learning E's bar mitzva parsha

We've been doing ok on the birchas haftorah.  We found a video and sing along to it and E's been learning it. 

I've had a hard time sitting down with him to learn the parsha.  Not leining; Ari's doing that with him.   It's hard to find time to sit and learn with him.  I guess I'm settling in to the new school year at work and the yom tovim are coming up. 

I realized also I'm having a hard time focusing.  What are our learning goals?

Today I had a conversation with Elazar.  I said that learning his parsha involves 4 skills:

1) leining/trope
2) reading
3) translating
4) understanding

I asked him which skills he is interested in working on and which skills he wants to pursue.  He said that the reading part is the hardest for him.  But he also felt that the reading would be important to have by his bar mitzva.  He figured he'll be working on reading with his father at avos u'banim, so he'd prefer not to do that with me.

He said he likes figuring out what the words mean if I read him the words.  So he doesn't mine trying to translate it and having me help him.  He thinks that's fun.  (And he generously added that when I read it to him, I could read it with the trope.)

So that's the plan.  I read it to him, and together we'll translate.  And then try to understand the pasuk.  We'll see how that goes.

Loving What Is: Upon Thinking Fish Should Be Taught to Fly

It's a blessing that somehow, I consider Chen's rebellious nature to be a blessing.  We've had so many talks about why there needs to be rebels in society, how it's useful evolutionarily for groups to have rebels, how rebels help change things that need to be changed.

It's a blessing that I came across Susan Cain's book Quiet and learned that Jack's cautiousness and hesitation and need to be very comfortable and secure before he can relax is not something that needs to be "fixed."


This past year Chen tested all the kids to find their love language and it turns out Jack's is gifts. This has radically altered my attitude.  Practically, I am trying to make sure to give him small gifts every day--little drawings, shells I've picked up on the beach.  And I noticed he either makes special food for himself with friends--sushi, bakes, french fries--or he asks to be taken out to buy a slurpee if he doesn't get a gift that day.  I also noticed that he is extremely focused on tracking when his packages are coming. 

The important thing to note about the gift love language is that it's often mistaken for an inappropriate or unhealthy focus on materialism.  I've found it helpful to think of it as a small gift is important every single day just as a kid whose love language is touch needs a hug every single day (or even numerous times a day).  If he doesn't get a small gift, he doesn't feel loved.  This affects his mood, his sense of things being right with the world, his equilibrium. 

You can see me wrestling with this and not realizing what is happening here and here. I'm not saying that I handled those situations badly per se, but look at them through the lens of gifts being his love language.  There is a whole layer of understanding missing that part of what is paining Jack so badly is that his cup was not filled, and he was "itchy" (so to speak) from the feeling of needing love (via gift).  Once you see that, you can see his mood and his reactions in a different context. 

And that's a context I'm totally missing at that point.

What does it lead to?  Less compassion, less understanding, less creative problem solving, less giving him the small physical gift he needs to feel loved.

I also was mistakenly looking at it through the lens of middos improvement, as if his desire for material things is a character flaw.  It's a nature and it's a way he feels loved.  This is something I'd like to help him be aware of and help him learn to satisfy in a way that is not overly expensive.  It's not something to fix.

I'm in the middle of a similar revolution of understanding regarding Aharon.  I'll make that its own post.

One of the things that makes Unschooling so Radical

Something that comes up when people worry about unschooling is: What if the kid grows up and feels that the parent has abdicated responsibility for educating them and the parent should have done a better job and forced them?

I've tried to explain that when unschoolers want to know something and feel like they need it, they simply pursue it.  Ask for help if they need.  (For example, when Chen took a college course and realized she didn't know exactly how to write an essay, she asked me to run through it with her and I told her about introductions, stating points, backing them up, and conclusions, and she began writing essays.) Today I read something by Caren Knox and it gave insight as to why this is and how it works and it absolutely resonated with my experience (bolding is mine):

Someone said that they find watching their children feeling bad about failing painful.  She responded:

One thing I’ve noticed in most long-time unschoolers I’ve known is that they inherently understand that they’re learning all the time, and that they experience not reaching goals or not quite getting something, not as personal failure or a shortcoming, but as one step in learning. I doubt they’d even be able to express that, unless they’re particularly self-reflective; for them, taking “failure” personally isn’t part of their experience of life. (This, of course, also depends on the personality of the child. What I’m saying is what I’ve noticed, generally speaking.)

They’re able to assess what happened without self-recrimination. “Oh, I didn’t know xyz was part of this thing I’m trying. Now I know, so this time I’ll add in xyz and maybe it’ll work now.” “Jeez, I am not so great at organizing this thing. I’ll ask Banu how they did it for the thing they did.” [<——- Very doubtful any unschooler has said anything like this out loud. This is my clumsy attempt at portraying the inner, perhaps even unnoticed by them, thoughts of an unschooler facing something not working as they planned or imagined.]

In school, something not working means FAILURE. You had one chance, and you screwed up, so that’s it. You get an F or a C or some other measurement that means you did not get this thing, and you will not get this thing, because this is the only time in the curriculum this is done. And people seem to think that means something about you personally. “You’re bad at math.” “You’ll never be an engineer.” “You’re slow.” “You’re a bad student.” “You are falling behind.” “You have a disability.”

Unschoolers have experienced life differently. There is plenty of time to do what they’re trying, so not getting it the first time means they can assess and try again, learning each time. (They might learn they don’t want to do that thing as much as they thought they did.) If they see they’re not skilled in a certain area, it doesn’t mean that *they* are failures; they can choose to learn about that, or ask for help, or outsource, or all of those.

Most always-radically unschooled kids or long-time radical unschoolers are comfortable with the process of learning, which often involves failure.
It’s like a lot of video games. You move your character through obstacles, and if you fail, there’s another life right there for you to take what you learned (“Whoa, a Goomba comes at me there”) and make different choices (“I’ll kick this Koopa shell first, then go”). There’s no real-life failure or death, and there are infinite opportunities for you to start over (or from a save point) and take another go at it.