post
12:45 – I actually start this post
1:29 – I finish this post
1:30 – I proof read the post
1:40 – I finish correcting the post

Yeah. Weekend are like this.

It has been very hot and humid here over the last 3 days. Today, the humidity went so high that the haze became so thick that without being able to see the sky you would have believed that it was cloudy and going to rain. So far it hasn’t. But the haze allowed the air to cool earlier in the evening. I was expecting a thunderstorm again tonight. We had one on Tuesday night which lasted about an hour and a half. Between power outages and heat, I haven’t felt like reading or writing.

Hopefully, the weather will break soon

Kay left these two questions below:

Classical education teaches logic, reason and rhetoric which is something that I never learned going to public school. I never learned how to spot fallacies or argue properly, so to me it seems as though its a must…but my heart just can’t get there. Is there a way to help children in those three areas without a classical education which suggests that the child learn in chronological order and be forced to write, read, write read all day long?

My son will be 12 in a couple of weeks and he does talk about going to college someday, I’m just starting to get a little bit freaked out and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kay, I think I will answer the second question first since I can answer that out of experience. Our son will start college in another month or so. What we told him a couple years ago was that if he wanted to take his program of choice at college then he would need to work through these sections of these books. Because I was teaching at college in that field at the time, I already knew what books he needed to work in. But that is something which you have lots of time to find out. What is important about that strategy is that the choice to study whatever subject is still his. If he starts digging into it and decides he doesn’t like it, then he can search around for a field which suits him better. In the mean time, he will have 4 years where he can explore his interests and gain experience that will help him make a choice that HE will be happy with.

There are, from my perspective, thousands of tools which are readily available which train in logic, reason and rhetoric. Before I get to the tools, I would like to explain why I’m going to give you the answer that I give you. As I mentioned above, I used to teach at a technical college. Everything I taught was somehow related to my field of expertise, which is computer programming. Some students had about 500 hours in my courses over the duration of the programs I taught in. What I would tell them at the beginning and remind them of as often as the opportunity presented itself was that what would make them a good programmer was programming.

Programming is like riding a bicycle. You can talk about it all you want, admire all sorts of different types, debate endlessly about the advantages and disadvantages of different models, watch videos of professional riders riding their bikes. But, in the long run, the only way you are going to learn to ride a bike is to get on one and ride it. You may be wabbly at the start. The only way to become a good bike rider is to practice.

Skills are developed through practice. Public school was supposed to teach us logic, reason and rhetoric. But I expect few people learn it there because the exercises they are given are too structured and controlled for any student to get any practice. If your children do not want to follow a course of study then making them do it will not teach them the intended subjects, whatever they are, simply because the only skill they are really exercising is enduring a controlled environment.

For logic, I would suggest things like stretegy games (eg. chess), books like 2, 3 or 5 minute mysteries, mystery novels (eg. hardy boys), puzzles, brain teasers, etc. Any of these will provide lots of practise in logic.

TBH, in thinking about it, the first thing that came to mind for both reason and rhetoric were books. Lots and lots of books. While I don’t have any great issues with the classics, I don’t believe that the reading material has to be classics for the reader to learn from them. From reading we learn how other people say things and discover there are writing styles that we do like and others that we don’t. I’ve never felt that I was particularly articulate. When I write, I write, to some degree unconsciously, in a way that reads well for me. Secondly, you can provide them with lots of opportunities in day to day life to practice both of these things. In our home we talk about the news, politics, history, science, etc. in a way that comes as close as it can to being equals.

I think almost anyone will become a natural problem solver, thinker and speaker/writer if they have the chance to immerse themselves in other people doing those things and practive the skills themselves.

Are there other readers who can constructively add to this?

Sometimes a post in this blog or someone else’s turns into what I call an offline conversation. Sometimes the email exchange ends up being longer than the original post. Other times a post here turns into a reply post there. What I am aluding to is the conversations that in a variety of ways that spring up out of blog posts.

