Cecile Conrad: 0:14

Welcome to this episode of the Ladies Fixing the World. We've decided today to introduce ourselves. We didn't do it in episode one because we just started talking, which is the most important part to share the insights and the questions and the perspectives on unschooling. But equally, maybe we should not assume that everyone knows who we are, even though for the two others in this maybe they do. So, yeah, we decided to talk about who we are, where we are, how many kids we have, how unschooled they are and maybe why when we got started. So I think Sandra Dodd is very ready.

Sandra Dodd: 1:03

I think Sandra Dodd is very ready. Maybe you start. My name is Sandra Dodd and I have three children. I didn't want to have children. I had thought the world is too harsh, I will not have children. And then I sort of accidentally did. And when I, when we had a baby, keith and I used to take turns being the one who said let's do and the other one's going not. Yet when we did, we both got really excited and really into it and all of our hormones kicked in, which is great for us, and we said let's have lots. We were already in our thirties so it was not as advantageous, but we ended up with three and I had always been very interested in education and just curious about everything and was already I had been a teacher in public schools.

Sandra Dodd: 1:42

I had wanted to do that since I was little. I was good at making connections since I don't know, just out of curiosity, but I had a teacher in high school too who did a six-week course One year. They let each teacher do what they were most interested in and we did six weeks rotation and my choir teacher did what he called humanities. He just called it humanities and it was connections. It was history of Europe mostly, but it was music, architecture, clothing tied in. So, instead of chopping this way, science and everything separate, it was this chart, this chart vertical, like in this place. They were doing all these different things. Why, but how? Why? How was the art related to the, the clothing and maybe the politics or whatever. And I thought, oh, this is great, this, this makes history, science. You know, this makes this makes science music and all of these things can be connected. So I liked, I liked the ideas that I got there. I was 15, maybe 16. And then I just carried that around with me and looked at the world through that lens.

Sandra Dodd: 2:49

I graduated from college early, so I was only 20. When I graduated from college, my family was kind of falling apart. My mom was an alcoholic, so I didn't come from a lot of joy and stability in a way. My dad was an alcoholic, so I didn't come from a lot of joy and stability in a way. My dad was great and things were. Things were pretty solid. You know, I had an, I had a house, I had clothes, had musical instruments, so I felt rich. That was good.

Sandra Dodd: 3:10

But as I, as I came out of that problem, just as the time, about the time I graduated in college, I saw people who are in calm, stable families have an advantage. I don't think I had really seen that before because a lot of the families I knew families of friends of mine where I got to visit the house and stay over or whatever you know get to really know the family. Some of them were, you know, they're just the whole range of humans. Some of them were very quiet. I didn't learn much. Some were reactive and talkative and I learned more. Some fell apart, some stayed together, but I hadn't been very analytical about the effect on the kids until I got older. I still didn't have children. So when I had children, everything that I was learning at the time started coming together.

Sandra Dodd: 3:55

In that same vein of comparison of factors and learning all kinds of things, just before I got pregnant I was going to adult children alcoholics. It's a part of a program called Al-Anon. It's part of 12-step programs. Guess what? This probably could have messed you up or caused you some problems, but it wasn't your fault. Let's see how we can roll back and you can see the world a little more clearly and you can help heal your inner child. A lot of the people were carrying around teddy bears to represent the healing they were going to do for some other entity and I found out I was pregnant.

Sandra Dodd: 4:34

So I was focusing on I need to fix this so that this little baby can have cannot have the disadvantages of alcoholism in the family. Because they said, even if your parents didn't drink, but if you had alcoholic grandparents, it can still have an ill effect on the way they parent, on the way that they see what's normal, on the way that they react to things. And I thought, wow, that's scary. And some people had two alcoholic parents, which was worse than mine. So my husband does not have alcoholic parents, so genetically my kids were one quarter proclivity of alcoholism and I thought this is good, we can work with this, we can rise above all this, and so that was my goal.

Sandra Dodd: 5:13

Then, when I had the baby, I joined La Leche League, which was mothers helping other mothers nurse babies in an as healthy and sensible way as they could, and those two things together really helped me, and both of those have ideas that flowed directly into unschooling so easily and so naturally. But we didn't know we were going to unschool, we thought we were going to put the kids in school. So, gradually and very incrementally, we had it easy. We didn't send the first child to school. We thought we probably will send the next one, and so it was never one big, big, momentous decision. It was very sneaky and flowy and none of my children ever went to school.

Sandra Dodd: 5:57

They're all grown now to have children of their own. One went to college and one got a fancy job. Where they waived college, they said, oh, you can do this and this. Okay, usually we want a college degree, but you're good, you're good, you're in. The other is the youngest, holly. No children yet, no marriage, no fancy job. But she does a lot of little jobs and a lot of really interesting things and knows a lot of great people who give her opportunities. So she's traveled a lot, she's anyway. So that's that. I'm happy with all of them. They're happy with their upbringing. We learned a lot. We're still learning a lot along the way.

Cecile Conrad: 6:38

And where are you, sandra oh?

Sandra Dodd: 6:40

I'm sorry. I'm in Albuquerque, new Mexico. New Mexico is between Texas and Arizona and Colorado, and south is a little bit of Mexico, all of Mexico but touching, and that's where you've been the whole time.

Sandra Dodd: 6:56

All of my marriage. I've been in New Mexico most of my life. When I was very little I was in texas. I was born in georgia, but that was just a fluke. My dad was working down there and I popped out, but he was working in south carolina. So I never lived in georgia. I never lived in south carolina. I was an infant. We lived near my grandmother. My dad came back to build my grandmother a house and we lived next to there for a while. And when I was six we moved to northern New Mexico, to a little town called Española and that's where I taught. So I lived there for a long time and now I've lived in Albuquerque since the late 70s 1980. All our kids were born in Albuquerque.

Cecile Conrad: 7:35

I feel like I have 200 questions I want to ask, but that might be too much. I want to know if you speak Spanish and I want to know what happened.

Sandra Dodd: 7:48

I understand, can barely speak, can understand a lot, but there's a lot of that that goes on. If some older person would ask me where something was, I could answer in English. So they would ask me in Spanish, I'd answer in english and that worked all right, but it's the english that's in northern new mexico is very old because the people who came up there first and stayed it was 1598 when the first spanish farmers, you know, they brought people who were going to stay and they didn't keep in contact with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and I think it became mostly a non-literary situation where they weren't reading and writing much and they didn't get the updates. So some of the words are old, are archaic, and some of the verb tenses are less jazzy, less fancy, and they picked up English words for things that were invented after they came along. So they didn't. You know, they used troka for truck instead of communeta.

Cecile Conrad: 8:57

I don't know stuff like that.

Sandra Dodd: 8:58

So it's I, I, I. I can't tell the stories as well as I like to hear them, but it's sometimes, when people from northern new mexico have have gone elsewhere to speak spanish, that it's some kind of a hillbilly situation, I think well, it's a very big language, spanish spoken in many places. It's everywhere, and even even all of the countries in south america, central america. They don't always understand each other super well. They have whole different greetings and slang and I don't know.

Cecile Conrad: 9:28

But no, I didn't learn to speak spanish fluently I will try to not follow that path in my, but I think we skipped over. How did you become an unschooler?

Sandra Dodd: 10:33

So you just said we never sent the first child to school. When I was in college I the professors that I have and I was I majored in English, minored in psychology took a lot of anthropology classes enough for a minor and I took English. I took education classes but very quietly and a couple of them I tested out of or opted out of, appealed to say don't make me take this because I'm taking psychology classes, because a lot of the education stuff was very watered down psychology, child development and I said, look, I already have these credits, let me out. It was embarrassing in those days maybe still sometimes to to be training to be a teacher and I didn't go to the teacher training college in our state. I went to the our, you know, liberal arts university and I I did want to be a teacher. But anyway, the people who were teaching in those days at that university were school reformers the open classroom. The people who wrote the book called the Open Classroom were professors there and we read John Holt. We read a lot of school reformers, but they made us read John Holt, made us read John Holt. So I was already exposed to the ideas.

Sandra Dodd: 11:48

When I taught I was using alternative methods. I never used the textbook that the state gave us. I made my own materials and we came up with exercises and projects, and so I was already doing an alternative ed style teaching, and so when we had babies, I was aware of child development and learning. I was open to the conversations and the play and the things that lead to more questions and ideas. One of the books that I have on my page I don't even know if it's around anymore it's called philosophy and the young child, and it was about seeing philosophical questions in the things that children ask. So I was already looking at my kids like that. They're learning all the time.

Sandra Dodd: 12:33

I didn't go. I could keep them out of school and be cool. It wasn't that at all. It's just that the first child didn't seem in two different ways. He seemed not. It didn't seem in two different ways. He seemed not. It didn't seem like group situations were great for him. He would either jump in and do things wildly or he would hang out on the by the wall and cry. It didn't seem like it would be good to send him to school.

Sandra Dodd: 12:56

So we waited a year. We could wait a year easily because of his age he was born in the summer because of the way the birthdays go. If you're born in the winter, some, there's some sort of have to or can't involved, but with a summer birthday that's the option to wait a year or not. So it was easy for us to experiment with it to try and see what happened and it went so well and it was so easy and so promising. You know, my husband wasn't worried about it at all then and we gave the next two kids options when they got old enough to go to school and they wanted to stay home. So it was easy for us because we were confident and it was gradual.

Sandra Dodd: 13:34

There was no, some people come to it in an emergency situation somehow because something terrible happened with their child in school or various things, but it was easy for us. It just turned out that it was because I was not afraid of it. We used to read Growing Without Schooling magazine. There was no, there's nothing else that John Holt. John Holt had died just a couple of years before, but there are people still keeping a magazine up and they were still printing some of john's writings, and so there was. There was a way to read about unschooling and to read stories of other people who were doing it, but you had to wait two months to read another, another magazine. But that's what I had at first Well, back in the days.

Sandra Dodd: 14:25

Maybe in the 90s, and so as soon as we could get online, as soon as there were discussions, I went there and there weren't many unschoolers at first, but there were more as time passed. By the late 90s there were enough that AOL had a forum just for unschoolers, and there have been some really nice, really rich forums over the years, message boards that have come and gone as styles changed or providers changed, and so there were other people with young children saying how's it going? You know, what do you think about this? How did you do that? How did you avoid this? And so a lot of what's on my website and Joyce Federals are the best parts of those conversations over the years, of particular topics just being analyzed carefully, you know, carefully laid out on the table and and everybody saying this, you know, here's why this part we should work here's, here's what we tried, tried, here's our, here's our success. And so it was easy to be confident in those days too yeah in america why are you saying that?

Cecile Conrad: 15:32

you've said because I don't know, because I I'm not. I'm not not aware of what's going on around me and I'm not very bad at searching the internet, and somehow it didn't. Maybe because it was such a lonely course to do it here. Even 20 years later, it felt like we were all alone and if we could only go to America, there would be a network, there would be someone to talk to.

Sandra Dodd: 16:04

We were on the internet. I know.

Sue Elvis: 16:06

From the beginning there were people in England.

Sandra Dodd: 16:09

There were people in England and Australia. There were people in South Africa, mostly English speakers, but there were pretty early on a lot of people in France. A few could speak English and they were translating for the others.

Cecile Conrad: 16:22

I don't know why I didn't find it.

