Reflections on Deschooling

One of my great areas of cerebral and practical interest is that of education.  What is it really?  It’s not school, or I should say not only school.  Education is much, much bigger.  So how should we  look at education?  Many people of faith think of it with an “in” or “out” approach.  You either keep them “in” the public school system or you take them “out”.  But many times the actual style of education that is happening with the “home” crowd closely resembles the structure, if not the content of the “school” group.  But education doesn’t stop with the schools.  We have opportunities all around us all the time for learning and growing that go way beyond what school offers.  How should people of faith think on those issues?  The question I personally want to answer with education is not, “What job can I get?”, but “What skills and knowledge do I need to live a meaningful life?”

Here’s my background:  My degree in college was in Mathematics Education which qualified me on finishing my studies to teach 4-12 grade mathematics and K-8 all subjects (due to my added endorsement in elementary education.)  Before you get too impressed with the Math part let me tell you that if I hadn’t had study partners in my Junior and Senior years I would have drowned in the sea of all those letters and numbers.  Anyway, I ended up substitute teaching for 2 1/2 years and I had my own 1st grade class for 2 years.  When my daughter was born I really started looking into various kind of models of education since I was thinking of teaching her at home.  A couple of the models I looked into were:

• Montessori
• Waldorf
• Charlotte Mason
• Unschooling/Deschooling

And to be honest, I found things in each that I liked.  Deschooling, however held a certain mystique for me and still does.  Reading about it really gave me sense of the possible.  And I began to wonder, if it does that for me what would that style of education do for my children?  So I am setting myself a task.

I’ve been reading a book by Matt Hern entitled, Everywhere All the Time:  A New Deschooling Reader. This book has a great collection of authors, including deschooled kids themselves. I am going to be pulling different thoughts, ideas and quotes from this book and take some time for reflection.  I’m not looking for a one-size-fits-all model to lay like a template over my life and that of my children, but more a way of thinking about education that incorporates it into all aspects of my life.  I’m excited to see where this will lead.

“Justice at the Table” Workshop coming

I would love for you to join me for a “Justice at the Table Workshop”.  I’ve been working for the last several months to better integrate the issues of faith, communion and food practices in a practical resource and I’m excited to share this with all who are interested.  If you are please join us.  Here’s the information:

Description: Come to a “The Revolution Starts at Home” event, Justice at the Table!  We will explore together the intricate connections between our faith and the food we eat.  We will challenge ourselves and each other to bring our eating and buying practices more in line with our beliefs and begin drafting a  plan to help us implement the changes we hope to make.

Event Details:

• Date – March 13th, 2010
• Where – Mustard Seed House, 510 NE 81st Street Seattle, WA  98115 (upper floor, back entrance)
• Time – 9am – 3pm
• Food – Coffee, Tea, and a vegetarian lunch is included.  Please bring any snack with you that you wish to share.
• Children – Due to our limited space and small staff, we are unable to offer childcare at this event.  You are welcome however to bring children 2 and under with you if you feel they’d do well in a room of chatting adults.
• Cost – $40 individual/$35 groups of 2 or more (if cost is prohibitive please contact mail@msainfo.org for scholarship information)

Renewing my Hope

March 9 last Spring our third child was born, a beautiful healthy boy.  For the past eight months we’ve been in what I like to call “hamster-wheel-mode”, going from one thing to the next, never quite getting it all done, crashing completely spent in front of the TV, going to bed, then waking up too early to start it all over again.  My husband, Eliacin, and I haven’t been too happy with this rhythm but we’ve been too tired to think of anything new.

For my birthday this past week Eliacin gave me a wonderful gift, the gift of time-off!  We took a couple of days and went to a cabin up at Cama Beach State Park.  The cabin had two full beds, a microwave, a fridge and a sink, (and heat) with a bath house a short walk from our cabin.  (And for anyone living on a limited income these are really inexpensive off-season!)  No stove.  No TV.  We took all our meals premade and just reheated.  We went on 2-3 long walks a day, and played games with the kids at night.  We watch a heron come every evening to fish right in front of our cabin.  We stared at the water and the rain and trully started relaxing more than we’d been able to for a long time.  Then we started talking.

What we realized pretty quickly was that once again we were off-track, saying and doing completely different things.  Believing in a life-style of self-education, but spending most of our evenings in front of the TV.  Believing it was our responsibility to give our kids a foundation for their spiritual journey, but taking little time to talk with them about it.  So we came up with a few simple guidelines for ourselves that we are challenging ourselves to follow.

• Have a morning and evening prayer time with our kids where we read scripture, talk through bible stories and just engage their thoughts and questions.
• Turn off the TV Monday-Thursday and either read, listen to books or radio, or just go to sleep early if we need it.
• Take a family walk everyday around the neighborhood.

