16: Sandra Dodd | Always Learning: A Conversation with Unschooling

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
We're we're live. Okay, so uh today this week's guest is uh central dud. And um when when you look at uh unschooling, then uh that's a name that is quite hard to get around. So we are very happy that you you're here because I know this it's a central name, it's a central name in the community. A lot of our friends have said, Oh, have you read this book and all that? So now here we are.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:31
Yeah, we've been looking forward to this conversation. I remember one of my friends, she I think she drove to a conference in Amsterdam, maybe some years. Leiden my friend's name, or no, it would have been in Leiden. Okay, yeah, but I wasn't in the Netherlands. Yes, yeah, yeah. I remember she was so excited, and now I get to talk to you. I'm really happy. I appreciate your time here with us. Thank you for inviting me.

Jesper Conrad: 00:60
Yeah, and one thing I would love to start out with is uh you do not any longer have any kids at home. Uh they are all uh escaped the nest of that is a stupid way to put it. No, no, no, no, no, no. That wouldn't that may be more normal how children feel. They they have flown away and are now now being adults on their own and living their own life, and but you're still uh having a voice about uh unsku schooling. Uh so I think that could be interesting to hear why is it so so important?

Sandra Dodd: 01:33
When I first started helping people, I did it as penance. So I noticed that you had asked someone else uh in another interview, why are you doing this? Why are you helping other people? I have a cousin my age, a little older, who grew up with me. From the time we were eight, she lived with us, and so we were like sisters and the same age and in the same grade and everything, very close. And then when I was at the university, I was, you know, all uh junior, so I was my third year. I thought I knew everything, right? I'm 19 years old, I guess. I went to university early. And she came to visit me in Albuquerque, and um, we lived like 90 miles north, so she had come to visit me. That was very cool. She had a little boy named Paul, and uh she said, We're thinking of keeping Paul home and homeschooling him. And I said, Ah, what a bad idea! That's a terrible idea. I said, the schools are changing, it's gonna be great. There's all this new research, and and schools are reforming, and New Mexico was just you know big into this. And and then I, you know, I had all the other arguments about you know social stuff and and yeah, it's so silly. I mean, some of those arguments, even if I were to just start reciting them, it seems so silly in northern New Mexico. Anyway, um, so she believed me because I was confident and pushy. And she didn't homeschool. So some years passed, years passed, many years passed. And then I had a and then I had a child, and he got to the age of five, and I started reading about homeschooling, and I started thinking, oh, for one thing, the schools didn't change. You know, they sort of experimented with change and then rolled back to the old way because that's another that I could talk about that for an hour, about why trying it doesn't work with school reform. You have to do it big time, and it it can't be done with public schools, they're too big, it's too big a monstrosity. So, anyway, um, so my cousin's name is Nada, and I and I um I called Nada on a morning, like early in the morning, when I when I the day that we decided I think that we were gonna do this, that I was really confident that it wasn't crazy. And I was reading John Holt's Teach Your Own, and uh and I um I called Nada and said, Nada, I am so sorry that I told you not to homeschool Paul because I think I was wrong. I was totally wrong. She she does this, she pulls the phone away from her and it says, Hey kids, they're getting ready for school. You don't have to go to school today if you don't want to. And so I thought, well, that's I feel better, although it had been like 10 years, maybe more. I don't even want to add it up because I'm more embarrassed if I think about that. But I decided that to make up for that, I was gonna help other people for two years, and then that stretched to three years. I thought, ah, two years isn't enough, and I thought, and then I will have redeemed myself. Yeah, but as it turned out, I really enjoyed that, and I was learning from them too. You know, when once we started telling stories back and forth, it just blossoms. It's so much richer to have a conversation with a lot of people in it. Yeah, and so at first, the at first I was just talking to people locally, a little uh in Albuquerque, you know, little uh groups that had formed out of La Leche League, sort of. And um then I went online, and I all at first it's hard for people to imagine who who have only been online in modern days with with color photos and music and stuff, it wasn't like that, it was dusty. It was just uh black and white text, not even as pretty as a nice typewriter, but like you know, computer type. Yeah, and there were user groups, so you leave messages like a message board by topic, and people come and answer, so it's one long, long, long list of all the responses, which is fine, like comment sections now. And um, so I was in a in a user group for home education. There were about 80 people in it, and about three were unschoolers, but I was the only one who was brave enough to say anything. But that's okay. So most of them were fundamentalist Christians because in the 19 late 1819 eighties and 1990s in the United States, there was a huge movement of homes of fundamentalist Christians to begin homeschooling. They had they built curriculums, they built conferences, it was a huge deal. So for a while here, if we would go, well, I'm homeschooling, so are you fundamentalist Christian? No, it was weird and it was a little difficult. And we had neighbors who were like that, and you know, their daughter babysat for me. So I got to see that too. I anytime I had a chance. I wasn't infiltrating, I was just curious, you know, I was just really um interested in how and why. But at church, the ministers would say the men should tell their wives to homeschool, and if they didn't, they weren't doing what God wanted. I mean, it was just it was it was some serious pressure, and so she didn't want to homeschool, but she did because her husband said, because the minister said. But so I made it easier for her by taking her 13-year-old daughter and giving her fun stuff to do at my house. So I used her daughter as a mother's helper. I just paid her a little bit to come hang out at my house, and she was glad to do it because she didn't get to go anywhere otherwise. It was great for me. So, anyway, I was in that group, and then America Online came along, which was better, still not photos, but much more organized. And so we had a homeschooling section that we could have Christian and non-Christian separated a little bit. And then after a while, after a year or two, we had unschool, an unschooling section, huge luxury. And by then there were a hundred people talking about unschooling, it was great. And so uh we started having chats, and some of those chats are on my website now, some from the late 90s, and uh just text chats, you know, people writing up, but all still all in one room. So the ideas kind of roll over each other really fast, but there was also the thing where one person could say a thing and three people could say that didn't work for us. There's some value in that, in the numbers, and in a conversation like this, I always loved panel discussions at conferences, especially if the people knew each other. Because if somebody says something, you see the expressions on the other faces. Maybe not everybody likes that, maybe not everybody has that, but I always liked it. It's like, okay, somebody said something, three people went like that, what? Or they all went, yes. So that's valuable for me. It's like a confirmation that this was a good thing to say. And so I like those sort of tapestries of in of communication, information, yes, communication, right? Where where it's going back and forth. I like that a lot. So that was fun for me. And I and people started asking me to speak. I had spoken at a couple of little local things here, and I was invited to speak in California twice in one year, I think it was '96, '97, and um, and then in Texas. So after that, because I had spoken, other conferences invited me. And I've the first time I was going to speak and they were going to record me, I was terrified. I thought, yeah, what if I say a wrong word? And I do, and I have, and some of the recordings on my site, I say, Oh, when I said this, I meant this, you know. But you know who's going to read that first? Sometimes you have to.

