EU418: When Teachers Become Unschoolers
Pam and Anna interviewed three former teachers who are all unschooling parents and members of the Living Joyfully Network. Erika Ellis, Jen Hollis, and Michelle Kren shared their experiences becoming teachers as well as their thought processes as they chose unschooling for their own families. They talked about their changing views of education and how their roles as teachers helped shape their ideas of parenting.
It was a fascinating window into a very common phenomenon – teachers becoming unschoolers! We hope the conversation sparks some insights for you.
Watch the video on YouTube.
THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Erika Ellis and Anna Brown, as well as our guests Michelle Kren and Jen Hollis. Hello to you all.
So, today’s episode is a panel style featuring teachers who became unschoolers. And Erika is joining Michelle and Jen as we explore aspects of their journey and reflect on this very interesting perspective. So, I’m very much looking forward to our conversation. Anna, would you like to get us started?
ANNA: I would. So, first, thanks for joining us. I’m kind of excited about this one.
I think it’ll be an interesting conversation because it is actually really wild how many teachers turned unschoolers I’ve met over the course of these last 25 years. And it makes sense, right? Because teachers deeply know what’s happening in education. They’re passionate about it. It’s something that’s important to them. So, it really makes sense.
But I can’t wait to hear about each of your unique journeys. So, this first question will just be, tell us briefly about your journey to becoming a teacher. What drew you to the field? How did it unfold for you? What did that part look like? And I’m going to start, Erika, with you and then we’ll kind of move around to the rest.
ERIKA: I’m excited about this too. It’s something that honestly at this point I don’t think about that often, but I also have met a lot of teachers. And so, yeah, it’s just very curious.
I was only a teacher in public school for two years before I had children. When I left school, I was planning to be in film production, which I did for several years. But that field out in LA is mostly project by project.
And when we were thinking about having children, it seemed a little bit risky for both me and my husband to be finding job by job what we were going to do next. And so, I was looking for things that I could do that would be more steady and just know what I was going to get paid for the year, basically. And so, that was kind of where I started.
But many years before that, as a kid, I wanted to be a teacher because I loved school. I loved being a student. I loved curriculum. I loved tests. I just loved everything about it. And so, it wasn’t far from my mind as a possibility of something that I could do.
But then, of course, as we grow, we learn and change our minds about things. And so, I hadn’t thought about it until I was really just looking for some more stability. And the way my mind works is like I’m a scanner.
I am interested in many, many things. And so, there were always things I could pull from, like I was in film production, but my undergrad was in biopsychology. So, I was like, I can teach science.
I could do different options. And so, when I was thinking about a stable job, something I would be able to do in the area where I was, I thought about getting a teaching credential and teaching high school science. And that whole process was actually really easy for me.
It seemed like a good fit as far as the pay is pretty good. The union in LA for teachers is really great. And so, I got good benefits. And it just drew me in that this would be good for our family financially. And I just, I love learning. I love science. I love kids. There were lots of things that I was like, this is gonna be great. But I never knew how long I would stick with it because I also envisioned myself being a stay-at-home mom.
I really wanted to devote myself to really focusing on connection with my kids. And so, since we knew we were planning on starting our family, I didn’t know what the whole journey would look like. And so, I told my husband, Josh, that from the start, you’ve got to be ready for this to last two years or 50 years. I just don’t know. And I have figured out the math. It’s going to work either way. But is that fine with you? If I put all this effort into it and then I walk away from it, is that gonna freak you out? And he’s like, no, we always figure it out.
I definitely went into it not sure how the whole process was going to go. But there were things I loved about it. I loved the topics, I taught integrated science. So that’s a little bit of biology and a little bit of physics and a little bit of chemistry and a little bit of earth science. And so, that was very fun.
And the kids, of course, were amazing. And I don’t have to get into all of the details of what happened later. But I just, I definitely learned a lot about, what even, what is this? I started questioning things a lot more than I did when I was a student in school, because I could really see the whole picture of what we’re asking of these kids. And I definitely started to change my mind about how much I loved school at that point.
ANNA: Yeah, oh my goodness, I can totally imagine that. So Michelle, let’s go to you next. And then we’ll go to you, Jenna.
MICHELLE: Okay, it’s funny that Erika got about two years of teaching in because that’s the same amount of time of teaching that I got in. Like her, I did want to be a teacher for forever since probably about second grade. I loved my teacher. I loved to play school and everything. And I was pretty good at performing in school. I loved to babysit. I loved kids. So it just kind of made sense. So, I worked well in school so that I could get a scholarship so I could go to college so I could be a teacher.
Go on the path, do the things. And I really felt like I wanted to help kids at a foundational level, that I wanted to be in on the ground floor because I felt like as students got older and if they weren’t supported in the early years, that the problems just kept compounding. And that whene they got to high school, you have this kid that’s hated school for all these years, it felt like they’re doomed now.
So I really wanted to be in on the ground floor. I did my student teaching in second grade and enjoyed that experience. I actually, in one of my phases, got to be in a classroom that was first and second grade. It was kind of nice to have the youngers and the olders just to have that little bit of a different dynamic where it’s not so based on age. There’s a little bit more flexibility in that.
I got married right out of college and moved to where my husband was and I couldn’t quite get a job right away. So I did substitute teaching, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed the flexibility. I enjoyed the variety of it. Like, I don’t know what grade I’m going to be in today and what the kids are going to be like and all of that. I liked coming with a teacher bag of some books I liked if we had a few extra minutes to read to them before recess or whatever. I liked that part.
