If I could see something
You can see anything you want boy
If I could be someone-
You can be anyone, celebrate boy.
If I could do something-
Well you can do something,
If I could do anything-
Well can you do something out of this world?
...
Dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer
Dreamers don't suffer from attention deficit. On the contrary, they have amazing powers of concentration. My husband, who can focus his attention inwardly so much that he becomes completely oblivious to the outside world is a case in point. He may seem absent-minded, but, in fact, he is capable of such intense concentration that he can completely tune out external stimuli. Now that he is in his 40's, he is allowed focus his attention on subjects of his choosing. But when he was a kid, he was called a dreamer...
Peter is 10. From the time he was very small, when kids are supposed to have real short attention spans, he could spend hours on one activity. What activity? Well, it almost didn't matter, as long as it was something he chose himself: Rescue Heroes, mazes, Bionicles, sand castles, recycle towns, Legos, drawing comic strips, writing a story, more Legos, perspective drawing, Star Wars, drawing on the computer, back to Legos, photography, Redwall, stop motion shorts.....
His capacity for concentration would vanish without a trace the minute I tried to get him to do something that was part of my agenda. Whenever I tried to complete any "planned" activity, Peter would suddenly become very hungry, or cold, or droop in his chair, or notice a spider, or remember that he forgot to feed the cats, sharpen his pencils, brush his teeth, anything, to get him away from the task at hand.
I guess that the reason this presents a problem for me is that I have not yet become comfortable with the type of homeschooling family I want us to be. As many others, I entered this realm with the idea of orderly lesson plans, organized around a fairly predictable schedule, covering a variety of subjects in ways way more interesting than a school ever could. To my keen disappointment, my son did not think that my carefully prepared lessons, full of humor, cross cultural references, and interlaced with poetry, Aesop and Shakespeare, were very interesting at all. His dramatically acted out boredom and flagrant procrastination were infuriating and deeply wounding at the same time.
So, for a time, I let it all go, and allowed him to occupy himself in any way he wanted. I read up on unschooling, and tried to make my peace with it. But I felt a nagging sense of unease. Was I allowing him to lapse into total ignorance? Was he learning any kind of discipline? He was reading a lot, fiction and comic books along with history, but was there any rhyme or reason to it? Currently, he is obsessed with making stop-motion films. It's true that he could stay on task for hours, even days, but was what he was doing useful? Measurable? Productive? Educational?
Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of ideas in the homeschooling blogosphere that made me realize how restricted I was in my thinking. The idea of classical homeschooling has always appealed to my organization-hungry controlling side. It also resembled the way I was educated. Unschooling seemed to be it's diametrical opposite. But why not classical unschooling? Maybe you can't teach true discipline and love of learning. Maybe those things, to really take hold, have to come from within, and all you can do is to set the stage for that to become possible. Maybe the most important lessons Peter was learning in the days he made those amusing and seemingly inconsequential Lego films was self-discipline, commitment, persistence, patience, and a chance to see something he created out of nothing come to life. And the most important lesson I was learning? I don't know. Ask me when he's grown up. Patience? Trust, maybe?...
The other idea was RedMolly's bittersweet musings on Dreams Deferred... And here, I have a story of my own. Although I may be one of the people who has "picked up new dreams to replace the old", there is one story of an old dream that I recall with particular regret. The one about being a costume queen with the highly-regarded, avant-garde theater company right after college. When I told my parents I got the job, they cautioned me that it wouldn't pay, and maybe my first job out of college should at least guarantee a rent payment. I chickened out. I turned it down. When I told my dad, he said: "But why? I thought you really wanted to do that!"
We want to teach our kids practical skills, so that they can function in the clinically objective world that values skills more than dreams. But if we squelch in them the ability to dream, what does that leave them to stand up to, defend against, and beat down that heartless reality?
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