Cecilie Conrad: 08:56
But um so did those two, three years of paying back to humanity ever stop?

Sandra Dodd: 09:06
Not yet.

Sandra Dodd: 09:10
Because then there was just another thing coming. It just sort of built itself a scaffolding, and that's where I was. And it was it was very satisfying. And over the years, I've had groups of friends. It's a little like being a Girl Scout leader, I guess. Like if you're a Girl Scout leader because your daughter's that age, and then she grows out of it, usually the moms leave too. Same with La Leche League. Somebody might be a La Leche League leader because she has little children, and then when they get older, she might not be anymore. And that happens a lot with unschooling. So I've had friends, really good friends, that I wake up in the morning and I'm really happy if they've posted something, is like, yes. And um, the last batch just topped out. The last batch who came when they had little boys who were eight. All those boys are 19 and 20. And so I'm I'm it's just a little sad for me because I didn't want to foster another batch. So I'm topping out now. I'm I'm to the point where I people used to say, How are you so how are you so patient answering the same questions over and over?

Jesper Conrad: 10:14
And I said, I rephrase, I think if I can do it better, yeah, or I try to particularize it for the other people in the group, because because it from a different point in your life, so it will always be uh a better or a new answer, of course.

Sandra Dodd: 10:30
That's true too. Yeah, that's true too. And very many times I had collected so many, I have pages of collections of people's best ideas of topics, and so very often we would answer the question, we whoever was in the conversation, and then also give them a link. So, you know, here's here's how you can start getting toward that. But here, go read this if you want to. And very often the person we were talking to didn't, they were impatient, they were off to do something else, but other, you know, five other people did. So that's another advantage of big groups.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:60
When I started unschooling, I had a lot of information about what I could read about unschooling, but I also had four small children. So this go off and read this book and that magazine and that website and that book and this book. I was like, um, no, I simply didn't have the time for it, or the bandwidth, or I I couldn't stay awake at night to to read the book. So I I kind of read the reviews and talked to other people, and so in that respect, I understand that people are impatient and everything and tired and their babies are coming. So if you have a lot of small children, then and it's too bad. I wish I'd read all those books before I had the I have the time now to read the books, but well, I see I I there's more information available now in one day.