But then I did end up, once we moved again, working in a small Hebrew academy. That’s where I taught for two years. The only availability was to teach fifth grade my first year. And then it was fifth and sixth grade my second year. And so that’s what I did, which was really interesting because the fourth grade teacher, as I was coming in, I was thinking, oh, she’ll be able to mentor me and help me. She’s got so much experience and she can help me, give wisdom to me.
She told me, oh, this class was the best class. You’re going to love it. These kids, they’re all great students and everything. And they were, they were great. But then we had a couple other students get added to the mix very shortly after. And that just kind of threw everything upside down. And I’m trying to adapt for all the different needs of all the different children and everything like that.
It was quite challenging, I just felt a lot of burden or pressure, just trying to rack my brain on how can I meet the needs of this kid? And this kid and this kid. This kid can read college level and this kid can read like second grade. And how am I supposed to meet the needs of all these kids? So, yeah, that’s kind of my journey to becoming a teacher.
ANNA: Okay, thank you. Jenna.
JEN: When I think about this question, it’s sort of like, where do I begin? Do I take it all back to my early childhood years? Which, you know, always looking forward, things don’t tend to make sense. So I find it really interesting that we as parents and teachers get so fixated on the child’s future. When you look back at anyone’s life, could anyone really say that? Yes, I knew that I wanted to be this and my path was this clean sequence of events.
And so when I think about my path into becoming a teacher, I actually didn’t want to become a teacher. I never really thought about it. I actually wanted to be a chef at one point. And as I was going about my experience, I realized, well, that was probably going to require me to work late at night. And I’m just not a night owl. I’m early to bed, early to wake.
And then so, the kinds of conversations as you’re getting towards that back end of your high school years, all the adults in your world are starting to ask those questions. What’s the plan for after school? And so, of course, I had to have a plan.
I was like, OK, being a chef wasn’t going to quite work for me. And I think I must have just plucked it out of thin air. What if I explore being a teacher? Once I made that decision, I really committed to my studies and ended up doing really well. I got into uni, started my degree as a primary school teacher. And when I did my first prac, I ended up coming home from that thinking, I don’t know about this.
All of the teachers just seemed really unhappy. And for me, it was like, if I’m going to do anything, it’s got to be something that’s meaningful. And then I’m going to enjoy it because we spend so much of our time at work. That was a non-negotiable for me. Anyway, I was having a conversation with my mom saying, I’m not sure about this. It just doesn’t seem like anyone’s happy in this industry.
And at the time I was working in a sales company. I was just doing some telemarketing and I saw these salespeople going out and selling. I think it was an alarm system door to door. And I thought that was a really great other option. I really was looking at it, I really don’t want to do this. That seems like a really good idea could start to generate some decent money. And my mom was like, absolutely not. You have worked way too hard to get here. Choose another degree. And I’m like, okay.
And so then I moved into early childhood and I absolutely loved that degree. And the difference was I found primary school teaching was all about subjects, whereas an early childhood degree was focused on the whole child. And so I really, really loved that study.
And so as I’m going about it and I started to do my work placements, I didn’t absolutely love working in the industry, but I loved the study of the whole child. And so then I did my final year of uni and ended up going to the Cook Islands for a whole month to do my final prac, which is pretty cool. I came back, got a job in an early childhood center, which, you know, again, it was okay. I really loved connecting with the parents, really loved connecting with the children.
But that didn’t last very long because I discovered that I wasn’t being paid properly. So then I approached the owners of the center and they validated. Yes, you haven’t been paid correctly. And please don’t tell the other staff. And that was my red flag to go, okay, here’s my resignation. And of course, I let my friends know who I was working with that you might just want to tune into whether you’re being paid correctly.
And so down that path was letting the parents know, they were all really upset that I was leaving and I was upset to be leaving them. But what came about was that one of those parents was a teacher. She was actually an assistant principal at her school and she was going on maternity leave towards the end of that year.
And I was saying to her that, I’m just going to go and do some casual teaching back in the primary school system. And she’s like, oh, you know what, actually, would you like a job? And so one thing led to another and I ended up starting that position towards the end of the year.
And I absolutely loved it. I loved the structure. I loved the conditions, compared to the early childhood conditions of work. It just was like a breath of fresh air. I had two hours a week of planning time as opposed to working 10 hours a day needing to work out when I was going to do any of the planning. On top of that, better pay and all the rest of it.
And so I really loved the structure of it. And so for the next sort of four years, I really dived into that world. And because I was based in a really small school, I got all these amazing opportunities. I became the reading recovery teacher. So we really got to understand the mechanics of reading or what I thought were the mechanics of reading as it was being delivered to me. And I was also in class at the same time.
So I had a class that I was responsible for and I was doing reading recovery, which was a massive load. I literally felt like I jumped in the deep end and learnt so much in such a short period of time. But as my husband and I, we got married, and we started to think about a family, we ended up having our first child.
And I had every intention of going back to teaching because like I said, I loved my job. But as time went on and it got closer to that point, I was just like, I can’t leave my baby. I can’t leave my baby to be raised by someone else while I go back into a profession that demands so much of my time and energy.
And I just couldn’t see the possibility. It was like, how could I be the teacher that I was before I had children as well as be the mum that I wanted to be? And so at that time, my husband had his own business and it just made financial sense as well for me to be at home, for me to help out with the admin and really prioritize raising our family.
That’s basically where my teaching journey started to taper off. I always had this idea that I was going to go back. But as time went on and I started to experience life as a parent, teaching just didn’t make sense to me anymore.