Sandra Dodd: 16:24

Maybe I am bad at speaking English. I. I don't know why I didn't find it. Maybe I am bad at speaking, I don't know. I've spoken in several European countries a few, but anyway I know people who are not in America and tons of Canadians, I think it was my mindset, to be honest, because I knew about you, but I kind of felt that America was so far away. Well.

Cecile Conrad: 16:48

I didn't want to ask you in public.

Sandra Dodd: 16:50

But you, you have several times said, well, yeah, that's fine for Americans, and I've kind of wanted to go. What are you talking about? Because there are so many people who were not Americans.

Cecile Conrad: 16:58

Yeah, I know I think we're venturing into a discussion and it's not that I don't want to answer your question.

Sandra Dodd: 17:09

No, you don't have to, I'm just.

Cecile Conrad: 17:10

I just think that we're doing this introduction thing and it's spiraling off Um. I'll note it here.

Sandra Dodd: 17:16

Don't ask me a hundred questions. Then let Sue introduce herself.

Cecile Conrad: 17:20

But maybe me not starting to talk about why do I not feel I don't know it's off topic somehow. I'll note it here and then we'll go on topic later, because it's actually interesting. Why do I think it's so much easier in America? I think it has to do with proximity. I think there's something about in real life proximity that actually matters, but I don't know. I'll have to think about it. I'll actually write it here it is. I'll actually write it here it is. Maybe we should move on to the next introduction. If this is introductions, I mean this is a long format podcast. That's what I love about podcasting is the long format that we don't have to do everything in 60 seconds and be all focused and clear and short. We can actually unfold things.

Sue Elvis: 18:27

So it's all good. Shall I introduce myself? I think you should, sue. Okay, I'm Sue Alvis and I live south of Sydney in Australia, and I have eight children, and there's some similarities in my story with yours, sandra, but some differences as well. I had three children, I think.

Sue Elvis: 18:49

When my first one got to the age of five and we had been doing attachment parenting, I was reading things books like the Ones by the Seers, and breastfeeding, and I just thought that we were doing okay at home. Why send our first child to school? I could see she was learning a lot at home and I just thought well, look, why don't we keep her home between the age of five and six? Because in Australia you don't have to send your kids to school legally until they're six years old, though a lot of people do send their children when they're almost five and five, and my youngest brother. He was homeschooled, so I knew that homeschooling was a possibility here. So I told all my friends that we were keeping our daughter home an extra year. She wasn't going to go to school till she was six and then, behind closed doors, we explored homeschooling. Now I thought that we ought to go out and see if we could make contact with other homeschoolers in our area.

Sue Elvis: 19:55

We were in Sydney at the time, I think. At least we traveled to Sydney for a couple of conferences and they all turned out to be unschoolers, which seems to me rather remarkable all those years ago how many years, I don't know now, maybe nearly 30. And there weren't a lot of homeschoolers around. But we managed to make contact with unschoolers and, like you, sandra, we read John Holtz magazine. We got it sent in the snail mail and, yeah, I poured over it all the time. When a new edition arrived, I sat down with a cup of coffee and just devoured it. But there weren't many homeschooling books and there wasn't the internet and we didn't have a lot of people to get together with in person, even though we went to a couple of conferences. And what I think we were lacking was what we're doing today is having discussions with other people and mulling over ideas and trying to understand unschooling and what it can look like in our families.

Sue Elvis: 21:04

And these stories in John Holtz magazines were good, but I wanted someone to talk about them with, to unpack them, and the message I got mostly was unschooling is about stepping back from your children. Children are naturally curious, they will learn everything they need to know, and parents shouldn't interfere with that natural process. And so I got afraid to do anything with my kids and I just one day thought look, how am I going to share all those things I'm excited about? They might be excited too. I didn't want to force them on them, but I wanted to introduce my kids to things that I enjoyed or things I discovered, and so I think by this time the internet had appeared and we went off track.

Sue Elvis: 21:52

For a while I didn't really understand unschooling totally, and I think it's one of those things that, even after many years, you always find another depth to unschooling, and maybe that's because it's so closely related to life and we never come to the end of things to ponder within our lives. So I went and explored things like Charlotte Mason and classical education, and one day I got fed up with all of that, because I was battling with my kids for them to do what I thought they should do, and in the end I just threw my hands in the air and said oh look, we'll just do what we want to do. We'll do things our way. What I actually did was we started unschooling, but this time around. I knew what we were doing. Well, I didn't know we were unschooling, but we were unschooling without realizing we were unschooling until I got online and started blogging and getting into contact with other unschoolers and one day I thought, hey, this is what we're doing, but we just don't call it unschooling. My kids are interested in, they follow their interests, we listen to each other, we read good books about just just so many things. And I thought this is what we're doing. So, officially, we just declared to the world we were unschoolers and started.

Sue Elvis: 23:14

I started writing about it and exploring it and, sandra, you were one of my heroes because whenever I got doubts about what we were doing well, well, not so much what we were doing, but what I was writing and sharing with the world thinking, oh look, are we really unschooling? Am I sending people the wrong way, giving them the wrong information? I used to look up Hugh, sandra and Joyce and other people and read through it all and get my confidence back. Yes, yes, I think we're on the right track here and you were a great help to me in those early days of blogging when, yeah, I think that term unschooling we've talked about it, I think, before in this podcast about is it important to label ourselves unschoolers or not? But you label yourself an unschooler and you sort of attract that sort of like putting your hand up in the air for all the people who are interested. They can find you.

Sue Elvis: 24:14

And I thought, well, perhaps perhaps I got this all wrong and not that it really matters. Because I think if we listen to our own families, it's not, for our aim isn't to follow a method, it's to live life with our children and to have that atmosphere where they'll thrive, they'll grow, develop, learn. That's the important thing. It was the blogging aspect that sort of threw me a little. Have I got enough to say on this topic and start conversations with people online? But I once said that we will unschool education-wise, but we'd never become radical unschoolers, it would never flow over into our parenting and, just like having eight children, sometimes we're surprised about what happens we found ourselves radically unschooling that's just a sort of a term, I suppose, for taking up the principles of unschooling from education and applying it to the whole of our lives and it affected our parenting in the same way.

Sue Elvis: 25:27

I realized in retrospect what we were doing, that we'd got there, that we hadn't sort of said, oh look, this is what we want to do, but this is where we've arrived. How did we get there? And then we looked back and, yeah, all my children are grown up now. They're my youngest for 10, 21 at the weekend, and I've been on their sort of outskirts, sort of on the fringe of unschooling, as far as being online goes, for a while now. And it's people like you, cec, you, sandra, who keep me sort of tied in there when I've got nothing else. So I think, well, what am I going to do now? I'm an unschooling mother and I'm still here sharing, and that's mostly because of the encouragement of people like you, cecilia and Sandra, and a couple of other podcasters who regularly invite me to have a say on their podcast too. But anyway, I think that's about my story. Is that any?

Cecile Conrad: 26:29

questions.

Sue Elvis: 26:38

about me well, I, I went to uni and I have undefined degree, a science degree, bachelor of science. Botany is my major. I also did biochemistry and I worked at Sydney University before I had children, um, but I don't think, oh, that it's. That story always comes in handy when I say that wasn't really what I wanted to do, I wanted to write, but that's what, the pathway that I sort of got funneled along and, yes, I did my job. Well, for that time that I was at the university and I learned a lot of things like surgery skills. I actually worked. I didn't work in the botany department, I actually worked in the animal physiology department, which sounds strange. I didn't study that at university. But the experimental skills are very much the same, except for the surgery. I ended up learning how to do surgery, be a surgical assistant, which was something that you think, oh, that's a good story to tell my kids.

Sue Elvis: 27:50

But the story that I tell the most is after I left work. I wrote all these notes down, thinking I'll return to full-time employment one day. I need to remember all the things, all my knowledge, and you know, I can hardly remember anything because it's just not relevant to my life. And yeah, that sort of, if I ever need to, I'll go back learn it again. But things that we have no relevant, whether we have no need for or interest in, they tend to slip away. And this is very much informed my approach. It did inform my approach to my children's education not to make them do things just in case and to listen to them, to what they really want to do, and to be confident that if they have a need or an interest, they'll learn what they need to know.

Cecile Conrad: 28:49

Yeah, it's been one of my big deals as well. We don't live our lives to prepare for some just-in-case future that might happen, because the ability to learn a skill or a language or a method it's there. So if we ever find ourselves in need for that, we can go ahead and do it. We don't have to do it beforehand. It seems like a fear-based activity to do things just in case we need it most jobs.

Sandra Dodd: 29:30

They most jobs teach you when you get there. Anyway, what?

Sue Elvis: 29:33

you need to know exactly yeah, but one thing I didn't mention, cecilia, was I married to a school teacher. So he wasn't a school teacher. So he wasn't a school teacher when I married him he was in marketing and sales and then, oh, maybe 16 years ago, 15 years ago, he retrained as a primary school teacher. But the interesting story about that one? Well, there's two interesting stories. One is you can go back to uni in your middle years. That just in case. Is that just in case is it's never too late. You can always go back and learn as an adult and pick up a career later on, and that was a good example for my kids, that inspiring for my own children. But the second thing story which I find really funny is after he qualified, we got together with some homeschoolers, unschoolers, homeschoolers and one of the first questions was oh, it's so wonderful, your husband's now a school teacher. He'll be able to do the homeschooling for you now yeah, but there are some jobs.

Sandra Dodd: 30:40

There are some jobs and one is being that being teacher or having been a teacher. People don't go well, how can you homeschool dinner? How can you unschool? They just like hands up. So I used to be a teacher and they're like OK, like as if that's magic. But very often I mean your husband's doing it because he, because he, wanted to, and that's different. But people like mostly women, who went into education early and then they stayed as long as they did and then they moved over to unschooling. Many times what they learned was what schools don't do, what schools can't do, the problems with schools, and so a lot of times ex-teachers are ex-teachers, even if they. I was an ex-teacher before I had kids. You know I didn't quit because I had kids, I quit because there were problems and lots of people do quit when they have kids.

Cecile Conrad: 31:29

I think we have an older representation of homeschooling and unschooling moms who used to be school teachers because they know from being five.

Sandra Dodd: 31:32

There are quite a few the other jobs that people will say, okay, that's great. Oddly, if you're an engineer or a professor, I don't know why engineers get the buy, doctors don't? You know, if you go, I'm a doctor, nobody goes. Well, then you know they don't stop arguing with doctors. But if you go I'm an engineer, they go. Oh, I don't know what that intimidation factor is, but anybody with a PhD, which is ridiculous, because there have been a couple of times when people with PhDs would come into the discussions that I was running and they thought because they had a PhD, they get to sit in the front row or whatever. But often people who are that invested in the education system, who have just lived there that long, and I, I, I used to think I really wanted a PhD, but what I wanted was a professor's office and a library card where you didn't have to take the books back. Um, you know that, so that was just me being silly, but you can buy those library cards.

Cecile Conrad: 32:26

You just buy the books.

