Clover, who will be 15 shortly, is what I consider unschooled, although some may disagree on the proper terminology. Another fitting term may be "child led". Whatever the name it is about pursuing passions. Having a child who is an old soul can be a difficult thing for outsiders to understand. Clover, has never been her chronological age. She's always been what I referred to as the "older little sister." So finding her place in a cookie cutter type of world has been a challenge for us both.
She is a girl who likes to be challenged, but will kick and scream and refuse to do anything which she cannot see a logical purpose to. Clover logic means how something fits into the bigger picture and why its important in relation to people. This is something that when it comes to traditional subjects I just plain suck at conveying to her. While I see the abstract she needs to know how people will be affected, why they would be affected and how to ensure their happiness. Not an easy thing for me when it comes to subjects like math...
So needless to say we have tried a few different approaches. Clover's absolute favorite was when she was twelve she attended a co-op three days a week in the Malibu mountains overlooking the beach with a wonderful playwright as her instructor. She really looks back on that short period of time as being magical. There were three little girls that stuck to her like glue and that she loved dearly and a couple of boys her age who referred to her as "Hermione." But like all good things it came to an end for many reasons, and I must admit that my bank account was very glad that it was over.
After that she slowly moved into a more unschooly approach. She has chosen which classes interest her and taken them. This has led to following many rabbit trails, which sometimes are found to be exciting and other times lead to dead ends. For example, she has tried several online classes which interested her. The first was a class on evolution and although she liked the subject matter she found the format of the class to be something that was hard for her to connect to. Then last fall she took two advanced literature classes that were taught in a different online format. Even though she liked the projects and the teacher, she found the lack of face to face human connection to be a problem for her.
Another experiment this year has been taking a few classes at the local high school. Again, she signed up for things that interested her, which first semester happened to be Art and Spanish. She ended up loving taking the classes, but realized she could never be at a high school for an entire day as following their arbitrary rules made it feel like she was in daycare.
But along the way other rabbit trails led to exciting discoveries and the realization of the different levels of self motivation within her. She has goals for herself that are outside of the normal box and I continue to encourage her by helping her identify the things she needs to do in her life to reach those goals. Sometimes we hit bumps and then take a step back to figure out a different way of approaching something that is important to her. One example was just recently she took a research paper writing class. She hated the class because she felt no connection to why she needed to do it. Even though she understood the logical need for it, since there was not an emotional connection she didn't put the type effort into it that she normally would have. So after the class was over and she cooled off we came up with another way to get the same skills in away that made more sense to her.
With Clover the biggest success is the ability to be aware of her own goals and progressing towards them. Not being afraid to try out many different approaches until something works along the way. But most importantly finding a way to have a human connection to something she is learning or undertaking is an incredibly important part of her process. After all this is a girl with some amazing out of the ordinary goals for her life, its just my job to help her see that she can do them.
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