It didn’t make sense. I have complete admiration for those teachers out there that are doing both because it’s such a demanding job. Personally, and I am a person who likes to do well at everything that I do. And I just knew that for me, that was not going to happen. I do believe I probably would have ended up sacrificing my family big time to be that teacher who I really wanted to be.
But when I think about the time that I did spend in teaching, I was really focused on engagement. How can I really engage these students? And I think a lot of that came from my own childhood experience of being in school and feeling completely disengaged, feeling like I was more interested in watching human behavior than what the teacher was delivering.
It’s just interesting when you do reflect back at your own journey, so much of it makes sense when you’re looking back. But this whole idea of being able to look into the future and have it all figured out, it kind of makes me think like, gosh, we put so much pressure on ourselves as teachers and parents to have these children’s lives figured out when they have so much to teach us. But yeah, I’ll stop there. Otherwise I can talk forever.
ANNA: No, no, I appreciate it. And I think you’re right, we have this idea that we can control and have this linear path. And yeah, it just doesn’t work that way. But gosh, do we see the connections when we look back and how it’s gotten us here? So I just appreciate all those stories. So amazing.
PAM: And I’m just super excited now to take the next step because you’ve been looking back and putting the story together for yourselves. So it will be very interesting to hear how you then came to decide to unschool your own kids. And do you feel that it was easier to make that choice because of your teaching background or did that make it more difficult?
And also curious to know about whether you had a lot of pressure from external voices, like friends and family who were also in education. I feel like they kind of come in bunches too sometimes. So I think this will be very interesting to hear.
And Michelle, would you like to start this one?
MICHELLE: Sure. So for me, I feel like the decision to unschool my kids was a very organic unfolding type of thing. My husband and I have five children.
Right now, their ages are from 19 to 10. And so basically, I was having a child every two years. And so as my first two were approaching school age, the bond that I had with my children. I essentially didn’t want to give them up.
And so while I can’t really remember the conversations about, are we going to homeschool our kids or not? But I remember it just unfolding. People around us are homeschooling. So that feels like, okay, we’re not alone. There are other families doing this. And also the fact that my first two sons both taught themselves to read at very young ages. So the oldest was four, and his brother was two.
And it was kind of like a party joke, not a party joke, like party trick. Oh, look at my two year old reading. People would do that, and ask, do you know this word? Do you know this word? And because it was so baffling, like, are you kidding me?
So, with your first two children teaching themselves to read, which that’s why we go to school, right? To learn to read and write. So if that part’s already taken care of, then what’s my kid going to do in a school anyways?
I wanted to learn alongside my children. I saw them learning already. And to me, you’re learning all the time. You’re learning from all sorts of things, and ways. You are learning how to be in relationship with people as a family. That was always something when I was having another baby, I couldn’t imagine all the other siblings having to go off to school right now and not be able to be with the new baby.
I did start with a curriculum for my oldest just because I thought, well, let’s try that. It was like a unit studies thing. And I liked that it was every six days because you are always rotating. It wasn’t like Monday through Friday, right?
So because it was six days, it was always rotating and that helped it feel like you were never behind. So, I liked that aspect about it. And because I’m a learner, I love to learn. I’m a very curious person. I was looking into different people’s homeschool things and philosophies and things like that.
So I came across some different people like Julie Bogart. She’s been in homeschooling for a really long time. And she is very open to unschooling and has talked about it, doing a little bit of it herself with her five kids and such. Sally Clarkson is another person that I had looked to and then I found Pam back in those early days. So I’ve been listening to the podcast for a really long time and actually reached out to a guest that was on the podcast, Amy Martinez.
She and I are friends now and have been for numerous years. I looked, it was 2019 that I reached out to her for the first time because she had five kids and she was further down the road. And that’s one of the things that I think is so beautiful about this community and homeschooling in general is just the helping. It’s the education, but it’s also the parenting.
It’s the whole picture, right? Unschooling is learning without school and pretending like school doesn’t exist and things like that. As far as it being easier or harder though, I was kind of torn on which I thought. It’s a good question. I just, I’m not quite sure if I think it’s easier or harder.
I think that my instinctual ideas about learning fit really nicely with unschooling, and things not being arbitrary. I really did not like that about school, you have to learn this because you’re this grade and you’re this age and all of that.
That was something that did not sit well with me. And so, I wanted a lot of time to not feel hurried and rushed. I had these school experiences. I had my own growing up in school. I had teaching in school. I had all these different experiences. I kind of got a little smattering of each of the different types.
And so then it was like, well, I get to pick which one I think is best out of all of these because I tried them all. I did also approach it as like, this is an experiment too. We are taking this one step at a time and if something’s not working at some point, we can pivot, we can try something else.
So, just organically making our way to let’s keep learning the things that are in front of us, the things that we’re interested in. I think about my five different kids and just what they’ve been interested in over the years. I couldn’t just, oh, yeah, we’re learning this science curriculum. And I just didn’t want to go that way.
PAM: Oh, that’s beautiful, Michelle. I love that piece, too, you know, that, like you said, that it’s not like a forever decision that you can keep trying things and keep learning. You said you’ve always been interested in learning yourself and figuring these things out.
And the point about, especially with a large number of kids, the number of interests that I’m sure would weave through, continue to weave through your home is super numerous. So yeah, to try and fit that all into some sort of curriculum-y schedule, I can imagine would be very difficult. Erika, would you like to go next?