Sandra Dodd: 12:06
Even if you just said I'm only gonna read for one day and then I'm gonna stop forever than it existed in the whole earth when I was started.

Jesper Conrad: 12:12
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sandra Dodd: 12:13
I can imagine there wasn't there wasn't a book except Teach Your Own. And that was the first time John Holt had said, just don't even send your kids to school, because the other things before that were all about school reform. Yeah, uh schools could be made better. But he hadn't gone so far as to say, just don't send your kids to school until that book. So I when my when I decided that I might unschool, the only resource I had other than the you know talking to people online, which was really not rich and fast, it was occasional and slow, uh was Grun Without Schooling magazine. So we could get that magazine. I read it cover to cover, every word when I got it. It might take me a couple of days, but I read everything. Yeah, and then it was that was it for two months.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:09
Okay.

Sandra Dodd: 13:10
And before I was online, that's all I had, because there was a while, there was a while when I only had my neighbors.

Sandra Dodd: 13:15
There were two unschooling families out of our La Lechelle group. They had formed some of the leaders, and I was a leader applicant for a while, but then I quit to go work with the cesarean prevention group. But um in that group, there were four homeschooling families. There are about 15 families in the group. It was a home scale, uh uh babysitting co-op where we would let each other's, you know, let kids come over. The kids just think they're going to play, but the moms are really keeping points about who's, you know, who has credit to have their kids watched and stuff. It was nice. And so we knew a lot about all those families because once a month we got together with dads and everybody and had a barbecue or whatever picnic. And then once a week we had a park day where whoever was home, sometimes dads, mostly moms and kids, would meet at a park and play together. And then otherwise, we would I would have sometimes just the kids over, or their mom would come in and hang out a while, or my kids would be at their house, and when I picked them up, I would go in and hang out a while. So pretty much we had been at everybody's houses, and those monthly meetings would be at a house. So that kept us more confident about leaving the kids there because we'd been to the house and we knew the parents, so it was nice, it was nice, and I was involved in that for a few years. So uh in that group, there were two families homeschooling with a curriculum, and there were two families just unschooling, kind of informally, you know, not hardcore, like they weren't out preaching it and researching it, they're just doing it calmly. That was nice, and so I wasn't going to homeschool. I knew they were doing it, but I didn't matter to me, you know, I'm just not paying that close attention to it until when my oldest was four, he wanted to take a dance class and it went horribly sadly wrong. I was so sad for him. And then I he wanted to take an art class, and that went wrong another way. So that the art teacher said, I'll just I'll just do him private lessons, okay? And I just thought, oh my gosh, if he goes to kindergarten, he's gonna be like this, either super hyperactive or hiding and crying in the corner. He has two little girls now, and they do that. So they were over here just the other two days ago, and one of them had a popsicle and she tasted it and she didn't like it, so she says, I'm gonna throw it away. And and I and I go, No, because her sister liked it. And I thought she could give it night, but I said it too fast and too loud, and she just hid her head by the trash can like that and wouldn't say a word.