Simple actions that we hope will help us move forward.  It is so much easier for me to give up, to stop moving forward.  But everytime that becomes my rhythm, my life looses its joy, its passion.  I don’t want to live without passsion.  Sometimes I think of my life as a spiral.  It’s either one that starts with me and moves outward sharing and giving or it takes everything that surrounds me and draws it in to myself focusing more and more on my own family and interests.  Right now I need to change the direction of my spiral and regain the passion and hope I think is so essential to living an abundant life.

Justice at Christ’s Table

Envision your local church; the altar, pew, or whatever space in which you take communion.  What does that look like for you?  Now imagine your dinner table, coffee table, couch, where you eat dinner most frequently transported to that space.

What thoughts come to your mind?

Would your dinner plans change in reference to your new surrounding?

What would you eat?

Would the table look different?

Who would be sitting with you?

Who would cook and clean up?

Is it still your dinner table?

A lot of thoughts have been floating in and out of my mind as I’ve been preparing for a workshop I’m facilitating for The Revolution Starts at Home series entitled “Justice at the Table“.  And from the beginning I’ve sensed that I’m missing something.  Something essential, foundational but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

As so often happens in my life something I recently read started to pull it all together for me.  I decided to pick up the book Take This Bread by Sara Miles.  This book is very open look at the life of a amazing women who was dramatically transformed by partaking of the eucharist.  And it dawned on me finally what I was missing in my whole view of food issues and my faith.

I was missing communion, I was missing the body of Christ.  And not just the spiritualized view of the Lord’s Table but the actual down to earth translation of what that meant.  What does it mean to BE Christ’s body for people?  What does it mean to say that his body is offered freely?  And how should that change me?

Christians are in no way unique in their desire to eat justly.  There are many groups the world over that are working extremely hard to change the systems that marginalize others.  But I feel we have an added mandate and it is directly related to Christ’s body.  He not only called himself the Bread of Life but he shared bread with others many times in his ministry.  He didn’t just talk, but literally became what he preached.

I’m at a crossroads right now.  I feel that I can’t just buy fair traded coffee and locally grown produce and say that’s the epitome of food and justice for christian life.  I need a way in which to become the bread,  to become the body and I need to do it in a way that puts me in communion, in the truest sense of that word, with the rest of the body as well.  I’m not sure where this will lead but I think I’m finally at a place where I’m ready to find out.

Finding Balance

One of the ideas I sincerely believe in is that our lives are not meant to be fragmented but whole.  Instead of pinning labels to myself: mom, wife, homemaker, home education parent, non-profit worker, pregnant woman; I want my life to be integrated, with one role or responsibility flowing into the next.  Please understand, this is my ideal, not what I’ve been able to achieve.  And recently finding the balance that makes it all possible has been extremely difficult.  So I apologize for my absence and hope to be blogging more regularly in the future.

The Revolution Starts at Home

Making coffee to open our eyes in the morning, food preparation to sustain our bodies, washing clothes, cleaning our homes, nurturing our children, sleeping (maybe?). The list goes on. These activities and hundreds more like them take significant blocks of time out of our days and weeks. In our society which tries to “box” everything into neat little categories, these things are in the, “Ugh, Do I have to do that again?” category. Which in my mind brings up several questions:

• How many hours do we really spend on this stuff each week?
• Are these sacred or secular activities?
• If secular, does that mean that much of our lives are godless?
• If spiritual, WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT!?

That’s what this blog is about. Reclaiming those areas of our lives, by many viewed as boring and dull, to be sacred and taking small steps each day to bring them back into the spiritual realm of our lives; or better yet, expanding the spiritual to leave nothing out.

The Laundry Monster

Laundry is one of those chores that people either love or hate. When I talk to people who do a lot of housework laundry and dishes come up as the top two in the Ugh! factor. For me I actually quite enjoy it. Eliacin and I started our married life in Puerto Rico; we lived in a cement duplex about fifty feet from the Caribbean Sea. With just the two of us the laundry didn’t add up that fast. And with minimal days of rain and no dryer I hung it up in the back yard. I’d wash it up in the morning and throughout the morning I’d go out into the beautiful sunshine look at the sea and hang it while enjoying the fresh breeze. Ahhhh! The I’d put on a good movie in the evenings and fold it all up and put it away. It was one of my most relaxing chores.

Things have changed a bit. I live in a community house with three floors. I’m on the top floor, laundry is in the basement. My husband and I now have two kids with one in cloth diaper that we wash ourselves. Needless to say the laundry can really pile up! (I average about ten loads a week.) A member of our community calls the dry laundry that I gather throughout the day on my couch my laundry monster.

Looking back on my laundry experience in Puerto Rico I was recently trying to figure out what it was I enjoyed so much. Was it the sun, the sea, the breeze, watching my daughter playing in the yard? And I came to realize that it was a combination of all these things. A sense of all things fitting together. A joyfulness in daily tasks. A deep sense of prayer without words.