ERIKA: I feel like in one way, my teaching journey is completely separate from my own unschooling journey. But certainly, it must have informed it, but I view my unschooling journey as really just me listening to my kid, my oldest, and it kind of naturally flowing from our relationship that was growing as he was growing. When he was a little kid, he was kind of scared of other little kids.
And I also saw that he was, he was slow to speak. I just could see these things that I’m like, this could be a problem for someone in a school setting. But to me, it didn’t seem to be a problem. I could see him learning and communicating and all these things. But I could see if his behavior at school was similar to his behavior on the playground. It could be a problem in school.
He’s running away from other kids. He doesn’t want to do what anyone else is doing. He’s very specific about what he wants to do and very clear about it. But, and also just so sensitive. And so I was just putting together this image in my mind of what that would look like for this little guy to be in a school setting. And it just didn’t feel good to me. And so that really was my reason for looking into other options.
And I did find project-based homeschooling first. Which could work. But any kind of adult-imposed ideas just have never been okay with either of my children, really. And so in order to really facilitate them learning about things, it had to be their decision of what the thing was going to be.
And so it made me think about something I’ve heard about teaching, which is that teachers are kind of like taking away the most fun part of learning when they pick the curriculum and plan all the activities. So, if an individual child is choosing what to learn and how to learn it, there’s so much more that they can get out of it than if somebody comes in with that already pre-planned. And plus, as teachers, we know that part’s also really fun. It’s our most fun part. And the kids aren’t getting to do that. We’re just coming and putting it on them.
And so I really thought a lot about that. I had heard that somewhere and it made sense to me. And so I do think it probably was slightly easier to choose unschooling given my teaching background, just because I had become aware. I had the rosy view of what I could imagine school was like kind of eliminated over my experience as a ninth grade teacher.
I was in a title one school in LA. It was great. We had such a nice atmosphere as far as a real safe place for kids. And the teachers seemed to all be there for the right reasons. And it had a nice, I don’t know, it was a nice community. And at the same time, I was like, these kids don’t need to learn earth science right now.
This is literally the last thing they need and they’re not interested in it. And so I just felt horrible giving them anything in addition to what they were already carrying, the loads that they were carrying, taking care of their younger siblings, working jobs. They were like 15 years old, but they had to work because their family needs that additional support. So they were already, in my opinion, it seemed like they were already young adults having to shoulder so much responsibility.
And it just felt ridiculous for me to say, and now do this homework because this is the most important thing. I just couldn’t do it. And so I saw teachers who really did in their core believe that this was the most important thing. And for them, that worked, they could do it. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t make myself believe it, just based on what I had heard about, what my kids would tell me about, what was going on at home and what was going on in the neighborhoods.
And it just didn’t feel right to me. And so I ended up never giving homework. It was always just review what we did in class, you know?
So then for those few students whose parents were like, I know you have homework, they could do something. But for the kids who were overwhelmed already, I was not going to be a person who would add to that for them. And so I do think having that experience made me question it a little bit more.
And then definitely as I started diving into unschooling and learning more about that, then I started really looking back to my own experience as a kid in school and questioning all that had happened as well. Because I did love it. And you know, in some ways, and in some ways, it was terrifying.
All the things because you’re in this kind of super controlled environment, lots of rules, lots of expectations, and I wanted to not get in trouble and all of that. So all of those kind of things, I started reflecting on later. I don’t really remember pressure from external voices at all.
But I’m kind of immune to that, for the most part, just personality wise, like I’m going to do the things I want to do. But yeah, I think people probably looked at my decision as like, well, she knows what she’s doing. So they assume that’s the best choice. It’s been interesting for sure.
PAM: I can feel like you having that teacher’s experience is kind of one thing that can show people when you make the choice to teach your own kids, that you tick a little box for their acceptance versus the how on earth are you going to learn how to do that? You’re not a teacher.
So Jen, how about you? What’s your experience?
JEN: Homeschooling was never on my radar. I don’t even think I really even thought about it, probably because no one around me was doing it. And for the most part, with my eldest son school was a pretty good fit.
And then, like I said, I didn’t really think about homeschooling as such. But as my second son came into the world, and I watched how he learnt from the world around him, I started to question how school was going to work for him. He’s pretty much like what Erika was saying, he really is quite immune to other people’s ideas for him.
He just pretty much runs his own show. He was a very hands-on learner as well. And so I could just see, I think I intuitively knew that it wouldn’t work. I just wasn’t sure how school was going to work out for him. Anyway, we just kind of went about raising our kids the way that we knew how. They started off in an early childhood setting. So, they actually joined the prep program that was part of the private school that we had decided to send them to. And that was quite beautiful. The teachers that had both my eldest son and my second son were amazing.
They were very whole child focused, very play based as well. But then as my second son was starting prep, I started to notice even things in prep started to change. There was less focus on the play side of things, and things started to become a lot more structured.
But thankfully, I had an amazing teacher that was in that space. And she was very much relationship based, she really put a lot of focus in connecting with the children. And so that was a really beautiful experience for Hayes. I often would talk to her about how I’m really concerned about how Hayes is going to go moving forward into this more structured approach to learning. But like I said, we just sort of continue down that pathway that we knew. And as he went into kindergarten, he actually had the same teacher that my eldest son had.
And she was an amazing teacher in that she was very academic, like you could just see that she knew her content. But the piece that was missing was that connection piece. I felt like there was this big focus on academics, but it didn’t land because she did not have that connection with the children, she didn’t have children herself.