Jesper Conrad: 15:40
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 15:41
And other times she's like, you know, zipping around and doing so. That's how her dad was. His options were zing, climb, scream, or so. I thought, well, he's just not ready for school, but he had a late summer birthday. And the way it works in New Mexico is you can just say he's not ready yet on kindergarten. Oh, that's nice. So yeah, if it depends on the birthday, like there's a range, there's an age range where you have the option in or out. And so I I when we decided we would try to homeschool, we had the longest, smoothest runway I think any human could ever have. So not only did I know these families, this is before I was online, I knew these four families we didn't have to put Kirby in school yet. If he if we sign him up to homeschool for kindergarten, we have kindergarten, then the next year, if he wanted to go to school, we could put him in first grade or kindergarten. So huh. If we fail to sufficiently homeschool kindergarten, yeah. So yeah, oh yeah. And so I got sequence from the school, you know, what do we have? What does he have to know by the end of the year? Because when I was in college, they were talking about the open classroom. The people who had invented that term and written that book were professors at the university where I was, and there were buildings built in this town to incorporate those ideas, like with a science center and a history center where they would have actual things, uh, plants and animals. And uh anyway, it didn't quite work. And some of those buildings are still there, they've just built walls out of filing cabinets and bookshelves and stuff, and use that use them for regular classrooms. But anyway, I had been trained that that the whole world's changing is going to be great. We know things we didn't know before, and here's how people learn. And they made me read John Holt, how people fail. You know, how children fail, how children learn. Which is funny, you know, you're sitting at a desk and they're making you read John Holt, but that's okay. Um I uh I'm stuck, but I'll find it again. So we knew that it was gonna be easy, and within about two months, we knew that we as long as he wanted to stay home, we were just gonna keep him home. It was fine. But then we thought, but he had a little brother, and we thought he probably will want to go to school because he's very uh jockish and likes to play ball and you know, ride bikes, and he's gonna want to go to school and you know, wrestle the other boys. So we'll just you know, Kirby's like this, but his brother's not. I was pregnant at the time with Holly, who's now 32, so that's how long ago it was. And when Holly came out, after a while, we noticed she's a little fashion girl, she always dressing up. Marty would announce her outfit as she came down the runway, down the hallway. And we thought she's gotta go to school to show off her clothes. But as each of them got school age, we'd say, What do you want to do? They go, Well, I want to stay home. So every year we used to say, Anybody wanting to go to school, what are we gonna do this year? No, no, we're staying home. So that was nice, that was easy.

Cecilie Conrad: 18:44
We do the same thing, actually. We ask them and we're not very systematic, but in theory, we ask them once a year or twice a year. Well, I could ask it after a few years, but I don't really do it now because it's ridiculous.

Sandra Dodd: 18:60
Well, Holly nearly went back, she kind of wanted to go back for uh eighth grade or ninth grade when she was 13, 14. And we checked out the school. I would drive her along as kids were walking to school, so she saw where it was. And she said when the kids were walking to school, they were all like hang dog and just sludging along. And then we would go down there and see them come out of the room, out of the building, and start walking home. And she said, When they come out, they're all happy to come out. Yeah, not school didn't make them happy, coming out made them happy.

Jesper Conrad: 19:31
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 19:32
But she also she didn't want to take PE and this and that, so she just she decided not to, but I but we tried that, you know. One day, one day I really had to go to the bathroom. So we're in the parking lot, and I said, I gotta go home and go to the bathroom. So she said, I'll stay here. So she sat on a bench right outside the door where the kids are flowing around her, and she said she could feel the energy, and it was a little disturbing. They just were agitated and unhappy various ways. Yeah, and so that was, I think that was a good way for her to feel it out. Also, she had a lot of friends in school, she had friends at that school, so she had people she could ask too. Okay, so that that that's how long it took us to be absolutely sure no one was going to school, I guess. But I think this most of the damage that can be done by school can be done at home. It's possible for parents who are using a curriculum and and to to accidentally, they don't do it on purpose. No, uh, but I just feel so bad when if a kid doesn't like homeschooling and he's being homeschooled in that schoolish way, he can't go home at the end of the day. Yeah, that's actually even worse. At least at least if you're going to school, it's like it's three o'clock, let's go home.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see.

Sandra Dodd: 20:44
So when it came down to how are we going to do this, I had no question by that time because the two unschooling families were really friendly, sweet, nice to their kids, their houses felt comfortable. Nobody was afraid or hiding or hateful. And in the other families, I couldn't even say that. Sometimes there was one little girl who her parents would make her stay in the car when we went to the park day. I mean, this park day is part of our operations where all the kids are supposed to get out and play together. They would make her stay sit in the car until she finished her math homework. That's not a good use of park day.

Jesper Conrad: 21:16
No, that's not a good use of park day.

Sandra Dodd: 21:18
It's not a good use of life. So it wasn't. I I was glad to have had that. That was also part of our runway preparation.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:29
It sounds like really optimal. We have never heard of or met any unschoolers when we started our journey. Maybe we met one. Yeah, we did. I'm lying. We had met one family, but not only briefly. And it was very radical and rare. So if I had known several families, that would have been just so much easier.