Until I started blogging and getting involved in these sorts of conversations, it hadn’t really occurred to me what develops out of those discussions. Even though we are not likely to meet the authors of many of the the blogs we read, there are 2 hidden bonuses in blog reading and writing. First, I think our society conditions us from early age to judge people by where and how they live, what possessions they (eg. what they drive), what they look like and how they dress. However much we might struggle against that, it is always there and we have to watch for it trying to make decision about people for us. The beauty of blogging is that you often do not have any of that to go by. And you are really left with the things that the person talks about and how they say them to decide if they are someone you would like to get to know better.

For example, CS Lewis died when I was a small child. But I have read alot of his writing. I think he is someone I’d love to sit and talk to. I can imagine us talking away an afternoon and not even noticing it slip away. If his writing is representastive of how he thought, then we approach problems in much the same way.

Second, I believe that because most of us were dropped into a room of 25-30 strangers at an early age, whenever we encounter someone IRL which we know nothing about we keep the conversation to safe topics. My experience teaching at college leads me to believe that one of the strongest lessons learned in PS is guarding one’s private person.

When I started writing here, there were things that I wanted to talk about. And for most of those subject I have. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the reason I wanted to write about those subjects was that both that the subjects themselves and talking about them were important to me. Shortly after that, I realized that many of the bloggers that I read were also writing for the same reason. TBH, I think that most of the time our society offers us little opportunity to do that.

So, what I think I’m trying to get to is the thought that in many respects I’ve gotten to know some of you through a sort of virtual exchange better than some people who I’ve known most of my life. The thing is that underlying it all is that the things that are important to us have alot to do with defining who we are. And talking to people about things that are important to them is the best way to get to know them. I’ve discovered that I like doing this far more than I expected I would. There are bloggers out there who aim to attract as many readers as possible. I realized a few months ago, that I wasn’t interested in that. I think I’ve collected something which is far more valuable than the revenue that could be generated by high volume traffic.

and it has a post from yours truly. Country Fair.

I’m writing this post using Firefox on Gentoo linux. I’ll still be installing pieces and parts for a couple days. But, I’ll be able to background most of that. The list of software that I can install by a single command is rather impressive. I haven’t counted but I expect it to be in the range of 10-15,000 titles.

I even took a couple hours out tonight to play games

Overlooking the hurdles I had in getting it running, I’m quite impressed. Installing software and keeping it current is exceptionally easy. Builds that are going on in one window do not affect the performance elsewhere in the system

Imagine this scenario if you will: you are expected to cook and present a meal, but you are not in a kitchen. Furthermore, you only have 3 kitchen tools to work with, a camp stove, and $13 worth of food. How hard it is going to be for you to accomplish your task?

Sometimes as parents we unintentionally limit our children in ways we wish they would grow, mostly because we’ve never stopped to think about it, or we’ve assumed this is how things are done and our goal will magically spring forth.

Take creativity, for example. Many times I’ve read moms who wish to expand their child’s creativity, looking for the right books to follow or the right activity, while the kids are doing page after page of coloring, or following instructions for some easy camp craft that can be made from household materials.

For about six years, I owned a small retail craft supplies business operated out of my own home. About half of it was mail-order, but I also sold locally and held classes, including an ambitious week-long craft camp for kids during spring break. One of the things I noticed was that in the adult classes, some participants had a hard time without any firm instruction or direction, even over things as simple as placing an accent on an item. Essentially, the adults I had the most problem with were afraid of doing it “wrong”. Children, on the other hand, had no problems with a vague sense of the end product and a pile of materials to work with.

Somewhere along the lines, adults don’t loose their natural creativeness, they get it instructed out of them.

So how do we nurture a child’s creativity?

Take your instruction books and put them away where you can’t see them. Now pull out all your craft materials, not just the kid’s craft items. Yes, I mean your craft items too. Yes, I really do mean the “good stuff” and things you’ve set aside for when they are older.

Instruct the children, if needed and when they want to try, on how to use the various craft tools you have. The craft punches, special scissors, pliers, glue gun – all those things. (Please use some common sense here too. I’m not suggesting you show your five year old how to use the rotary cutter. But your 10 or 12 year old might be able to handle it.) Instructing the child beforehand on how to use a tool safely will help keep down the risk of injury. Often children get hurt when they are trying to use something they haven’t been shown properly yet.