I can appreciate that when you have gone through the system, and you go on to uni, and you do really well at uni, and it becomes all about the academics. And so that was a real missing piece. And so I started to see Hayes not gelling with that classroom environment.
But again, just continuing on with what we knew, it wasn’t a big problem. But it was sort of then that I was starting to question things. And then as he went into year one, Blair, my third son, had started prep.
And again, I started to see this change in the system where they were taking primary school trained teachers and putting them into prep. It was like they were shifting towards even more structure. And so, and then what I started to see too, was this whole diagnosis approach, like, we need to get these kids diagnosed early, get them connecting with the right services, so that we can basically get rid of those problems that get in the way of our approach to teaching, so we can get better results.
And so at that time, I’d actually had my fourth son. I had just had my fourth son. And I remember having the interview with Blair’s prep teacher. And she was suggesting that I needed to take Blair to go and see an OT, an occupational therapist.
And I’m like, freaking out thinking, Oh my God, what have I missed? I’m just seeing this beautiful child. And she is seeing this child who can’t sit still on the carpet for a session. And me just having had my fourth child, just feeling really overwhelmed, self doubt through the roof. And thankful, thankfully, as I was going through that experience, I lent into really focusing on my child instead of what I was being told.
And I just started to, to really ground in that. But at the same time, we just continued to do what we were doing, because it still didn’t enter my mind. It wasn’t until Hayes, my second son, was moving into year two. And he had the most amazing teacher, as well as he was in a class of all of his friends. But I just started to see this light dim in him. And at the same time, Blair was in kindergarten, and he would pretty much cry every day.
The anxiety was through the roof. And I had this new baby. I had this baby, I had Blair in kindergarten, who was really struggling. And then Hayes in year two, who had all the conditions right, amazing teacher, friends, but was just completely unhappy.
That’s when I started to really look at other options, more so for Hayes, because I felt like back then, Blair was just kind of, I had this idea that he just needs to get used to the whole school thing. Anyway, so then come towards the end of year two for Hayes, I thought, okay, let’s try the Steiner school.
So we did that for a little bit, which was a massive ask, because it was like half an hour there, half an hour back. So it’s two hours of driving every day. And at that stage, my youngest was only two. And then I started to see that that was still sort of the same thing.
It was a different idea, but it was still an idea that was placed upon a child. And so then I started to explore the homeschooling route. And as I was exploring that, I came across the Living Joyfully podcast. And it just spoke so deeply to my heart that I just couldn’t look away. I listened to so many episodes. When something just really resonates with you, that it’s like, it just, you feel this whole weight lifted from your shoulders because it just feels so right. And so that’s what gave me the courage to really jump into homeschooling because I knew which direction I wanted to head.
And as far as being a teacher, does it help, did it help me or did it make things harder? It was kind of a little bit of both. It helped in terms of other people outside of my family going, oh yeah, that makes sense. You’re a teacher because they’re naturally thinking I’m doing school at home. And I often say to people, if I had those kinds of children who really resonated with that approach, that would make my job so much easier. Like, okay guys, let’s sit down and we’re going to do x, you know, I could do that really well, but that’s not why I moved to homeschooling.
I could see that environment did not work. It did not work for most of my children. And I could see that it did not work for a lot of children. And so, it took a lot of courage to go down this route because I didn’t know anyone who was doing it. I started to discover more families who were homeschooling, but very rarely did I come across a family that was unschooling. And so I kind of felt like I was doing something naughty.
Like I should have still been trying to do school at home. But for me, I’m like, if I was going to do that, my kids would be at school where all the other kids are because they loved the social aspect of school. But so far as whether it was easier or harder, it was kind of a little bit of both.
It was easy because I had the insights from my teaching experience. I also had the insights as a parent. I could see how the system was changing. I could see how it was moving from this really play-based approach, which I feel like even when I think about my own schooling experience, a lot of that was still play-based. And now I could see this shift towards more structure and more control. And we’ve got to box children in and identify all of these problems that really are not a problem if you have the right environment.
As far as the pressures were concerned, I didn’t really have that outside of my family and friends. And I think that kind of blindsided me a little bit because I thought my immediate family would really appreciate it, like, oh, okay, she’s got all the skills in the world. She’s a teacher.
I had been diving deep into the world of personal development and I feel like I’m an awesome parent. And so it makes sense that I’m going to have my kids at home with me and we live life together. But that was not the case.
My family found it really hard to understand and appreciate my decision purely because they couldn’t see outside of their own world of how that could be possible. And so as I became more and more grounded in myself and I started to unpack a lot of my own, I guess, my own conflicts with this way of doing things, it just became kind of irrelevant. I just was able to then build that stronger shell where I had compassion for other people’s ideas without feeling like I had to take them on. So yeah, I hope that answers that question.
PAM: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. It really does.
And I mean, it’s underneath all of your answers. It is so much of our work to do, right? Our own processing, there’s the word, processing our own experiences. Even you had talked specifically about that too, Erika, like looking back at our schooling now with this new lens. And because I feel like I did that too, kind of paint it over to make it a positive experience for myself while I was going through it. It’s like, oh yeah, rah, rah, I can do this, blah, blah, blah. And looking back, it’s like, oh, I put up with a lot of shit without even really realizing it at the time. So yeah, that’s very interesting.
ANNA: I was kind of struck too by your story, Jenna. So you’re talking before kindergarten, this kind of pre-program, they’re already making it this more structured academic. And we really see that here in the US too. It’s just earlier and earlier and earlier. Whereas I feel like back in the day, there wasn’t any of that until so much later. It was kind of fourth grade things kicked in.