Sandra Dodd: 21:53
Especially it was a luxury, huge luxury. And I've never known anybody else to have that much advantage as I. Also, I wasn't afraid of it. I wasn't afraid of it because I had already taught and because I had been in school when they said here's what's wrong with school. So I would I had that step ahead too, which helped me with other people because other people would be saying, I don't even have any idea why the schools do this. And I'm like, I know, I know. So I could explain to them in calmer terms why the schools had those policies because they're afraid of lawsuits, because they're afraid of children being abused, because they're afraid of children being neglected, because they are uh I don't know if they have this concept where you are living, traveling, but there's a thing called um uh not obligatory, but like you have to report. I'm not thinking of the adjective.

Jesper Conrad: 22:44
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 22:46
You are a reporter. Um, social workers, policemen, doctors, and teachers don't have an option if they see child abuse, they're obligated to report mandatory or yeah, that's yeah, mandatory reporting. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate you telling me the English words I can't remember. I'm getting old. And nouns are the things that go, right? The names of things. I don't know. You know that thing, the the washing machine behind the other thing that you use to do the thing.

Jesper Conrad: 23:15
The thing behind the washing machine. I don't have anything there.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:19
I don't have a washing machine. You don't have the thing behind it.

Jesper Conrad: 23:23
So uh something you said uh made me made me think about our personal journey, uh, where um it was I was more hesitant with it, and I think that often the men in the families are, and I think it's quite fun if you look at some of the the big names in unschooling, homeschooling that have uh written books and are researching are often men. Uh, but when it comes to being a father saying yes to unschooling, uh we uh tend to be more scared. Uh and I think that uh one thing I I hope with our podcast and with talking with different dads, I I want to help grow is uh kind of like a community for dads that they can hear other dads' stories because I needed uh to restrain Cecilia, kind of, you know, say, oh, but if you are homeschooling, can you please make sure they do this and this? And and it comes out of fear um from inside. Um and and I was afraid to say yes to it, and I was afraid, you know, of the societal judgment of uh would my kids be be weird, um or what not not actually not if my kids would would be weird or not, but what other people would think about them and think about us as parents. Um and and I actually think that the dads uh silently have this fear, maybe larger than the mom does, but but it is often the mom that we would uh you know, and Cecilia is probably not agreeing.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:08
You see my face now, yeah, yeah. No, no, but to be honest and fair, if we're sharing our story, so

Cecilie Conrad: 25:17
yes, but was hesitant to homeschooling. I was totally on board with the idea. We have exactly your story. We had a child who said school, maybe the other kids like it. It's not for me, I don't want it. And so he, long story short, he didn't start. And uh yes, but didn't like the idea, thought it was very radical, very weird, very hippie style. And what would the neighbors think? That was your point of view. And and told me you can do it for six months, but make sure he can read, you know. This kind of um that was where we started. But after a short time, we realized we were homeschooling. I had to sit down one afternoon and admit to my husband I was not actually teaching the children because it made no sense and and it wasn't fun and it was just annoying. So we let go. We had at that point two friends who were unschoolers, and I called one of them, had a good long chat, and then I sat down with my husband afterwards, and he said, Okay, let's let go. It's crazy, the whole thing. Let's just forget about it, let's unschool. And you let go much easier than I did.

Jesper Conrad: 26:29
Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:29
Because in the aftermath of that, my de-schooling process, I believed in the idea of unschooling. I totally am on board with it, but I'm from an academic family, I was schooled for 23 years straight. I have a nice university degree, and it scared the hell out of me when my kid didn't read. I I really had to work hard with myself, and you were you're so co cool about it.

Jesper Conrad: 26:53
Oh, yeah, but I my maybe you just didn't care. No, no, I think my reality is I had I had uh I had been living an unschooled life uh after after what uh is similar to high school. I just did what I wanted.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:09
In school you lived an unschooled life because you didn't listen. I didn't listen so far.

Jesper Conrad: 27:14
When we met uh and had kids, I had a had had had had a career for 10 years without having any sort of kind of education. Uh so I was not really afraid that you cannot learn on your own. But but to come back to the the the fear, then then I was afraid of what other people would think. But I don't think we meant talk a lot about it. Uh I think we silently enforces uh it on our wife that hey, it's in they need to do this and this, and the judgment from the society then I think would often be on the mom and not on the dad, then.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:50
So I see now that we were afraid of different things because I couldn't care less what the neighbors thought, but I was worried about the children. I would I would have those black days where I thought I just ruined their life. And I had them more frequently in the beginning. I I don't really now it's not a day, now it could be an hour. I might think, is this crazy? And then I talk to them and they tell me it's not. In one of the interviews. We're talking about two different things, so maybe we should go with one.

