Category: Learning Lifestyle

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Not Good Strange Times

There are moments when things feel almost right. Moments when we’re with the right people at the right place. Even then, in picture perfect scenes, the shadows of a twisted reality creep across our path.

Yesterday, we met a home educating family at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library for fun and exploring in the snow. Snowball fights, storytelling, nature appreciation, and my sons’ love of getting away from the grown ups ruled the children’s day.

We’ve been friends for years and probably share more common interests with them than any other family I know. The kids love each other, I’ve played innumerable hours of soccer with the dad, and the mom has been one of my best spiritual and emotional supports in widowhood.

The mom and I walked and talked at a healthy distance from our rabblerousers and couldn’t seem to stay off of sad topics. My recent breakup, wrestling with depression, the aggravations of Zoom school (they are educationally diverse), and the unreality we are experiencing.

We only saw another dozen or so people during hours in the thousand-acre expanse, but they were mostly masked. Couples, hundreds of yards from other humans, walking along with their faces covered. There was no breeze and the sun was brilliantly warming, although the air was chill. It’s troubling and scary that this behaviour is being normalized. This particular oddity of covering our skin from the vitamin D-producing sunlight our bodies so desperately need to stay healthy is worrisome. We’ve known for months that vitmin D deficiency is rampant in hospitalizations. It is difficult to get the necessary exposure to sun in the winter, why are we covering our faces?

I take heart in the example we’re setting for our children. We teach them that health and freedom are not mutually exclusive. We teach them that health is an individual responsibility. We teach them that you must first care for yourself before you can be able to care for others. More importantly, we model these principles in our own words and actions.

In March of this year, just as the world was turning to fear and I watched fellow Christians recede from one another, I had the opportunity to help a homeless family. The mom wasn’t feeling well and needed to be seen by a doctor. Her children and mine piled into my minivan and we headed to an urgent care in heavy morning rain. It wasn’t open yet, so she asked to go to the bus stop to get to a hospital. She wasn’t in need of emergency care, but that was her only option. I almost dropped them off at the bus stop, but thought better of it. I insisted on driving her to the hospital and she begrudgingly acquiesced, her pride was worn from little sleep and respiratory distress.

I didn’t think about being in danger. I didn’t think I was putting my children in harm’s way. It felt much more dangerous to walk away, or leave them at a bus stop.

Later, I Iearned that she had a strep infection. My wife and sons had suffered strep infections two years previous and she didn’t survive. Maybe we survived in order to help that mom. I don’t know.

I don’t know why we’re hiding from each other now. Maybe people need the illusion of safety and security to go about their lives. I don’t ever remember being blinded by that lie, but going through tragedy has stripped away the delusion that existence isn’t integrally bounded by suffering.

Today, I’m going to do my best to accept neccessary suffering and work to relieve unnecessary suffering in myself and others.

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It Ain’t a Break

There is a lot of talk among homeschoolers this time of year about what kind of “break” to take. As much as I agree with the concept of taking a break from formal homeschooling, it’s not a “break.”

It’s a shift of priorities. In the wake of losing the mother of my two young sons, I shifted all my focus to our emotional, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing. There’s a lot of work in that. I’ve come to believe that learning the skills to cope with tragedy is more important than any book-based lesson.

An emotionally balanced, psycholgically self-aware, and spiritually grounded individual is unstoppable in whatever learning they desire. That individual can never be “behind.”

That work isn’t just for those in the throes of trauma, it is for everyone. Our society is sick with worry over where each of us exists in the rat race. The only real race is the one against ourselves. Finding deeper peace in each day will bring us ever greater riches until our last day.

The work is in yourself, always.

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Little Library Christmas Cheer

We got a wonderful surprise when one of our local Little Libraries started holding wrapped books.

My younger son found a Christmas book during his explorations and we drove my older over to find something.

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

He was super excited to get two Roald Dahl books, The Magic Finger and George’s Marvelous Medicine. He hasn’t read either, but we are all big fans.

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Grateful for Time to Build

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

We’ve been hosting unschoolers for a weekly Lego club called Time to Build and I’m going to start documenting their creations and our experiences.

Below is a fun scene I found after club that involved the LEGO Marvel Spider-Man Far From Home: Molten Man Battle set.

This challenge was equal parts fun and dangerous and produced a laser canon that my son was happy with.

I got in on the building when one of our younger guests requested a giraffe. I grabbed The Lego Ideas Book and copied this design as closely as I could.

I love this time with friends. The home education community is incredibly diverse and I love getting to know other parents and how they go about facilitating their children’s education.

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Grateful Deschooler

Deschool yourself, unteach yourself about what education is. It’s not an easy process to let go of the assumptions we have absorbed. “Preschool” wasn’t a thing 40 years ago. Kindergarten was voluntary in many places at that time too. The mandatory “school” mentality is shockingly new in human history, this isn’t how we have learned for millenia.

I don’t “teach.” I learn out loud, ask questions, model curiosity, model good behavior, model self care and self improvement, model good eating habits and physical fitness, and, most importantly, I listen. Listen to the child’s desires and needs, try to fulfill those and you will be on the right path. The hard part will be when his/her desires don’t match your expectations.