And so you had this time of really just learning about yourself and how to be around other people and all of those things. And we really have lost that. So I thought that was interesting.
But yeah, I just love how each of you brought those insights from that time, but also just listening to your kids and seeing who is in front of you and listening to your heart. Because I really feel like all of you had, there’s just this call to be with your kids, this is so important. So I think that was really beautiful.
JEN: I was just going to say, on that note, Anna, we’ve also needed to appreciate that with this more structured approach that the education system is still moving towards, we need to understand the pressure that that puts on teachers.
ANNA: Yeah, absolutely.
JEN: There is no space for relationships. There is no space for connection. And so I appreciate where the system is trying to move towards, but it just puts so much pressure on so many layers within that, that it ends up just extracting all of the good pieces from the teaching profession. That again, like when anyone is in a stressful environment, no one is going to benefit from that.
And we see that time and time again, that teachers are under incredible stress, incredible pressure.
ANNA: Well, that whole system, right? I feel like that whole system is having this pressure of, we need these outcomes, so we’re going to put pressure on this system. But when you drill down to the individuals there, I mean, every teacher I know, again, has the biggest heart, right?
They’re there because they love kids. They love learning themselves. They want to be a part of something, like you said, Michelle, these foundational pieces of like, if we can reach these kids.
And so there’s just, there is so much heart there, but you see this incredible pressure coming from wherever, governments, larger community, whatever that puts such pressure that makes it this boiling point. And I think it’s the kids who suffer and really the teachers too in those systems. It’s so hard.
Okay. So my question is, it’s similar to what we’ve been talking about, but can you share any mindset shifts that have happened on your unschooling journey? Maybe shifts away from schoolish ideas or the way you thought it might be.
And I think we’re all, we talk about this a lot on the network, we’re all learning all the time, but just some of those shifts for you that have been like, oh, I thought it was going to be this way, but really, my kids have shown me another way. So I will go to Erika first.
ERIKA: Yes. I mean, there’s been so many, but I feel like one of the biggest things I had taken away from all of my schooling was that there is a right way for everything, one right way, at least a better path compared to a worse path or, different ideas like that.
And so I think that left me as an adult kind of trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this and what’s the right way to do this. What’s the best way, there’s got to be a correct way for me to parent and there’s got to be a right, best way for my kids to do X, Y, Z. And so that has been gigantic for my mindset to realize that there’s not a right way and that we can’t know. I think we’re promised a lot in school that if you do these things, you’ll get a good outcome.
And now I know that’s not true. And so I feel like that has taken a lot of pressure off of all of our individual decisions. It’s opened my eyes to the great lives that people are having that I would have judged as not a good life back when I was in school because they didn’t do it right, or I don’t know, it wasn’t prestigious enough or something like that. And so I would say that’s probably the biggest mindset shift. I also feel like I had kind of an immature view of the expectations of school being like making sense or being easy when I was younger, that now I don’t feel like that at all.
I understand deeply now that people are different. Back when I was in school, I had a lot of empathy and really cared about how other people were feeling and doing, but it didn’t make sense to me why they wouldn’t just do it though. Like, why don’t you just do the work and then it will be okay and you’ll stop getting yelled at and you’ll stop being in trouble and you’ll get good grades. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that this is harder for some people than it is for others or that we have different strengths. And so that is something that I am so grateful that I know now, just how different people are and how different everyone’s experience of every single thing is from everyone else.
It’s been interesting if I ever do have a chance to talk with someone from my school days, how different our memories are of the same things. Something that stuck with me forever that shook me to my core at that time. I’ve had people be like, oh, I don’t remember that that happened. So really even back then everyone was having a completely different experience.
But I didn’t recognize that at that time, of course, because I was young. And so that’s something that as a parent, I think, and as an unschooler on this journey in particular, I think I’ve had a lot of space to dive into really questioning those things. And I’m so grateful.
ANNA: Yes, those are big ones! Okay, Jenna, I’ll go to you next.
JEN: Yeah, with mindset shifts, it’s almost hard to pinpoint what exactly they were once you’ve made the mindset shift, right? Sort of like, oh, what was my mindset like back then? And I think one of the biggest ones was moving from this mechanistic kind of approach to raising children.
And when I say mechanistic, I’m referring to if you’ve, well, I know you beautiful ladies have read it, because that’s how I discovered it. Alison Gopnik’s book, “The Gardener and the Carpenter.” This whole carpenter approach where you are trying to mold or build something specific. And so you’re making decisions based on, if I do this thing, then I’m going to get this outcome.
What that shifted to was really this gardener approach, which is really interesting, because we’re now as a family, we’re now going down the road of regenerative agriculture, so everything that I’m learning about regenerative agriculture, I’m looking at it through the lens of unschooling. And it’s really this whole idea of understanding the nature of things, understanding, what it really takes, it needs to start with observation, right?
You need to really take that step back and see the child in front of you, which is really impossible to do when you have that mechanistic kind of approach, that carpenter approach where you’re trying to mold them into something specific. I don’t believe that children are this blank slate for us to just do with what we like. I believe that every individual is their own person.
And like Erika demonstrated, two people can have the same kind of experience, but they experience it very differently. And so really moving towards this gardener approach, it’s all about creating the conditions that allows the nature of that thing to really bloom.