Now here comes the hard part: let your children use whatever craft materials they want to make something, without your instruction. If you really can’t bear to let the kids use certain items of yours, put them up somewhere for now. But please, let them examine and explore all the great things you normally set aside for yourself. A creative idea of theirs is bound to spark and soon they will be making something.

It doesn’t have to make sense to you, it doesn’t even have to look good, and in some cases you may feel they are just “wasting” materials, but I can asure you, we are working towards a process here, not an end result. If you have really small children who just want to cut things with scissors, give them used paper from the printer, newspapers, flyers and old magazines to start. Be sure to give them good scissors that you have tried yourself.

For example, I have a small selection of scrapbooking supplies, some of which were bought for a specific idea I had. One day, while trying to work on an album, two of our children hovered nearby and wanted to help. I do admit, I was torn between giving them free access and doing something for myself. Eventually, I identified a few things that I knew I really needed for this project, and let the other two use “my” stuff.

First, this was an example of sharing with them, even when it kinda hurt. Second, it helped the children expand their own creativity in being able to explore the function of new tools and products. Third, it was just plain fun. I was initially surprised when their efforts turned out better than I thought they could do, and a few of their ideas were things I had never thought of.

I know how hard it can be internally sometimes. We’ve bought materials to use up in making something, yet pace ourselves and stretch it to last as long as possible, as if the item (and sometimes it’s just a set of stickers) is more important than the child themselves.

By letting our children use the good stuff, we are telling them without words that they are important to us, as well as helping to expand the creative process.

Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than words… They learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent. They do not learn from repetition and drill. They are whole-part learners that need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means they do not learn in the manner in which most teachers teach…They are systems thinkers who can orchestrate large amounts of information from different domains, but they often miss the details. They tend to be organizationally impaired and unconscious about time. – Guerrilla Learning

How many readers think they might have a visual spatial learner on their hands? I happen to be both this and tactile.

Unschooling Voices #2 (August issue) will soon be published. The optional August question is, “Do you extend the principles of unschooling (trust, freedom, etc) into any other areas of your child’s life?”. (Details on submitting blog posts) When I first saw the question, I thought to myself, “What a good question. I’d love to answer that.”

But when I had given it some thought (and I do have time to think about such things while driving to and from home on the weekends), I realized that, except in a tangental sense, I couldn’t answer it. In fact, given the way I approach most things that I do in life, it seems an odd sort of question. It occurred to me that a good illustration of my approach to life would be a discussion Andrea and I had a few years ago.

At the time, she was a member of an online moms forum which had a section set aside for attachment parenting. Over an extended period of time we had a fair number of conversations about threads on attachment parenting. Finally, because these discussions had piqued my curiousity, I asked her, “What’s attachment parenting?”

Her explanation started with, “What we do…”

You see, I’m not really the sort of person who reads up on various theories and methodologies and says, “Ah well, that’s a great theory/methodology.” And I really did not understand what unschooling was about and why it worked, etc. until I was already doing it. Realistically, in our early stages of unschooling, I would never have described us as unschoolers.

The reality is that unschooling does not extend into other areas of our children’s lives. Instead, through time, our parenting principles (trust, responsibility, maturity, etc.) inserted themselves into our educational strategy. No one will become responsible without responsibility being delegated to them. No one will become mature without the freedom to make choices. The inherent message in controlling, watching/supervising, evaluating and testing is that object of the control cannot be trusted, is immature and iresponsible. A child that always has to wait for an authority to tell it what he/she is supposed to do next cannot learn diligence. A very necessary component of diligence is initiative.

What I’ve said in the paragraph above was obvious to me for a long time before I recognized that what we were doing educationally was contrary to our overall parenting strategy. I don’t think it is particularly necessary for me to describe in minute detail what we were setting out to achieve as parents.

What I recognized several years ago was that the most valuable thing we had done toward that end had nothing to do with our choice in curriculum. We have given our children thousands of hours of free time that their publicly schooled counterparts were deprived of. We delegate things to them by which they learn responsibility. We trust them. There is nothing particularly complicated in terms of the principles of what we are doing. For us, unschooling is a means to an end rather than being an end in and of itself.