So that’s at the root of deschooling: releasing expectations and assumptions about what education looks like. I was public schooled for 13 years and deschooling is an ongoing process. We have been filled up with so many assumptions about the way things aught to be, when our hearts and minds know they can be better. That is the path to freedom.

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New Friends

I sat at my dining room table with three new friends today. These were home educating moms who had brought their children over to build in our Lego workshop.

We didn’t talk politics, Covid, nor any of the mainstream narratives. We discussed unschooling and our greatly varying paths to a similar mindset.

I don’t know if I would have met these amazing women if not for the Lockdown and happy coincidence. In the chaos of the new social divisions, I have sought out those who would think for themselves and be willing to meet and connect in honest exchange.

That has meant forming new groups and opening my home when so many doors are closed.

I am grateful for these opportunities to connect. I am more a social creature than most. These connections are lifeblood.

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My Curious Little Man

I’ll start with a small self-gratitude for my intentional and disciplined approach to media consumption. On Election Day and the day after, I didn’t see, nor hear, any news. I was focused on our lives as a family and we had a great couple of days without distraction.

My big gratitude is for the little bugger who wrecked my plans. My older son, Westen, got curious about who won the election late on Wednesday. I told him I didn’t want to know and I didn’t want him searching for the answer.

Luckily, he’s a Zerbey and would never listen to an incurious authority figure. While I played soccer, he looked up the results. Of course, he couldn’t find anything satisfying and told me after the game. I’m not the best dad I can be at night after a workout, so I chided him for disobeying my request. It took me a few minutes to apologize and tell him that he had done the right thing, that if you have a desire for knowledge, you should let no one stand in the way. I told him I would have done the same thing.

I’m blessed by my rebels. They humble me and teach me everyday.

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Not Imposing My Will on Others

I don’t determine my potential by who is in elected office. I am the driving force in my life.

I participated in politics for 20+ years. Voting, phone banking, volunteering for the Republican National Convention in Philly in 2000, attending city council meetings, speaking at school board meetings, Tweeting wildly in the pre-censorship days, watching C-SPAN and listening to Rush Limbaugh at age 16 and spinning that into a 24-hour TV news habit, and generally believing all those activities were important.

Then I had children.

I turned off the TV. That’s adult stuff, right? I don’t want to poison there minds with that…yet.

Then I came home to take care of those children and facilitate their development full time. That was around 2009-2011 and I was sure Obama was our greatest villain. He and Hillary were getting us into unnecessary conflicts in the Middle East and I was with the Right on all the arguments against him. It took me a long time to unwind my hypocrisy.

In that period, I was working out my principles and how to pass them on to my sons (as I thought that was my job as a parent). I hadn’t found faith in Jesus Christ yet and had no easy source for answers. I was working on my simplest truths.

I decided to formulate how I would explain my support for Bush’s wars and opposition to Obama’s (and both Clintons’) wars to my sons when they were ready. I couldn’t do it. The Golden Rule kept getting in the way. How could I act one way in my life and support the opposite policy in my political beliefs? Lesser of two evils? That’s a false choice. The near term cost may be great, but good is always an option.

It was a slow, quiet, and internal process. I had wanted to be a dad since I was ten. I had put a lot of thought into it and this was the first time I felt the Holy Spirit telling me that I was in the right place. I was learning at least as much from my sons as they were learning from me.

As we grew into a homeschooling family, I discovered Tom Woods and libertarian philosophies. My wife and I were taking on a task that many assume is the role of government. If we could be responsible to educate ourselves and our sons, what else could motivated individuals accomplish? What could they NOT accomplish?

The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) was the concept that cleared away contradictions in my mind that I had been trying to reconcile. It is the articulation of the Golden Rule in political terms. I was finally able to say that I had been wrong and that I can be right going forward.

In 2016, I was driving my young sons to vote in the Presidential Primary in Delaware. Our polling place was in the church that I would eventually join as a follower of Christ’s Way. Trump was on a roll and it seemed that Ted Cruz was the only one who might stop him. I was torn and discussed it with my sons. I told them war and education were my biggest issues. Cruz was better on education and Trump was better on war. My seven-year-old asked, “You have to decide between war and homeschooling?” Crap. Simultaneously, he exposed the false choice and gave me the answer I still give today, “If the people are dead, you can’t educate them and you can’t move their hearts.”

I’m pretty slow, so I didn’t absorb all of that before pulling the lever for Trump that day. I was more right than I knew, Cruz eventually tried to meddle in homeschooling from the Senate and he (or Hillary) certainly would have given us more dead bodies through military conflict. But that would be the last vote I cast.

I came to learn that democracy is one group of people imposing their values on a larger group of people (most Americans do not vote for the winning candidate) through force of law. I could no longer support that system of aggression.

Today, my sons have their own political ideas. They discuss candidates and issues with their friends in a juvenile manner that isn’t far off adult conversations on the topic. I see my role as always advocating for the opposite position as best I can. Freedom and voluntarism extend into my parenting. I’m not here to direct their thoughts, but as a stone for them to sharpen their blades upon.