We see it in schools, the kinds of conditions that we create in the education system, how it really stifles a lot of children. I know you’ve spoken about it, Anna, that you work with a lot of adults who are in their forties, fifties, and are really just learning about themselves now because they’ve kind of lived this surface level life where they’ve done all the right things. They’ve followed the directions that well-intentioned people have been kind of steering them on, but feel out of alignment with the life that they’re living.
And so I think for me, one of the biggest blessings, and even though I would have my mom back in a heartbeat, losing my mom at such a young age helped me to see the depth of life. I started to question everything when that took place, that I started to really understand. I started to dive deep into what the meaning of life was. And so through going on this unschooling journey, like I said, I felt so called to it that I couldn’t not do it.
And that was really the birthplace of me making decisions from my heart and appreciating that children know how to do that best. They really know how to follow that inner voice within them. And from my perspective, coming from that really mechanistic approach to living life to this gardener approach has allowed me to see the magic that unfolds as we are living life.
Why would we want to set outcomes for other people? It just makes zero sense to me now that, like Erika said, I just feel so grateful that I have come across this way of living life, because there is just so much more connection. There’s so much more depth to the way we’re living our lives that no amount of planning could ever create that.
And it’s just like, why would I want to? There’s just so much magic that comes from being in the present moment and following what we’re drawn to in any given moment that, to me, curriculum just makes zero sense. And particularly in this day and age where the world is changing so rapidly, I always say to parents, like, what are we actually planning for?
What are we planning for when, I think I heard a statistic like by 2030, 85% of the jobs that will be around in 2030 don’t even exist. And it’s like, what are we planning for people? Whereas by really following what a child is interested in and being so in tune and present with where they’re at in that particular time, not worrying about what their reading ability is, or their writing ability is, or do they know how to do this, or how to solve this mathematical equation.
I’m seeing this now, with my youngest. I’ve really been on this pathway pretty much from the get go with him. And just seeing all of these skills just naturally organically evolve has been really beautiful. And he’s not, if he was to go into a school environment, which he has entertained and played with that idea, because this pathway is not about whether you go to school or not. It is so much more about what is that, what are those conditions that are really going to allow this child to be more of who they already are. And so he has gone back into the school system. And it just doesn’t make any sense, because it’s just this surface level stuff, filling this worksheet.
And I actually showed Leeton a couple of months ago, he was doing something, he was playing a computer game, and he needed to work out which V-Buck bundle he was going to purchase. And watching him navigate that, it was just like, oh my goodness. And then I, as a teacher, documented what that looks like, pen and paper form.
And then I said, mate, what you just did then, that’s what that looks like at school. It doesn’t make sense whatsoever that just filling in a worksheet is going to bring about that depth that you get when you learn things in context.
And so I think, from a parenting perspective, does it make sense to just know how to do something on a worksheet? Or does it make sense being able to solve problems as you’re encountering the problems in everyday life? And I think really every parent would agree that’s way more meaningful than filling in, showing that you know how to solve this mathematical problem through this teacher method that the teacher has delivered.
And even my eldest son, who has been at school for the most time, and did pretty well at school, then started his electrical trade, had to do an early entry exam where they had to do a numeracy and a mathematical one. And he even said, he’s like, mom, I’ll be lucky if I got, he was kind of being smart about it. He’s like, I’d be lucky if I got zero.
I’ve learned all of these things, but do you think I could remember how to do it? And it’s like, yeah, mate, because when we don’t learn things in context, we don’t grow the depth. And going back to what I was saying with the gardener and the carpenter, now understanding more about regenerative agriculture, it’s about what’s happening beneath the surface that drives what happens above the surface.
And so that’s where my mindset has shifted probably the most is understanding that when we learn things in context, we’re actively learning them. We’re growing those roots that allow us to then take those concepts and apply them in all different contexts. And so, I often talk about this whole idea of, well, most people in my world drive a car, but I guarantee hardly any of them know how the engine works.
Like we know how to drive a car, but we don’t need to know all of the intricacies of how the engine works to actually be able to drive that car. What I feel education is trying to do, it’s trying to really teach all of the intricate pieces, whether they’re related or relevant to what the learner is interested in or not. And so I just feel like we lose, we lose the context, right?
ANNA: We lose that context.
JEN: Yeah. We really do lose the context and we get bogged down in all of this detail. But when you think about how we learned to walk and talk, no one sat there and said, right, okay, now you’re going to put this leg forward.
We didn’t explicitly teach that. And somehow we get this idea that once we hit the age of five and even earlier now, everything needs to be explicitly taught. And it’s like, no, everything is implicitly taught.
And this is the thing about even going back to the creatures. Even going back to that gardener and carpenter approach. When we’re taking a carpenter approach and we think about how we want our children to be, but the beautiful thing is we don’t need to do anything to our children. We just need to be it ourselves. And we see it, we see it in our children.
They’ll do something. And I’m like, oh man, I used to do that like early in my parenting days. And I’m like, oh man, that’s coming back to bite me in the bum now. They learn so much more unconsciously than what they do consciously. But yeah, I feel like I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there.
ANNA: That’s okay. I really appreciate it. Because all of those things are wrapped together, right? All those ideas and all those are the shifts that this journey teaches us. That is part of our implicit learning, right? Of just being able to be there and be a part of it. So yeah, I love that. But I’ll go to you, Michelle, and see what your thoughts are about that.
MICHELLE: So as I was listening to her, I was thinking about how a lot of my thoughts and chewing on these questions were similar. Like the gardener situation, I’ve been thinking about children, my children in particular, whether it’s about flowers or animals, the environment mattering very much. And so for example, different flowers, obviously they need different environments to thrive.