Sandra Dodd: 32:28

Nowadays they're cheap. But I but I think that I think people will come to unschooling discussions and think that their outside education was going to give them the buy that they didn't have to be polite at first or be in the beginning discussions or answer any questions about their own lives in unschooling. But it's like that could be worse at first or be in the beginning discussions or answer any questions about their own lives and unschooling but it's like that could be worse. That could be a disadvantage if you have a PhD in education and are still educating people to be teachers and now you're coming to where there are people some of them didn't even finish high school who are being really good unschoolers. But that doesn't fit the criteria or the expectations of the people who are professionally trained to that level to be the teachers, to be the professors who are teaching people, to teach university, to teach teachers like they're two levels up from actually teaching or from the time that they first thought they might want to be teachers. And I've there are, strangely and oddly, a few who never taught in a classroom, who just stayed in educational research, which is not a crime. That's fine. That's where a lot of unschooling came from, was from research in the 60s and a lot of the experiments that they did where teachers didn't know how the kids tested or you know which kids are slow or quick or gifted or what. Sometimes some of the tests I don't think were very moral, but they would lie to the teachers. They would give a false set of scores for their students to prove that the teachers would pay extra attention to kids that they thought were gifted, that they had been told were gifted. So that's a point that was proven by researchers in the 60s and so it's good to know. It's good to know that test scores make a difference, that it can mess parents at home up to be told this child needs and has and can't and will you know a bunch of predictions like that based on a test based on paper. So I always have tried to encourage unschoolers to stay away from it, stay away from testing, stay away from worrying or thinking about what's my child's IQ. It's like don't go there because there are problems with it. It doesn't measure everything.

Sandra Dodd: 34:30

My favorite model of all of that has been Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences where he came up with seven or eight that number. He's okay with there being eight. Some people have nine. He's not okay with that ninth, as much you know. But anyway it's saying the skills and talents and natural abilities that come with music or kinetic, meaning sports and dance, you know. Movement or verbal and mathematical is what gets tested.

Sandra Dodd: 34:58

But to say that that there's that there some people are very skilled at interpersonal relationships. They're good at reading other relationships. They're good at reading other people. They're good at helping other people out, at seeing problems in friend groups and trying to figure out a way to make peace. Some people are really good at understanding themselves, at knowing why they're upset or why they're unhappy or what they need, and some people aren't of any of those things. If some people are really good at math, some people aren't, it shouldn't be a crime. It shouldn't be considered that you don't have any intelligence.

Sandra Dodd: 35:41

So I've pushed that model for unschooling parents, especially to see if you have a child who is a great artist, whatever it might be. Fashion that involves the subtleties of different shades of orange. No, because I don't care, I have orange and people will talk about the subtleties and I'm like sorry, don't see it. But that doesn't mean I don't realize that there's a value to those who do that there's a value to those who do so. I just think if parents can, can be okay with valuing other alternative intelligences that's that sounds too technical a way to put it if they can just be happy with whatever their kid knows and not, and not keep going back to yes, but what this isn't leading to, algebra, is it? It might be it because, as as my, as my teacher, Sam Jamison, the choir teacher, was telling us, these things are related.

Sandra Dodd: 36:30

And medieval paints and pigments. When they were doing paintings on walls, friezes and stuff, they needed to know what's going to make a color that goes on the wall, what's going to make blue or red. And they were using natural materials, rocks, shells, whatever they were doing grinding it up, mixing it with oil and various things, and but it wasn't just will it make that color, but will it stay for a hundred or five hundred years? They didn't expect anything to last 500 years, but they wanted it to stay on the wall and some of those paints have lasted. They were making their own. They weren't going and buying a set of oil paints, and so any child who's interested in anything, if the parents then go looking for more information about that thing to share with their child.

Sandra Dodd: 37:44

The child sees a model of learning, of digging around and finding out what the history of these ideas are, what else connects to it, chemistry, or finding out what the history of these ideas are, what else connects to it, chemistry, or whatever you know, the idea of the longevity of ink or paint. It's not something a lot of people think of because I know the way I grew up. Ballpoint, pen or pencil it doesn't have to last long. Typewriter and carbon paper it doesn't have to last long. Nobody expects a carbon copy of a letter to last 500 years, carbon copy of a letter to last 500 years. And so, as time goes on, technology always changes and there are people interested in that and there are people oblivious to that. And I think some people are interested in some people are oblivious. Might be something to just I should get a tattoo. Some people are interested in anything you name and some people are oblivious to it.

Cecile Conrad: 38:34

I. It's a self-organizing system in any ways, that we all have different passions. It basically starts with passions, I think, and maybe it's talent and, and it's combined that we have. It could be different intelligences or different talents. That's just a way of framing it or passing curiosity.

Cecile Conrad: 38:59

Sometimes someone's interested in something for a minute, yeah, but we have different things that we're good at, and I'm I'm a trained psychologist and I one of the things that we learned at university was to administer the IQ tests, because that's like a thing psychologists do for some reason and I had a lot of time to think about that and work with that and I've never done it since I did it at university. I'm very much against the whole system of IQ testing. Interesting, I've read the books. Uh, something 20, 25 years ago I'm not updated, but I don't think the chit system the base of the ideas, changed a lot and basically we have a group of academics and an idea about academics and they want to define intelligence and they can't because we cannot actually point to it. So they try to make a test and basically it's a test of how much do do the other person look like me, how much do they think and how much do their brain work in the way my brain works. So we have a little group of people who are very good at some things, but not everything, because the people at universities, the academics, they're not the painters and they're not the dancers, and most of them couldn't build a house or grow a tomato if they had to, but they're good at some things and the IQ test can measure how.

Cecile Conrad: 40:32

How good is the other person at that exact thing? So it's basically to me the way I see it, and a way of pressing people. It's old fashioned. We, we, we do some sort of what's the word Like? We separate, we group people, you're good and you're less good and you're worse. My hand is out of the frame here and it has these numbers and you know I have 102 and you have 104. So therefore, you're better than me. It's silly.

Sandra Dodd: 41:06

Sometimes you need to know if you're about to build a soccer team for you know the day, a football team or if you need somebody to do something. We're in an emergency situation. Who can go on foot five miles and cross a river? I can't, but we need to know who in that group that day for that purpose, can do that thing, and I think that's a healthier way to be. In one situation, one person's skills are valuable. You're cooking a feast for a bunch of people. Who's the best to organize it? Who's the best to help? Who's the best to stay out of the kitchen? And I think, if you see it as a variable that doesn't stay constant like an IQ, it's so much more healthy.

Cecile Conrad: 41:48

But it's always. I mean everything. Everything is contextual, and if someone's building me a bridge, I would like that to be an engineer, or at least the person doing the math behind it, making the plan, obviously. And I would also prefer someone with a lot of years of medical training if I had open heart surgery. I mean, it's not that I don't want professionals around me I just but you went.

Sandra Dodd: 42:12

But you went to the doctor for that surgery. You knew you were looking for a doctor. Yes, useless now when we're cooking or may not be able to run five miles and cross the river I won't have that doctor build my house, right, right.

Cecile Conrad: 42:25

So, and I think it's a self-organizing system on a big scale that we all have different intelligences or different talents or different passions, or whatever we want to call it. And if we let people flow and flourish with what they are, then we get a society full of different people with different skills. And if they all had you know oh God, I'm struggling with words tonight Confidence, if they all had confidence, you know, I'm just as valuable as the, as the heart surgeon. Is that the word? If I'm the one to build the houses, or I'm the one to plant the gardens, or I'm the one to I don't know take the sidewalk? I mean, we need all the passions and we need everyone, but the IQ system is making us believe that some people have higher value.

Cecile Conrad: 43:25

As you said. Oh, I've got a PhD, I get to sit on the front row. If you're a doctor, you're kind of almost God, right? It's as if we have this layered system of the different ways of being smart. Quote, unquote, will. It's like a caste system, almost. So. Therefore, I've never done an IQ test after I graduated. I don't want to do it. I think it's a system of oppression and I think it's wrong and I think we have to not think about it.

Sandra Dodd: 43:56

It's part of academia where people do need to be ranked. You need because if you're in academia, you want the person who's helping you edit a book or helping you do research. You want them to be like that surgeon. You want them to really know what they're talking about. You want an Like that surgeon. You want them to really know what they're talking about. But that's an expert historian, I don't care about the IQ of that surgeon.

Cecile Conrad: 44:16

I want to know how much open heart surgery he's done before and I want to know his success rate. And I want to know how passionate he is about what he's doing and how updated he is on how we do open heart surgery right now. I don't care how good he is at math or how many words he knows in Latin or all the stupid things we test in an IQ test.

Sandra Dodd: 44:38

So one thing we were planning to talk about today is waking up with a hungry mind, and I really want to get to that, but you didn't introduce yourself. No, I didn't.

Cecile Conrad: 44:45

I started talking, which is where are you? I am actually in my home country.

Sandra Dodd: 44:47

Where are?

Cecile Conrad: 44:48

you, I am actually in my home country, less than 30 kilometers from where I was born, which is a rarity because I'm also a nomad. I have been traveling for almost seven years nonstop, and before that I was just traveling as much as I could, so I have some gypsy thing in my passion pool. I'm in Denmark. I was born in Copenhagen. I was born at the hospital in Copenhagen for single moms, even though my parents were together because they were not married. This was the mid-70s and my dad got kicked out of the hospital when my mom went into labor because he was not married to my mom, which is just kind of a fun story, not for them at the time, but but later on. Um and we have to fast forward because I'm not going to share my full life story right here right now we should also talk about that hungry brain. Um, 23 years old was my mom at the time when she got me, and 23 years later, almost exactly, I had my first child. So I was repeating a system, though I was actually a single mom. I had a. He's tall, he was tall, he was blonde and he was gone. When I woke up, situation I was very happy to become a single mom. I was very happy with this child that I was having. I was sure that this was the right thing for me, and everyone everyone around me thought I was insane, except for one of my grandmothers, of course. The child was loved by everyone once she came to this world. So that was a very radical choice I took. At the time, I was studying psychology at the University of Copenhagen, which was I knew that I wanted to study psychology since I was maybe 15. So, yeah, that was just my thing.

Cecile Conrad: 47:04

Five years later, I met my husband. He's my first boyfriend from when I was a teenager, so we kind of re-met on a summer day in Copenhagen, where the sun almost never sets, and he was out because he had been out drinking the day before. So he was out looking for breakfast, and I was a single mom with a five-year-old. We were playing football by a fountain in the city center and, and then we wanted an early dinner, so he was having breakfast. We were having dinner at this vegetarian restaurant and and we hadn't seen each other for a very long time, though we are the same age and and come from the same very small city Copenhagen is the capital, but it's not huge and um, yeah, so he charmed the child. It's an easy trick to do and uh, here we are. Uh, 20 years later, we had three children together, lived in a beautiful house for 12 years until we went fully nomadic.

Cecile Conrad: 48:11

Um, seven years ago, uh, ignited by I think it was ignited by the cancer I had, um, after we had child number three, he adopted the first one. So we had my third child when I was I don't know, maybe 33, and then I had cancer a year or two later. She was really little, it was really horrible. I was still breastfeeding and you know they had to pull her off the breast and I had leukemia and I was lucky enough to survive, obviously. And then we had a miracle child. So I wasn't supposed to be able to have more children, but we had one more. So now I have four and I just think it's not like the cancer really changed me. It just I just became more radical. So everything I already thought and everything I already kind of believed in and all my values were the same. I was just there was just even less bullshit. I was like you know what? I don't have time for this. Life is too short for this. I'm too grateful to be here for this. I can't, I cannot. I'm not going to work again. I'm not putting on fancy clothes and pretending to be, I'm just going to stay home with my kids. That's the only important thing. And also I suffer from seasonal affective disorder. So it's a really bad idea to live in Scandinavia and I really suffered and the years just got worse and worse.

