The Musings of the Sickly

I feel the need to post something. Not because, at this moment, anything particularly interesting is happening, but because I just feel the need to put something down in words. That's not to say that nothing interesting has been happening--it most certainly has been!--just that right now I am laid up, high on Vicodin, after having oral surgery. And there is nothing that can make the world interesting when your jaw is aching and you can't focus your eyes for an extended period of time.

Of course, this gives me time to catch up on my blog and book reading, and maybe write a bit. All of these things have sadly been falling by the wayside of late, as I have been running from pillar to post doing all sorts of crazy things (learning to bellydance! watching my sister learn parkour! taking horseback riding lessons! volunteering at The Grace Foundation of Northern California, which is a truly lovely place, and helping school some of their horses! hanging out with friends! taking pictures of dead cows ! getting in shape for the summer! trying to fit some family time in there somewhere!). Such is Unschooling life.

Several times recently I have been asked 'how do you fit school work in between everything else you're doing?' (mostly by kids I know who go to school, and envy all the time I have to run about doing things while they sit in class rooms). The answer to those questions is: I don't 'fit schoolwork in' anywhere. Living my life is 'schoolwork', and yes, occasionally I have to break out the math textbook (which I really need to catch up on in preparation for taking a community college math course next year), but that's part of my life too. One of my friends, who is a homeschooling mom and also the mother of three of my friends (yes, shocking, children can be friends with parents!) put it best in a conversation I had with her awhile ago. She said that the word school really has no place in the description of what we're doing, we're learning by living our lives. I wish I could remember her exact words, because they were much more eloquent than that, but it gets the point across.

I agree with her to an extent. School is not a word I associate with what I'm doing at the moment. School is a word I associate with institutionalized education, with spending the majority of my time being force fed useless information, with discomfort and lack of personal expression. None of that has anything to do with the way I am currently living my life. I'm learning useful things, I'm re-learning how to be a functional member of society (and the ways in which I don't want to be what is thought of as a normal, functional member of society), I'm comfortable with my life, I'm capable of expressing myself through words and humor and physical appearance in ways that would not be thought of as 'acceptable' within a school environment. I'm not sitting in front of textbooks, learning the same thing everyone else in the country is expected to learn, and not really processing any of it.

So School is not what I am doing. School, really, has no place in a description of my life. And my life is how I am learning. Un-schooling is not really a full or positive description of that, but seeing as it's the best one we have I'll continue to use it to find people like me, and to explain myself to people who don't understand it.


I hope this is a coherent expression of my thoughts, though I certainly didn't start writing with the intention of going off on this tangent. I guess I'll have to check back when I'm sobered up and no longer in pain.