With animals, I view it in a sense of how much is the school environment asking a tiger to swim or, I don’t know how well tigers swim actually, but okay, have the fish climb the tree, right? Yeah. That I think that’s what school is actually doing in a lot of senses is trying to take a child who, if left to the beauty of exploring the world in the safety of their home with their parents and family, that they would be able to thrive and blossom.
It makes me upset that so many children get labeled in certain negative ways that they think something’s wrong with them, instead of recognizing that it’s the adults that are trying to fit them into a particular box that is never going to work for them. Even as an adult, they might struggle and as an adult, still trying to fit into that box and everything. So I don’t know if this mindset shift per se, but something that does bother me is the use of the word behind.
I feel like it’s not a helpful term to say that a child is behind. Behind who? Behind what?
That’s not helpful for the child. It might be helpful in your system and such. But if the whole idea is to nurture and teach children and help them to learn and enjoy learning, critical thinking, all the things that schools want to put out as, oh, we’re helping them to be critical thinkers and things like that.
But then the way that you’re going about instructing them doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit together because you want them to conform. And I just think that, well, I wrote down, it’s sad to have kids jumping through hoops.
I know from my own experience of being a child and wanting to get good grades. That was so important to me was getting those good grades. And I felt like as I got older, I didn’t learn anything. I just was really good at regurgitation.
And then I got the golden stars and everything for that. But as far as my actual understanding of things, the way I view things now is mastery and enjoyment are available to us. So to learn something because you want to be able to do a thing, that’s the reason why you learn.
So when people, teachers, parents, whatever, want kids to learn by a certain age, learn how to read by a certain age, it’s for their purposes. It’s not for the child to be able to enjoy what comes from being able to read. All five of my children taught themselves to read at different ages in different ways, but they were just in an environment with their parents, their extended family. There’s so much around us that how can you not in a sense take it in. You’re just going to be able to eventually understand. It clicks at different times. One day you couldn’t as an 11 year old you just haven’t gotten it yet. And then all of a sudden, you’re reading big long sentences. And we have so many homeschooling, unschooling stories of this.
It just really makes me sad for kids that are stuck in the system that have those labels. But also the fact of just kids being focused on grades, what comes from that, whether the teachers or the adults realize it or not, is the question, will it be on the test? And so then, if it’s not on the test, I don’t care about it. Why would I spend my mental energy? I could be doing other things with my life.
It makes the learning not enjoyable. You’re just regurgitating and missing all of the beauty and wonder of being able to learn about anything you want. I mean, the world that we live in now, as far as the access that we have to the information and school is like a fake world.
It’s an imitation. I remember when I was in third grade, my teacher set up a whole big portion of the room that was a store. And we had a cash register and we could buy things. But at the end of the day, that’s fake money. That’s, it’s not real money. It’s not real world learning about, budgeting or whatever.
I feel like because of who I am that all these mindset shifts may have happened just naturally anyways, but definitely being on the unschooling journey. I don’t even know how to end that sentence, but yeah it’s part of it.
ANNA: But just tuning in with your kids. You just really brought those things that were deep inside of you to the surface. Because I think that’s the beauty of our kids just really showing us these things that I think we have inherently known. But a lot of us that went through that system, it’s kind of been pushed down. And something you said reminded me, do you, Pam, do you remember Animal School? I’m going to try to find it.
It’s an old video. I feel like it’s probably been 15 or 20 years. Maybe it’s still out there, but it’s this exact thing about what you’re talking about. And it just brings you to tears. The fish is at school and he has to stay out because he doesn’t know how to climb the tree, but the monkey gets to go climb the tree and then he has to stop that to learn how to swim. And, oh my gosh, recognizing that these environments don’t mean anything.
And I think that’s what I love about when people start questioning is because we just don’t question it, right? We don’t question, does this make the most sense? Is this the easiest way or the best way or the most efficient way even to learn about something?
And so I think it’s cool when you open that up, because again, I think so many people in that environment, they want that. And they have a lot of constraints around what that can look like. And so when we have the privilege and the ability to be able to try different things. For kids to really guide their own learning, find their ways. It can be really beautiful.
PAM: Yeah. And I think for me, through this whole conversation, really what shines for me as one of the big differences is, and you alluded to it, Michelle, is the, how in the system we come to put value on learning that happens there over all the other learning. Why can’t I learn while I do this other thing that I love, at which I’m learning a ton. So for me, I feel like you’ve been able to see within your lives and within the system, just the huge difference in how one just defines learning and the fact that, okay, not even define how we value, that idea that there is learning that is more valuable.
There’s learning more valuable to the system for the system’s reasons, but not to the individual, right? Things that are important to them in the moment are just beautiful learning experiences.
Well, thank you all so much for joining us. It’s been such an interesting conversation. I have loved how much you guys have thought about this and processed it, and I really appreciate you sharing with us.
And we invite everyone listening to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to continue the conversation with all of us. It is a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a nonjudgmental space where you can explore these more unconventional ideas about learning and parenting and these wonderful gardener and carpenter metaphors, and what they just can look like day to day in your family, because as Erika said, people are different.
Your family’s different from our family’s. Your child’s different from a sibling or from another family’s child, but that doesn’t mean we have to twist these ideas, right? They fit for individuals, for people, just as the human beings they are.
Anyway, your first month is free so that you can get a sense of whether the community is a good fit for you, and we are very excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfully.ca and choose Network in the menu up top. Wishing everyone a lovely day.
Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you. We appreciate you joining us.