Cecile Conrad: 49:58

I have some, my mother's mother, my maternal grandmother. I've learned the lingo now. She was also. He was tall and blonde and gone when I woke up. Child kind of, except he was Jewish and gone when I woke up. So she grew up with this.

Cecile Conrad: 50:21

It was a shame she was born in 26. And back then it was shameful to have a Jewish ancestor. I'm not proud of that, but that was her destiny, that she grew up in a time where she couldn't say that she had a Jewish father, and especially not as he was not around and I think those Jewish genes because he came from very much further south. You can see it, I look way darker. My children are all blonde and some of them even have blue eyes and but I look exactly like my mom and she looked exactly like her mom. This child of this Jewish guy who wasn't there when my great grandmother woke up. We all suffer from seasonal affective disorder. We look like each other and we have the same problem, so I think it's genetic. Basically, I am actually not supposed to be here and I don't know what I'm doing here in January.

Sandra Dodd: 51:18

You're supposed to be alive and not supposed to be in Scandinavia because it's January. Yes, it's wrong.

Cecile Conrad: 51:24

And I will tell you, my whole system of my physical body and my mood. It is in free fall and it has been for the two weeks I've been in Denmark. It's really, really interesting, yeah, so I suffer from that and therefore after the cancer I felt I've got half. I was 20. I was what? 35 when I survived. I was 40 when they told me my survival rate was now as good as if I had never had cancer. It's my, my diseases. You can't cure it, so you cannot say I'm cancer free, but the risk of the disease coming back is now smaller than the risk of any other cancer hitting me. So therefore we call it cancer free or cured or whatever.

Sandra Dodd: 52:21

Did that contribute to your curiosity, to your energy to learn?

Cecile Conrad: 52:28

No, no, I've always been like that no, but it did tell me to get the beep out of Scandinavian winters.

Sandra Dodd: 52:36

I've been to England a few times what I've been to England, but not in the winter. I always go in the summer so I think it's always sunny. But my husband worked in Minneapolis for a few years and part of the contract he worked in Minneapolis for six months and then they extended it five times, so it was bad and then. But we used to get to visit him once a month and I was shocked at the difference, because where we live in New Mexico is level with Morocco.

Sue Elvis: 53:02

We're like really far south.

Sandra Dodd: 53:04

And and Minneapolis, it's all winter it's dark and all summer it's light like England, like Scandinavia, I guess and what surprised me was that the sun doesn't make any difference. In the winter, the sun comes out, and it doesn't get any warmer, and in the summer it gets dark but doesn't get any cooler, and I'm so used to being on a high desert that the sun makes a lot of difference. Like, oh, the sun's coming out, we just stand out there and get warm. That doesn't happen everywhere. So in Minneapolis, though, on the television there would be advertisements for affective disorder you know, seasonal affective, what did you call it? Seasonal affective disorder, yeah, and so there would be advertisements for that on TV and reminders of people to get therapy. Get some sun, get some help. Don't kill yourself is what they were trying to say, and I just wasn't used to that, being in a place where the sun is so interactive with us. The sun is actually doing something when it's shining, it's melting ice, it's it's growing crops.

Cecile Conrad: 54:03

I was just driving on the 2nd of january, we drove, well, we left. On the 2nd of January. We drove well, we left. On the 2nd of January. We left the Lake District in England and drove to Copenhagen, um, via the, the channel, uh, the tunnel in the channel um. So we drove south and then we drove north again and at some point in Germany we came to the cloud where you kind of duck under something like three kilometers of cloud it's.

Cecile Conrad: 54:43

It's not like a little bit of gray, it's a lot of gray and there's not a lot of light coming through all that and I think that's part of the problem. I sometimes would joke around when I lived here in wintertime, just asking on Facebook back when you actually sent the message to everyone you knew does anyone know if the sun is up yet? And it would be two in the afternoon, which is about an hour before it sets, because the light is not really light, which is also very different from living in the south. So when there is sunlight, there is not sunlight, and when the sun finally shines and you have a blue sky, the sun doesn't go up very high on the sky, it's a very low sun. So technically you don't get the sunlight into the neurons in your eyes that you need to start your whole hormonal system of serotonin and melatonin.

Sandra Dodd: 55:45

Did you start traveling with your family largely because of that, because of your need to get out from under that cloud. It was part of it, it was a big part of it. So you travel in Europe quite a bit. Spain is pretty far south. You've been there a lot right.

Cecile Conrad: 55:59

Yes.

Sandra Dodd: 56:00

Where else? And you've been to Mexico. Where else?

Cecile Conrad: 56:03

Well, we have mostly been in Europe. We started out with a big bus, so we started out driving an 11 ton thing, which limits it, but we didn't drive it very far. We parked it in Spain and it didn't move at all and we bought a smaller one, started traveling in that and then COVID hit and we had one of the children had a big problem with. It's not just the, the teeth, it was the whole facial structure. That had to have some help. So because of COVID we got pretty scared of another lockdown happening where you couldn't fly, and we decided until his teeth were all right and his whole, because it had to do with breathing and the nose and the tongue and stuff and it had to be done while he was in the growth spurt. We had it done in Barcelona, took four and a half years and that whole process after the first lockdown, we decided we don't want to leave mainland Europe. We want to be able to drive to the doctor because this is too dangerous Europe. We want to be able to drive to the doctor because this is too dangerous. So we've been everywhere in Europe, mostly Western Europe, less so in Eastern Europe. We have been in Eastern Europe, turkey is also you can drive back to Barcelona. And then last year, when his teeth were not completely done they're not exactly done yet, but they are so close to done that it's not dangerous and the doctor has said any doctor can help you. Now you can just call me and I can tell the doctor anywhere what to do. So now we're more safe. So we flew to Mexico, visited, I think it was, eight different locations in Mexico and four in the US, and then we flew back in the spring and then we've been in Europe ever since. Yeah, we haven't been traveling everywhere. And I also just want to say, just to make sure it doesn't come out as if it's only my seasonal affective disorder making us live this crazy life, that we didn't and we have been just like with the unschooling, asking the kids all the time do you want to keep going or do you want to do something else? Do you want to settle down somewhere? Do you want to change the pace or the way or the location or the base of our lifestyle? Because of course, I can live in many places. I just have a hard time in Scandinavia in the winter, but I could settle down. I would just prefer settling down. I usually say south of the Loire Valley, which is in France, preferably south of the Pyrenees or the Alps, so that I get enough sunlight. But if they need something else, I can do it, I just have to fix it. I have to fix it with a lot of traveling in the winter and a lot of sunlight therapy. I have, you know, there are all the glasses and the lamps and things. It's not like it can't be fixed. It's just glasses and the lamps and things. It's not like it can't be fixed. It's just yeah. So that was the other thing I got from.

Cecile Conrad: 59:13

The cancer was why do I have to cope with winter? Why do I have to be this negative person every year in May? I have to say I'm sorry for everything I said the past six months. It's not fun. It's not fun for anyone and and the fun thing about being here now is staying for a month in the middle of the winter is that a lot has changed in seven years and and we've all grown and all of my children now see it. I'm not playing, pretend they see it and they're like let's get out of here. This is not fun. One of them feel the same. One of them has the exact same feeling. I can't thrive here, I need to get south, I need to get out. So that's nice that I'm not alone now. But also they see that this doesn't work. Mom doesn't work. Mom is out of order. We have to hard boot her when we get south. And so they know I'm not just being crazy. Yeah, big, long introduction of me.

Sue Elvis: 1:00:26

What I'm finding very interesting is that our stories are very different. We're in totally different parts of the world, different families, different backgrounds, different reasons. I got to one schooling in different ways maybe, but we're all so connected and I have really been enjoying these conversations and really value the friendship of both of you and love how unschooling has given us that opportunity to do this. As adults, we're not connecting through our children like going to a homeschooling group or a conference or something that starts off as our children's, and we're just the other. We're the parents and we're talking to the other parents who are there that this is ours, that, um, that all our. You still got, uh, children who aren't quite grown yet. Cecilia, but just waving to my husband there, I shouldn't have done that, no it's fine.

Sue Elvis: 1:01:35

He's just taking the dogs for a walk. He's on holiday. It's the Australian summer school holidays here, and this is why I'm sitting here listening to you talk about not many hours a day well, too many hours a day light or not enough. Need to talk about not many hours a day well, too many hours the daylight or not enough? And, um, we have pretty good, uh, sun and daylight, even in winter. Uh, it's uh pretty good. So, um, yeah, so I don't know what I was saying, but yes, so we were talking before we started. We were talking about how, um, schooling has affected us as adults health, the hungry brain and all that.

Sue Elvis: 1:02:13

And I find it quite remarkable that, looking back when we started homeschooling because that's where we started, you know, thinking about, do we homeschool, do we send our kids to school? It was all about our kids, and I've been very surprised to find out that this has been a journey for all of us and the changes and the growth and the opportunities that have come my way and the things I'm doing are really quite remarkable. But I think back to the woman I was when I set out. I think I had my first child at 26. So that was a long time ago. But the adventures we've had in between time and they're very unlike your adventures, cecilia, because I haven't been very far in the last few years very much a homebody.

Sue Elvis: 1:03:06

We've moved from house to house, but all my kids have grown up in one state, new South Wales, and though they've had multiple homes, because for a long time we were renting and we just moved from rental home to rental home and we tried a few different areas. We lived in Sydney, we lived on the coast in Wollongong. We now live south of Sydney in a more rural area, but never imagined where we'd end up, where I would end up, have all these plans and hopes and dreams for your kids, and I suppose that in a way, every parent has dreams for their kids, things that they would like them to have, even if it's just they want their kids to be self-supportive and happy and whatever. But for me, I never imagined where I would go, what I would learn and the person that I would become because of this. So, yeah, anyway, that was just a thought I was having there, cecilia, while you were talking.

Cecile Conrad: 1:04:10

Well, it was the thing that we were going to talk about today how it, who we are in it and what our style or our maybe you can introduce it, Sandra.

Sandra Dodd: 1:04:31

maybe my brain is a little weird right now once, once you had mentioned that you felt like you woke up every day with a hungry brain. Some people I probably most people are born that way because they're learning language and the question of little kids is what's that? What's that? What's that like? Name it, what? What do I call this? What's the difference in this and this? You know difference in a horse and a cow or a dog and a cat when they're little.

Sandra Dodd: 1:04:55

And as you get older, some people whether because of school or their families or their friends that gets tamped down. Other people are saying don't ask so many questions. I heard that too much when I was a kid. Don't so many questions. I heard that too much when I was a kid. Don't ask, um, it's not good. So I was determined not to do that to my kids. I would answer their questions and I'm now with grandkids. They're, they're young, a lot of them are really young. One's a teen and I and I'm willing to answer their questions at length and let them touch things and show them things, because I know the harm that can come of saying no, no, be quiet, don't, it's none of your business, don't touch it.

Sue Elvis: 1:05:31

That's not where learning comes from, or the harm that can come from being. You're interested in something, but somebody school, parents, whatever don't value that and make you learn something else, so that you're constantly trying to. The things that you're naturally curious about get pushed aside and you find that you're fulfilling the expectations, doing stuff that other people think you should do, and for me, that closed down my curiosity, that it became a chore. I wasn't motivated anymore by my curiosity, I was motivated. Well, I wasn't motivated, I was pushed and ended up as a young adult, not curious at all.

Sue Elvis: 1:06:24

I think we spoke about this a little bit in our last episode. Think we spoke about this a little bit in our last episode, and I think one of the great things that unschooling has given me is it has returned my curiosity watching the world through my kids eyes, learning more about how kids learn, looking back and seeing the process I went through and then just being allowed to investigate things that are of interest to me, and discovering that the world is such a fascinating place again and it's not just a place where you're given tasks to do which you don't really want to do and that you're fighting all the time to be yourself and to express yourself and to go along your own pathway. That has been good.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:12

I think some people Cecilia is saying she's always been curious that way and that's great. I was too. I never had mine crushed. I was always nosy. I was lucky, I think, because I found a lot of people who did listen to me, who did encourage me. It wasn't my mom, but it was a lot of teachers, beginning in first grade. I saw the way my first grade teacher looked at me and listened to me and let me express myself and she would help me find books I liked and things like that. That wasn't happening to me at home.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:45

Whenever teachers were interested in me in the least, I would follow them around like a puppy dog sometimes to get them to tell me about their lives, tell me what I don't know, what's out there that I should know more about, and so it was easy for me to do that with my kids. It was, and so my kids never had to suffer any discouragement or put down or extinguishing of their curiosity, and I am so glad that my kids grew up in the days when being a geek was okay, it was kind of popular, it was kind of cool. If what you were really interested in was how electric guitars and amplifiers work, you don't care about the music so much as how do the machines work. Or if you just care about Magic the Gathering and you know all about the history of that card game. You know all of the rules, you can run the tournaments, you know the history of the cards, the new ones, the old ones, rule changes that's okay among people, their age, that's not something to be ashamed of or to be embarrassed of. That was healthy for them too. That was not something I provided, except that I didn't discourage it. You know I didn't prevent it rigid. You know I didn't prevent it. So sometimes seeing those rivers of interest flow by video games or music in our lives is mostly music and video games, but whatever people are interested in if they're interested in sports.

Sandra Dodd: 1:09:37

Marty ice skated for a while and played hockey one year and then he was done. He goes ice skating sometimes and can still do all the tricks and skate backwards and mess around. He's competent, but it's not what he does. It's not what he does for a living, it's not his hobby, it's just a thing that he learned really well, got really involved in and then he was done. So I also didn't pressure him to keep skating or to play hockey again. It's okay in the family that they were in and in the unschooling situation they were in. It's okay to immerse yourself in something for a month or a year and be done and that was fine. And I know families you probably know families where they pressure. If they've invested some money in piano or whatever it is, they pressure the kid to continue.

Cecile Conrad: 1:10:26

I think also I've seen unschooling and maybe mostly homes. I don't know home ed. Can I say that families sometimes it's a definition thing whether you're an unschooler I don't really know. You know where you have a child with a passion or an interest or a talent of some sort and the parents kind of see a career and they start doing everything they can to support that passion or interest, which is great. But sometimes that can also be a little bit too much. You know what I was just doing clay for one afternoon and I enjoyed myself. I'm not becoming a potter or what is the word in English. I mean it's potter. I might just play the guitar tomorrow and you know so sometimes. And even kid might have, actually have become a potter. But you know the push I find it delicate to to. I don't know we should. Should we provide the context for the kids and give them all the opportunity and options with whatever passion, or should we sometimes, you know, hold it a little bit?

Sandra Dodd: 1:11:53

I liked. I like just letting them see it as a learning situation, as, as a dabbling, holly went from art form to art form, art form for years. She would get really good at something and then abandon it and go to something else, and sometimes I was. I wish she would make me one of those things she used to be making, or whatever Right, but I backed off because I didn't want to do the kind of pressuring you're talking about. A child could learn from that to not tell their parents anything, to stop expressing their enthusiasm, to not try something new, because their mom's going to go on that whole rag about you could make a living.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:28

There's another word in english for potter and that's ceramicist. Because english kept all the all their german, germanic, english words and they kept all their french words. So ceramicist, because in english we kind of just distinguish between two meanings, like they both get their specialization. So potters tend to be made the same thing over and over production and ceramicists are more artsy or more concerned with the chemistry of the glazes. Okay, just me.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:54

My hobby, the thing I love most, is words. Sorry if I jump on that, no, it's great. I love words. And one of my kids, two of my kids don't much care, and Holly is the same way. She loves the history of words spelling.

Sandra Dodd: 1:13:08

She read relatively late. She didn't read fluently until she was 11, but she had such a big vocabulary by the time she read that she didn't need to do any beginning books. So you know, she just knew all the big words already and soon as she could read them. But the interesting thing about Holly's reading is she looked first for vowel combos for blends. She looked first for vowel combos for blends and so any word that had TH in it she like scans the word. She sees TH that's bad in English because we have a whole lot of compound words and like bathhouse she I'm not thinking of a good example, but sometimes, sometimes, sometimes she would see that TH in it. Bathhouse is bad example. She would see that TH and and it wasn't what it should be. It was. It was that the T is part of the first word and the H is part of the second word. And so I got to see English anew. When Holly was explaining what it looked like to her, I got to see written English from a whole new way because she was old enough to describe what she was learning.

Sandra Dodd: 1:14:10

I have two granddaughters right now who are reading and they're very young, so they're not going to know, they can't help me, they can't tell me any stories. It's fun that they're reading. And one of them was arguing with me the other day that the word PEA should be PEA and I'm like, yeah, but it's not. Sorry, she's being very genetic, very phonetic about it and she's barely five. But we were playing Plants vs Zombies and they're pea shooters and she's reading the names of the plants and she said, well, it's pea shooter, ok, but anyway. So I I'm curious about language. So whenever any other person comes along and can give me any clue or any story or any a new, a new thing that I can hang on a hook I already had, I love that and I still love it, and I don't try to press it on people who are bored. So I'll shut up now in case you don't care if they don't want to listen.

Cecile Conrad: 1:14:58

It's voluntary, isn't it? That's one of the actually, that's one of the questions I wanted to ask in our very long introduction that you know spills into the actual podcast episode was why are we even doing this podcast? And I can say for myself that one of the reasons I like podcasting and I like blogging and I'm actually also writing a book at the moment is because it's voluntary to join. I'm not pushing this at anyone. It's not some autoplay thing on Facebook and I'm not, you know. And it has the long format and it's very long. And if you are not interested, no one's pushing you to listen to this very long podcast. No one's pushing you to be interested in words. If you're not interested, please turn it off and do something interesting to you.

Sandra Dodd: 1:15:53

So Sue said that she had kind of lost her curiosity and it came back Right Somehow. You had been discouraged and it all perked back up again. It bloomed again. I had mine, cecilia had hers. I have something to read by Jen Keith.

Sandra Dodd: 1:16:08

Jen Keith is someone you interviewed on Self-Directed she's episode 35. And she talked about mental health, unschooling and mental health. So Jen Keith wrote I have found it interesting Sorry, I'm starting over I found it fascinating how many different things are connecting for me as an adult through learning to unschool. Well, I didn't understand how things connected from school Wars, geography, fractions, the Russian language. It was all individual stuff.

Sandra Dodd: 1:16:34

I moved dutifully from one standalone period to the next trying to do the bare minimum work, not because I was lazy or stupid, but because none of it made sense. Now, daily, almost, I'll watch or read or hear or be talking about something and I'll think, oh, my gosh, that's connected or oh, that's why that happened there. I love Jen Keefe's writing. I love writing. Podcasts are okay. I listen to a lot of them in my everyday life, but I love writing and Jen Keefe is a good writer. So if anyone wants to read more Jen Keefe on my site, sandradoddcom, slash Jen, I have quite a few of her things quoted or linked and you can listen to her on at the self-directed episode number 35.

Sue Elvis: 1:17:14

Yeah, we'll put the links my dear I think I actually embedded that episode in one of my blog posts, probably one talking about mental health and unschooling, though I think that she was coming from a different perspective from what I remember than what I was writing about, which I found very interesting as well, because we all have a subject, we all approach it from different ways and different needs. But, yes, that mental health. I never actually thought about that until my mental health wasn't too good, because I grew up having to be the strong one. I was the eldest child. I always felt that a lot was expected of me, and so I always had this idea that I was a strong person.

Sue Elvis: 1:18:03

I couldn't admit any weaknesses, and it was only during COVID when, oh, things just fell apart here in Australia so many regulations, rules which made no sense whatever and no one to talk about them with. Nobody wanted to listen to anybody. You just got told what to do and I thought about and, oh, my mental health was terrible and I thought to myself this is sometimes what parenting is about is telling kids you got to do this and you got to do that. Why? Because I said so and it doesn't make any sense. And kids sometimes parents don't listen to their kids because they think they know best. And I thought well, unschooling is a great antidote to mental health, when we listen to our kids and we value what they have to say and we explain things, we discuss things and we don't make stupid rules and regulations, regulations which the kids don't understand. Why, why do we have to do this, mom? Why, you say? Because I said so, I'm the parent and quite often parents don't know why they have made the rule. It's just what people do and yeah, that's digressing there from what you were saying, sandra, but I was just remembering.

Sue Elvis: 1:19:28

I did actually listen to that episode and embed it on one of my mental health and unschooling blog posts, and I think that's one of the really good things about being an adult unschooler, and especially a podcaster or a blogger, is that we get this chance to explore issues or ideas, ponder them and quite often with other people, and understand a little bit more about ourselves and how think life works. And it's one of the most fascinating things, I think, is that I thought we'd get to the the end of unschooling as far as my kids are no longer of school age I've only got one left at home out of the eight and I thought what's next? What will I do next? And I sort of thought, well, by that time I'll have another interest and I'll go off, and I don't know. I'd never sort of formulated what this interest would be.

Sue Elvis: 1:20:32

I have a blog about cooking, or I just sit there and crochet stuff and then go and post it online, or I would write something, and I never thought I'd still be here learning more about unschooling and pondering it still with people and coming to new insights. Yeah, I think that's really fascinating about unschooling is that that's all like an onion taking a layer off, another layer off and another layer off, and I sometimes wonder if we'll ever come to the end of that, and I guess that's why, though, I keep saying, oh, it's time to move on. I never quite do it because I have another quite interesting thought or an interesting conversation, like the ones we're having today. I think, yeah, there's still something here to learn about and to think about. Oh, I might hang around another month or so, and it's still here.

Cecile Conrad: 1:21:23

It's a bit more than that. We have a few more episodes to record, I hope.

Sue Elvis: 1:21:28

Oh yeah, well, I've made the commitment to the podcast, cecilia, and, as I said earlier, I'm very grateful to have this opportunity because I really enjoy it, but also I'm enjoying the conversations. But generally when I think about should I blog a bit longer, I think, oh well, what have I got to say? I don't want to go around the circle again and repeat all the stories over and over and I haven't got any new younger people's stories, because my kids are growing up and then one day. So I leave my blog a bit. And then I think, oh, I've had a new idea like that one about the mental health a couple of years ago. And I sit down, I think, think I've got to write this and like you, sandra, I love words and I think I'll see if I can get my thoughts out and make it. What's in my head appear on the paper so everybody understands what I'm trying to say, and I like challenges like that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:22:25

I put out a blog post every day. Still, and partly because it's an intro back to my website. On the tops of the webpages there's a little line. If I've edited that page, make it narrower for phones and stuff, you know it's been touched up in the past few years. I put a little line at the top. That's a message to me. But it's also a portal to all of the related posts at Just Add Light, all of the posts that quote that page or that are similar. And so at just add light, at the bottom of some of the older blog posts there'll be this little straight line, or two of them. If there are two of them, it means this format works well on an iPhone and an Android. So the the ones that I had to change. I don't bother to put that, but if that little line is there, it means I've already messed with this page, I don't need to mess with it again. And those lines lead to other web pages. So I put since I needed to mark it anyway. I made those portals so that way people can flow through the ideas better. You can see something related.

Sandra Dodd: 1:23:23

I will do like maybe a week of that and I'll think nobody's reading this anymore. Why am I even doing this? My kids are grown, everybody else's kids are grown and then I will get a mushy letter One last a couple of weeks ago I got two in one week and people will say this is the best. This is changing. This is changing my life. I had never thought about this. I've been in schooling for 15 years and I hadn't thought about this. So thank you so much. Or they'll say something about one of the photos, like they'll say this photo goes so well with the words. And that only seems to happen when I couldn't find a good photo and I just threw in anything. So that from that I have learned that the connections that a person will make seeing a picture are totally different. That will look different to everybody, right? What that? What one person sees in a picture has to do with what their interests are and how they see the world. Or like Cecilia's holding a pen, somebody who really cared about pens would be wondering what kind of pen that was, maybe. And other people wouldn't see the pen at all. And so I I've learned from the responses I've gotten, from the work I've done, that there are whole different ways to see the same thing I'm seeing and I love that. I like it Because I had seen it in children. I knew that my children saw things differently. But that's a set of three. I didn't have eight or five or four, however many. I had a little number kind of.

Sandra Dodd: 1:24:43

But some of the best writers in the unschooling discussions in the past dozen years have been people with one single child. There were three of them that came along more or less the same time Joe Isaac in Australia, colleen Prieto in New Hampshire and Karen James, who lived in New York State now she lives in California. All had boys, boys, and about the time they came around those boys were eight or nine and I thought that's interesting that that three at the same time came with an only child, male, and they were all three really good writers, super good writers, and I have collections of all three of them. And now those boys have just all recently grown up, gone to college, gotten jobs or whatever, and so interesting that they sort of formed a set from my point of view. So I got to see them be new to it, figure it out, do really well, write clearly.

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:39

What they were seeing and what they didn't get to see is how different it would have been if they'd had another child, or two, or three or eight. So they missed that, but that couldn't be helped From their point of view they saw. What I didn't get to see is how good can it be if both parents are into it and you have one child, if that child very often only children communicate well with adults or older people and don't have to learn how to negotiate that much with little children, especially if they're not going to school. So they've seen something I didn't get to see, because I always saw my kids helping each other or squabbling or being jealous and those things can't be helped. It's just another reality. So the differences in parental awareness of the potential of unschooling or of learning in a family unit are also different for really natural, real reasons. So it can't be the same for me. As for Sue, sue knows things I don't know because she had a large range of kids at different ages at the same time.

Cecile Conrad: 1:26:43

And also I want to say please don't stop sharing both of you. I think the perspective that the kids are right now not in a school age doesn't mean you don't have wonderful new insights or old insights to share in a new context. The world is changing and the questions being asked are being asked in a new framework, and I think I was just recently talking to a journalist who is making a project doesn't matter, but his own child. One of them had just been out of school for two months and he said now it's been two months, now we're cool, now we've got it. And I thought Optimistic.

Sandra Dodd: 1:27:40

They saw an onion.

Cecile Conrad: 1:27:42

I'm pretty sure you'll tell me another story a year from now, and I'm saying this with all the love and I know how radical it can feel. I haven't done it myself. I haven't taken a child out of school, but I have not put one in there my first child. I've shared this before. My first child has been to a radical school and my second child has never been to school except for a few weeks of visiting in the mornings until we agreed both parents to homeschool and the two youngest have never. So I've never really had a child who was in school taking that child out, but I've seen a lot of people do it and and even just not putting the child in school was a radical. It felt radical to me and that was a child that was not in in kindergarten. So I understand how taking a child out of school. I think I understand how it feels and I also understand how long time two months can feel like. But my first thought really was you don't know anything at this point.

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:07

Relative, though. Relative to the future, he doesn't, but for right now, how old is this child?

Cecile Conrad: 1:29:12

I don't really know.

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:15

But maybe he means like the first few days it was scary and he could have put the kid back, and the first few weeks he probably felt like they were playing hooky, ditching, you know being dropouts, and then. But now he's to the point where it's far enough away that he's calm.

Cecile Conrad: 1:29:29

Well, I think it's cool and all my love goes to it. What I mean is just, I have now I don't know how many years maybe 12 years of experience unschooling, and you both have way more and thinking, just because the children are not actually in the age where they would normally be in mandatory school, we should sip it and do something else. I think that line of thought is wrong. I think we have great experience and we need to keep talking about it. I have a good friend, a good homeschooling friend, a very radical woman not radical unschooler, but radical in many ways and she says, basically, parenting, being a mom, is just preparing to be a grandmother. So I mean, we will just become fine-tuned, amazing grandmothers. We'll make all the mistakes now and then, when we're grandmothers, we'll know um, can I share my schooling grandmothers?

Sue Elvis: 1:30:38

can I share an idea that I have been pondering recently, just to show that, uh, when you think that you've come to the end and you have this other idea, something else pops up. Two or three blog posts back, I started thinking about aging and there's so many younger unschoolers around sharing unschooling, like on social media, and I've I'm not on social media much, but you know, sometimes I'll scroll through and I'm always discouraged. It's that typical Instagram feeling and I think what am I doing here? Look, all these vibrant younger people sharing unschooling. And what am I doing? I'm finished, I'm old, nobody wants to listen to me anymore. I've done my bit.

Sue Elvis: 1:31:30

And then I read this book by Arthur Brooks, and I'm not exactly sure what the title is. It's something to do with happiness and he was saying as we age, we have to stop, we have to move on. As we age, if we want to be happy, we have to let go of stages of our lives and move on to the next stage. But what is relevant to me was that stop competing with these younger people, younger unschoolers and I can't compete with them anymore, but just, we tell old stories about my kids as they were growing up. That's because I don't. They're not around anymore. But that's not my value anymore. What my value is because as you get older, our brains change. As a hungry brain, we always stay hungry. But Arthur Brooks was talking about our brains decline and my first thought was no, my brain's not going to decline, I keep active. I'm going to read this memory book about improving my memory skills. Nope, no, no, I'm not going to decline. And I kept reading and what he was saying was that in some areas our brain declines but we pick up skills in a different area, so that the person I am today is not the person I was 20, 30 years ago, because naturally I have. It's not even a case of wanting to change, it's just a natural process. I'm at a different stage of my life and what I have now is vast reservoirs of knowledge.

Sue Elvis: 1:33:10

And what do you say? That older people have all this knowledge and they know how to use it, whereas younger people, they have all the enthusiasm and they're thinking about things. But you know, look back at how I was when I was younger. I was exploring all sorts of ideas and, oh, I'm going to go and have a look at Charlotte Mason and how does this work? But now I can't give my readers or my listeners reassurance that just do what we do and your kids will turn out perfectly, because I don't think that's realistic. But what I can say is just do it anyway, because this is good for all of us. But I can't explain it properly.

Sue Elvis: 1:33:54

I've written blog posts about it, but it sort of made me feel that there is a role for older unschoolers because we give something different to their conversation than younger ones, or me. As a younger person, I have a different role to play now, and that's all right. And if I want to be happy happy then I have to let go of the person I was and embrace the person I am now. And how does that look? As far as sharing unschooling, I'm not exactly sure yet. I haven't worked that out, but it's certainly not from going on Instagram and feeling downhearted because all these people have these fabulous photos of all these things their kids are doing and they're doing things that I posted about years ago and I feel I can't do that anymore because I'm not there, and so, yeah, just our roles get taken over. But do we have something different to offer in our later years? Maybe that's the next thing I'm sort of exploring.

Sandra Dodd: 1:34:57

I think they would do well to pick up things from different from people, from different ages, different periods of oh, yes, maybe, yeah, I have to clarify that?

Sue Elvis: 1:35:09

Can I just clarify that, sandra? I was in my blog post. I was saying that people that are interested in unschoolers need that younger group of people. Like I needed it when I was younger to surround myself with people same age children. But maybe everybody also needs somebody doesn't have to be me, could be. You know, we all have different people we relate to but it might be beneficial to have somebody older as well for different reasons, like more traditional mentoring. Looking at that sort of role, right, right is that book called from strength to strength?

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:50

yeah, it might be. Yeah, okay, I was looking it up to see, so I might. I might look that up too, yeah it is. I'm getting old and I repeat myself sometimes. I probably will do it to you guys, sorry.

Sue Elvis: 1:36:03

I'm pretty sure that what you repeat? Is worth repeating you know, yep, repeating gives everybody a second chance to absorb the information, because sometimes you hear something once but you don't quite catch it and you need time to ponder it, hear it again and hear another story about it. And yeah, take it, it's all right to um revisit ideas and take time over absorbing them, and the context will be a new context yes, that's true's true.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:34

I like having hobbies not hobbies interests in common with different ones of my kids, because with me and Holly it's language and music, and it's nice to know which one of them will be interested in what sort of trivia I've just discovered, or to ask them if I can't find something, because I know they know I like that, to use them as resources and that's been helpful with the unschooling other unschooling parents that I've been in contact with. Different ones are kind of experts in different things, sometimes literally. So Jo Isaac in Australia is a biologist. She knows all about the animals there, especially possums, like she really knows. And Skylar Wainforth, who's lived in the United States and England and she's in Australia now. She knows all about anthropology and her husband works at a medical school and he his specialty is I'm not thinking of the name of it, but it's biology. It's biology but it's also anthropology, so it's evolutionary biology, I think they call it so the history of how people feel and how they know what they know, and I don't know how to describe it very well, but he knew all about studies that could support some unschooling things about. Like if you have all the food you want, how much do you eat? If it's limited, how does that affect? So there were studies that they had done with feedlots and feeding animals and stuff and so that was really interesting because he knew enough science to read those studies and know how it applied to unschooling ideas and so it was always awesome to have those experts around to ask.

Sandra Dodd: 1:38:11

Pam Sarushian was teaching economics and statistics so whenever something technical needed to be read or explained we'd go Pam, what are they saying? And she was really good at helping out. So having the relationships I had with them sometimes involved their kids. Sometimes my kids would be friends with their kids. Sometimes I didn't even know their kid at all. It was either an in-person either a little bit in-person and a lot online relationship where we knew what the other people knew. So we knew in a discussion who to call on. If somebody just happens to not have been in the discussions for a couple of weeks, we could call them in and say somebody's asking about this, could you come help? And it was just very rich and very valuable and I don't see that happening this season.

Sandra Dodd: 1:38:54

I hope some other sort of technology or forums will come along where people will visit the same place repeatedly, because if they don't come back, it was just like visit when you need something like a fix it shop. It's like taking your vacuum to the vacuum repair shop. You don't learn a whole lot about vacuums in general or your vacuum, you just get it fixed. And so sometimes people use unschooling discussions for that, like hello, I've never heard of you, but I came here and I have a problem answer it. Sometimes they don't even come back for the answers. They read the first couple of responses and they don't come back.

Sandra Dodd: 1:39:26

But back in the day, when we were less confident that there would ever be another answer, people would stay in the same discussion or come back and come back for years and there was a value to that. That I. That seems to have fallen away, but partly. Uh, you know, people have mentioned covid. Odd things happened, odd things happened to the internet, odd things happened to people, and so there seems to be a lot of polarization like if I will, I will stick around this group until there's one little thing that bugs me and then I'm gone forever. You know, there's that sort of tension, interpersonal tension in the world these days that's hard to hard to overcome.

Sandra Dodd: 1:40:06

I think before COVID maybe things were calmer and people thought I'm going to be unschooling for the next 10 years, so I might as well invest a couple of years in hanging out with some people who are doing it and see what we can share. So some people just like anything Girl Scout leaders or any volunteer sort of organization. Sometimes people come just because their child is that age, and so there's a club for 10-year, 10 to 12-year-old boys. The dad comes and he coaches or advises or whatever because his kid is that age, and when his kid's too old he leaves. And some people come and they like the interaction so much or the topic so much that they stay. So some people will coach football for 20 years and some people coach just while their kid is that age. And it's the same with unschooling.

Sandra Dodd: 1:40:50

Some people are only interested for a minute or an hour and while I like that in my kids, I know sometimes it won't help a lot for adults if they really want to get an idea or to ground themselves in the philosophy and the workings of it solidly enough that they can do it, even if they don't have personal examples nearby or they don't have a social strata where they can depend on these people to grow up with these other unschoolers in person. It helps for them to just immerse themselves in the ideas and work at those ideas and work through their thoughts in light of these ideas. So we used to say, okay, here's the table, throw your idea out and we'll examine it and we'll polish it up, not for your benefit, not for your vacuum cleaner, but for the benefit of anybody who comes by here to see it. And it also helps the people who are discussing it, because they clarify their own thoughts. If you can't defend, if you have an idea and you can't defend it, it's a bad idea. Throw it out. If you have an idea, not only you could defend it, but other people also took it home, used it, came back and said it works, that's a good idea. Bring that one out and again next time this comes around. So that's why my that's why I still try to get people to come and read things on my website, because those are the ideas that lasted years, the things that I saved.

Sandra Dodd: 1:42:12

So that's what. Just add light and stir. Just just add light and stir is the name of the things that I saved. So that's what Just Add Light and Stir. Just Add Light and Stir is the name of the blog that I mention, that I do every day, and so it's usually a quote from a page and a link to that page. That's the simplest version, and a photo.

Sue Elvis: 1:42:28

So, sandra, on that blog do you take if I got this right, you take something small from your main website and post it separately with an image. Is that the idea?

Sandra Dodd: 1:42:39

Generally. Yeah, that's the easiest way. Sometimes I have a really beautiful photo and I don't have anything to match it, so I write something new. Maybe about 20% of those posts are new writing. Sometimes I write it and I think that's too good. So I take that whole blog post to that page and now it's on the page, but it wasn't before. So that's some of it, some of its original writing of the day, inspired by something that happened or the photo. Some of it's really old. The other day I quoted something from 2000 because sometimes the way back machine coughs up something really old for me when I'm looking for something. Sometimes it turns out that it was saved from an old forum and I can stay with the forums.

Cecile Conrad: 1:43:22

pardon me, I was just thinking about the forums back when there were real conversations, long format conversations online. We had a forum in Danish in Denmark when I started homeschooling. We did not, I think, have anything specifically for unschooling and I think maybe we were five family unschooling in the entire country at the time. So it makes sense in a way to not have a forum for that. Maybe my memory is not perfect and someone can correct me, but I don't think we had it. But I do remember the forum format and I also remember the big discussion we had before going on Facebook, also remember the big discussion we had before going on Facebook, and I don't know whether we fell apart or Facebook fell apart but still have a.

Sandra Dodd: 1:44:41

I still have a group, but it works by. Either people have to go to that forum every day or they would have to check their email and nobody's using email much anymore except for receipts and, you know, notes from amazon or whatever.

Sandra Dodd: 1:44:52

It's become more business on email now than personal, but that it's called always learning and it's been there for 25 years. It's still operational, but people just don't go there. I, if I could get people to stir that up or to check in there, it'd be great, because that's the thing. The way it used to work is you want to read about unschooling, you went to the place to read about unschooling, that's all you were there for that. That's all that was going to happen and it was on. And when Facebook first came up and you could make a group, that still kind of worked. It was like a lot of still pools where you join this group and you go there, you can get notifications and you click in. But the advantage of Facebook is you can put in photos, you could put in memes, you could link, they would link to your facebook and they could look at your kids. So it was like an old forum only with photos. So at first it was great.

Sandra Dodd: 1:45:39

But facebook changed so that you can't keep people from joining the group. It used to be somebody would say can I join your group? And you say yes or no, and now the only options I have are to say yes, you can make a comment or not, and for me to go. I go look their. It's a lot of work and it's emotionally draining for me. So I go and look at their profile. If they're just selling natural oils or they want to tutor people in algebra, I say no, because there are people networking on Facebook or people who think unschooling is a bad idea and they want to come and tell us so. So if I can figure that out, I don't let them. But really, even with the best of people being in there, it's nothing like it used to be because they're just passing by. It's like being in a gigantic mall and you happen to pass by the candy store.

Sandra Dodd: 1:46:29

You may never be there again in your entire life and the other stories politics and and all kinds of stuff, all kinds of every negative and confusing and distracting thing on the way in and out of there I'm just thinking that the other platform that has developed.

Sue Elvis: 1:46:49

We had forums, we have facebook, uh, and now we have communities, but the community requires most communities require, they require payment, so it's financial. I belong to a few uh communities which I don't not, not unschooling ones. There are other ones which, um, are free, but it seems to me that all the unschooling, homeschooling ones, uh, you become a member on a plan and that's sort of not quite the same thing.

Sandra Dodd: 1:47:22

It's are they private too, so no one can go and read. Well, I guess you'd have to pay to read it, because I always, I've, never, I've I've stayed away from that because of the two groups that I came in from that I mentioned before um, adult children of alcoholics and lache League. Those didn't charge money and they were open to anyone who wanted to come. You could come and go, nobody was keeping track of you. You didn't have to sign up and stay, you just pop in, pop out or stay for years, and a lot of people stayed for years Because of that. That's the model I was working on. It's like I know some stuff. I'm willing to share it for free and I also never have had private groups.

Sandra Dodd: 1:47:58

I've always had public groups and any sort of once accidentally, always learning went private, where you couldn't see it unless you were a member. You didn't have to pay if you got to be a member, and so my link stopped working On my website. If I would link to a discussion, people couldn't get in there unless they joined the group. I was mortified. So when Yahoo groups closed, kept stopped. They didn't close down, they stopped keeping archives. So you can still use Yahoo groups for announcements but you can't read old things. So that another organization, groupsio, offered to rescue Yahoo groups. So I have it in a safer place. Now it's open. Now all those links that used to, anyway the links work.

Sandra Dodd: 1:48:36

But I always told people don't tell us anything you're not willing to put in public. Because this is public, because we're doing this to share, based on those other two groups, based on a lot of ways that women have helped women over the years. But it wasn't secret that they're sharing what they know verbally. I think that's how women learn from other women. That's how you learn about birth. That's how you learn about marriage. That's how you learn about sex is by asking other women is this weird? How's it going for you? Is this normal?

Sandra Dodd: 1:49:04

And the kind of conversations that women have about those things is the way people are learning unschooling, because if you pay money, you don't know. Is that person just giving you the quickest, easiest answer she can think of? Or is she really digging in, depending on how many people she of? Or is she really digging in, you know, depending how many people she has, she's going to quit when she felt like she got you know. You got your 15 worth. I don't know I it's. It's not the model I ever worked on, so it disturbs me a little bit. Just I don't want to do it.

Sue Elvis: 1:49:26

I like public you know, I I uh came across one of your old blog not blog posts, Facebook posts when we became friends on Facebook so that we could talk about this podcast. Facebook gave me a few of your posts to read, to put something in my feed, and one of them was from quite a long time ago and you were writing about not accepting money for help unschooling help that we had people that helped us work things out and now we're helping other people work it out. This is not a business. We don't tell people what to do. We just help people work it out.

Sue Elvis: 1:50:11

I think you said something I wish I had the quote. Think you said something I wish I had the quote. But you said something about everybody has to work it out for themselves as well that we can help each other, listen, give ideas, but ultimately we all have to work things out for ourselves. We can't tell somebody like this I'm an expert now just do this and that the unschooling doesn't work that way. But I was very struck. I wish I had. Um, I didn't know we were going to talk about this anyway, but it was very interesting, a very interesting post of yours. It gave me another perspective on how to help people online and whether to charge money for help or not.

Sandra Dodd: 1:50:59

If people do, they do. I mean my friend, pam Sureshian, is always saying I should have and I shouldn't mind if other people do. It's just me. It's just me, and I'm glad that my husband was willing to support my odd habit. I mean he would pay my way. If I wanted to go speak somewhere that wasn't paying my way, he would pay it. He was fine with that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:51:16

It was like I used to say my weird missionary work, and so I got to see places and go touristing in exchange for speaking. That's how I saw it, because people would let me stay and drive me around, and so I just made my own deal. I made up my own deal, but what I, what I have been telling people, is we can't install it in you. It's not a club you join and then you are one. It's not. We can't make you an unschooler. We can just give you all of the tools. We can lay all of the parts out and you pick up the ones you want. You have to build your own. You just have to build your own, have to build your own. You just have to build your own.

Sandra Dodd: 1:51:56

And it would be like joining a group of people who are Harley Davidson mechanics. If you're a motorcycle enthusiast and you own a Harley Davidson, you can join a group and they'll tell you all about, you know which parts go to which year and where you can get them and stuff, and you can just have a grand old time. But if you join a group like that and say, well, you know, I really have a Kawasaki, it's okay for them to go, well, then this isn't a good group for you. We can't help you. We don't want to help you. Why are you here? And so when people come to an unschooling group and go, yeah, but my husband doesn't agree with it, yeah, but our state says we have to do this and that, yeah, but I just feel like they're saying I don't have a Harley Davidson, I don't have, I don't want one, now help me. So that's another thing I can do if I'm not charging money is say, no, we can't help you, sorry.

Cecile Conrad: 1:52:41

Well, I have a completely opposite situation actually, because I'm a trained psychologist and my job is to help people. Basically, if they ask me for help, I'll help, and if it feels like work, I'll charge them money. And I would do it for free if I could go to the supermarket and get the food for my kids for free, but I can't. So my job is to help people who ask me for help. Sometimes I will do it for free, sometimes I will give a discount if I find, for example, single moms get a discount pretty big one.

Cecile Conrad: 1:53:32

And in my line of work, because I'm an unschooler and I have been so for a long time and I have a blog about it in two languages and I have a podcast and another podcast I'm very outspoken about the unschooling. I help people who unschool. Usually it's not to unschool necessarily. They feel they need support in life and they feel they can trust me because I'm a fellow unschooler and a professional. And then I help, and some of the help is helping with the feeling insecure about the unschooling and the spillover of whatever trauma or whatever personal story or whatever context is around that specific situation of unschooling. So I can't sit here and smile and nod and say we shouldn't charge money for this because I do that. That's my job. What?

Sandra Dodd: 1:54:36

you're doing is different. I have a page on my site of links I have you on there of links to people who can do counseling or therapy, who understand unschooling, because too many times if people feel like they need to talk to a counselor, they're going to spend the first four hours, the first four sessions, just explaining what unschooling is to a counselor who's saying why would you do that? I don't think that's a good idea. Put them in school.

Cecile Conrad: 1:54:59

So, to bypass that part, I have a list of people who will charge them money but who already will skip that unschooling what, what You're doing, what but also very often I see that my clients one of the reasons they need to talk to me, specifically a fellow unschooler, is what if you struggle with the unschooling and something else or maybe mostly the unschooling because that unschooling is poking you right where the pain is? You right where the pain is. You can't talk to a regular therapist about it because they would say, okay, why don't you put the kids in school and do like everyone else? Then you'll feel good. So I am talking with my clients a lot about unschooling and how to handle being an unschooling mom and how to handle being an unschooler in the world and how to handle the specifics All the things I would also share with someone I met at an unschooling conference or unschooling meetup and in those contexts, obviously I do it for free, just like the podcast is for free and the blog is for free and a lot of things I do.

Cecile Conrad: 1:56:10

I just do because I'm passionate about this topic. But it's just funny how the trauma or the personal development or the things we need to grow with where we sometimes need a professional to help us well, it flourishes in the things we do. So if we unschool, well, that's where the pain is, because that's what we're doing all day and that's where you see. That's the rash, you know. But the reason for the rash could be maybe a little bit deeper.

Sandra Dodd: 1:56:48

And that's where I can be the healing, especially if people's angst and trauma involves learning or school or acceptance or what they needed from adults that they didn't get. By giving that to their children, they can do better, they can be better. So if it's easy, if that's an easy thing, if explaining that and a couple of go do it, go do it will help, then we can help them for free. It, go, do it, we'll help. Then we can help them for free.

Sandra Dodd: 1:57:17

Like like Adultery and Alcoholics helps people overcome the idea that, oh, my life sucked because my mom was an alcoholic and I'm not even going to try to do better, I'm stuck here. If they, if somebody can help you for free to get out of something like that, if it's easy for that person to get out, then you don't need to charge money. And if the person can't get out and can't get out then they can go to a professional, they can hire a counselor. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is somebody charging a minimal amount for a secret group, where then I suspect what they're selling is stuff they learned from me and other people anyway, so that's different.

Sue Elvis: 1:57:49

Yeah, but I think when we offer things for free, it's not really free, because there are expenses in having blogs, websites, podcasts, equipment, and what we're saying is that we are willing to absorb the cost, pay that cost so that we can offer something free, but it isn't really free. Free, but it isn't really free. And this is where I'm at thinking how long can I keep all my um, my blog and my podcast online? Because it does cost money and you don't want to charge people but it's it's sharing. Unschooling. For the past, I think, think I was working out, I think I've got 15, I'm in my 15th year of writing on my blog. I put a lot of money into it and I don't regret it. It's been great fun. It's money well spent. But I wonder, it's not everybody can afford to have a blog, have a like a WordPress blog, I know, I know.

Sandra Dodd: 1:58:57

I'm lucky that my husband's willing to help me out and I have done fundraising Well mine is as well. Holly and I made a set of magnets and sold those. A lot of people still have those on their refrigerators. There have been some things in the past. I make a little bit of money from books not much. I never even remember to tell people I have a book. It's not. I've got it.

Sue Elvis: 1:59:18

I've got a copy.

Sandra Dodd: 1:59:21

I think it's a good one, but I'm not. I didn't write it because I wanted to have a book. I wrote it because people kept bugging me do you have a book? Do you have a book and it's got some good information in it. Sometimes, if there wasn't anything else like that on my site, I put the whole chapter on. I did that with babies and toddlers because I didn't already have pages on my site and so when people asked, I just I realized I didn't have a page, so I lifted that from the book. But it's me, it's my personal feeling that I came from. I came from free information and I want to provide free information Once in a while. I've just asked for donations. I haven't lately, I didn't this year, but if I needed money I would, and then the people who are really flush sometimes give me $100 and some people give me $5. And that covers the year easily. Pretty quick, in a couple of days, people will give me enough money to cover my website and my storage, my photo storage or whatever it might be.

Sue Elvis: 2:00:13

One of the greatest thrills I had, sandra, was I've got to buy me a coffee button to hopefully get just a little bit of money to help cover the costs Not that it is generating much income, but that day that I got an email saying Sandra Dodd has bought you five coffees, oh, I just got so excited. Sandra Dodd, sandra Dodd. Does Sandra Dodd, does Sandra Dodd know I exist? Um, yeah, I've known that you've existed for many, many years and I thought this is, uh, you know, the guru. Sandra Dodd is a legend. I've read all her stuff and Sandra Dodd's bought me five coffees and I sat there for a minute thinking there must be another Sandra Dodd. And then I went, you know, and then we started chatting over, we exchanged a few emails and I did a bit of fangirling and I saw that Sandra Dodd's my friend it was such a thrill.

Sandra Dodd: 2:01:10

Will you link her website below this so people can go see it?

Cecile Conrad: 2:01:12

cecilia yes, I've already noted that, okay, and I will also link to specific posts that you have been talking about. Actually, my husband will do it and I might send you.

Sandra Dodd: 2:01:23

I can send you that link to the jen keith page there's also.

Cecile Conrad: 2:01:27

I mean, I'm getting tired. It's after 11 here in the cold north um so but I've got. I can't see any longer, but I can still write. Um, yeah, sue, website. Um, but I also. You mentioned a few specific blog posts, sue, so we need to put them in the show notes as well. Um, the one about healing, you said yes that one and one about healing.

Cecile Conrad: 2:01:51

you said yes, that one and one about mental health Same, yeah, okay. Yeah, I can't see. I'm looking at the paper, but it doesn't work. Well, thank you, it's the funny thing Now, we shared it. One is in Australia, one is in the US and one is in Scandinavia, so we are on very different time zones here and mine is getting late. I feel like I have a few things we haven't talked about. That's noted here, but maybe we have to do it on. The next one Is there many, many things.

Sue Elvis: 2:02:32

Could we do a part two?

Sandra Dodd: 2:02:34

Well, yes, about recovering curiosity. I just feel that did we cover it really? There wasn't a summary, but I think the summary could be, even if you, by sharing your children's wonder and excitement about the world, you can rekindle your own, if you had lost it and I thought about when you said a few maybe once, maybe twice that I've had mine.

Cecile Conrad: 2:03:03

I never lost mine. That's not exactly true, I think. I think I had some school years where I was kind of I don't know a little bit lost. Also, my parents divorced just as I started schooling. So could be the school, could be the divorce, I don't know.

Cecile Conrad: 2:03:24

But when I scan back over my life and I try to think about those years from six to 16, and maybe even high school years, so until 19, when I started university, I feel like the things I learned and the things that really ignited my brain. It was never the curriculum and I was a very good student, especially the last half of these years. The first years I was really, really stupid. I couldn't learn anything. But after, I don't know, grade five or six, I became smart. Someone turned on the light and I got all the high grades. It doesn't matter much. But the things I really learned, I learned in relations. I learned from my uncle when he was telling stories and from my grandmother and from books I read. That was not school books. My mom had a library. She was a high school teacher of Danish and French and she had a library and I had a hard time sleeping as a child, so I would sit in the library at night reading all the books. I remember that.

Cecile Conrad: 2:04:38

I don't remember the schooling stuff, so what I'm trying to say is that hungry brain that I just need.

Cecile Conrad: 2:04:47

I need something to go in there.

Cecile Conrad: 2:04:48

I still feel that I feel really frustrated, really annoyed, if I don't get to learn something new, dig down somewhere or someone tell me something.

Cecile Conrad: 2:05:02

I really prefer learning in groups, actually learning by conversation or with someone exploring with my kids or my friends, or just having that shared community curiosity, or someone being really passionate about something hardly matters what it is Someone being really passionate about cardboard, telling me all about it, how it works and how it's created and how much is used for what and why and why it's a problem, and you know, I wouldn't care to look it up myself, but if someone's really passionate and talking about it, I can listen like an idiot for three hours just because that makes it interesting, right? So yeah, so my curiosity is like that and I think most of the things I've learned in my life of course, some of these things I've learned from school teachers in a school context, because some school teachers are really passionate and they share that passion and listening to them and exploring with them has been fun In school, not so much in high school, more in university, even more because these people, they just knew what they were doing.

Sandra Dodd: 2:06:18

I love the mention of cardboard. One time I was at a friend's house and I got really excited about some little cardboard box, about how they had cut it. So it was cut in such a way that if they punched them out they didn't waste cardboard. And I was just like effusively going on about this cardboard box and about the design and everybody's just looking at me and he said you know that people do that for jobs. It's like an engineering thing. I'm like I hadn't thought about that. You know, somebody, somebody somewhere, when they're deciding how to cut that cardboard, they have to have a use for the punch outs, for this through the waste or something right.

Sandra Dodd: 2:06:50

I'm like, oh, that's so cool, but if I could start over, there are so many jobs I would love to do tile. If I could just start over and like what do you? What in all the world is fascinating that you want to do? I have, I have a list and one of them's, I guess, designing cardboard boxes and one of them is doing tile and they're nothing like chemical engineering. I get excited when people can tell me stories about chemical engineering. So I'm curious about things that I'm too old to need to know. I can't do anything about it now. But yeah, I think that's great when people have the enthusiasm to see other fields of knowledge or other pursuits or other manufacturing or whatever as something interesting. And I think kids have that naturally and parents, if they're lucky, have it, or if they're not, if they've lost it, they can get it back.

Cecile Conrad: 2:07:37

Yeah, that's the point. You can get it back. And for me and I don't know if that holds for everyone, but for me it's kind of contagious. That was my point, but I'm just too tired to be focused right now that you know. If someone else is passionate about something and they have curiosity, just tack on to it.

Sue Elvis: 2:07:58

And then it's kind of a vibe.

Sue Elvis: 2:07:59

So in a way that our role as parents in our unschooling homes, it is absolutely essential that we are curious people who are excited about possibilities in life, so that that atmosphere in our home it gets picked up with our kids. They look at it and think it's normal to learn to be curious, to follow thoughts and ideas and try things out. But that's where I think that I regained my curiosity was because I was battling with my kids for a while and they kept why do we have to do this, mum? Because I said so. And then I thought in my head it's your turn to get an education, it's your turn to suffer.

Sue Elvis: 2:08:48

And then, when I realized that this was never going to work, I thought what unschooling gave me was that the idea that education or learning is for everybody, it's not just for children, it's not just for school-aged children, it's for all of us. And that was my turning point that this is wonderful. I get a second chance to go out there and learn stuff that I've always wanted to know about. And we're a team here where I go and inspire each other and share stuff, and I'm really grateful for that, because the education I got first time round it's pretty awful. Even though I got a science degree, and on paper it looks pretty good, it's pretty awful. The one I've gained from learning with my kids has been wonderful. Oh, that's great.

Cecile Conrad: 2:09:42

Isn't that a beautiful place to end the podcast. Actually, I feel like we could go on for another two hours, but I think then I need to make a bed for the sleepover guests that one of my teens have here, and maybe there's a second, but we can never promise where these conversations go. But maybe there is a second conversation about the role of unschooling in our personal lives and how that spills over to the children, instead of the other way around. It's an interesting thing. I kind of want to keep talking, but I other way around. It's an interesting thing. I kind of want to keep talking, but I think we shouldn't. I think we should.

Sue Elvis: 2:10:22

I should go to bed. Well, thank you, cecilia, for leading us in this interesting conversation. I've really enjoyed chatting with you and Sandra today.

Cecile Conrad: 2:10:32

Thank, you so much for joining me. It's so interesting that I can almost stay awake all night for it. It's been very wonderful.