Sandra Dodd: 28:18
I want to go back to the thing about that, but and um, it was in a blog post of yours. I think you said something about if if there the schools won't want to take the kids unless they want to commit to being there for a long time or something like that. I don't remember if it was an interview. But say it again. What did I say? You had said I don't remember if you wrote it on a blog post or in an interview because I've just been like binging on your stuff this week. Um but you said something like unless the kids want to, they don't want to take kids who aren't going to commit to being there for years in the schools, public school or something. And in the United States, that has never been the situation. I don't know why, I don't know what the difference is, but here because school is is mandatory and has been well for the kids to go when they're little, I think that was 20th century, 20th century, but 19th century places started making it available for at least the first few years. And that kept growing, growing up to up to eighth grade, which is when kids are 13, up to now a lot of places, you have to stay in school till you're 18.

Sandra Dodd: 29:23
It's just crazy. But anyway. So because in the United States you can move anytime you want to, you don't have to tell anybody you're moving, you're not registered to live in a place. If you want to just like leave in the middle of the night in secret and abandon your electric bill and all that, you know, after electricity was invented, so not mid-19th century, but you know what I mean. Yeah, but there's no law against me packing up. My husband's off shopping right now. If I pack up and go to Alaska while he's gone, that's not illegal. We don't have that.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:55
I think I don't know what I wrote.

Jesper Conrad: 29:57
What we have is that a school gets money based on how many students are in there.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:03
So that the responsibility for the education of the child either belongs to the school or the family. If you know that's an advantage, then you own the responsibility of educating your own child. Oh, like you've opted out of the system. So you opt out of letting the system do it. That's how our laws work where we come from. Oh, okay, okay. Well, that's that's what it's constitutional right, and you have to sign off. Now it's responsibility, which it should always be. I think that right you can't come Tuesday and Wednesday to school and then homeschool Monday, Thursday, Friday. No schools could accept that. I I suppose that's what I've been we we have actually writing about.

Jesper Conrad: 30:48
No, no, we have actually also experienced, but we just didn't respect it, even with a very free school our grown-up daughter uh was in. Um, what made sense in our life when the rest of them weren't in school was to take long winter holidays because Denmark is cold in the winter and you can get cheap tickets.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:08
When who was in school? Oh, we just had the rest of them. So we had one in school, and the rest of them were homeschooled, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 31:16
So so when uh so it made sense for us to take long winter vacations. Um, and we could take them out of season so they were cheaper, but the school were not very fond of us saying, Hey, you know what, we will take our kid out of this period. Luckily, it was a very private uh school that is uh more free than many others, but some schools won't allow you to take your kid out of school for uh for a longer holiday, uh, which is uh it's just insane that you cannot control your line.

Sandra Dodd: 31:50
The funding changed here. So, but it but here, if you so if I do move to Alaska and I have kids, I put them in school. Like I can put them in school halfway through the day. If I get there at lunch, I can go down there and go, I'm enrolling these children in your school and they have to take them.

Jesper Conrad: 32:04
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 32:04
And and I learned that being a teacher, a kid can change schools like the week of finals, and we just take them and make it work. We don't we say you have to have your records from the other school. That's not true. We we say we need the records from the other school, but that's because we need not they have to.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:26
Yeah, they don't need it now.

Sandra Dodd: 32:28
Yeah, it's not a federal crime that they can't get their records. And if we ask the other school or if they never were in a school, there's nothing anybody can do about that. You just make fake up some records. So people can it when I was a kid, because records were different because there weren't computers, they counted the kids in school twice a year. Once, like after about a month of school, they counted how many people were in each class, and then they gave them funding for half a year. And then once in the spring, they did that again and they gave them funding. Okay. So if a kid was there that day and left, woo-hoo, that's good for the school, they got more money. Now they do it by the day because they can't. So that's why here the schools don't want anybody out at all. So so if you're enrolled in school, they want you to be there from eight in the morning. I think they may be doing it by hour. That if the kid, you know, when they say you have to have a doctor's excuse and all that, they're super strict about that now because they their their funding goes by how many people were there.

Jesper Conrad: 33:29
Okay, okay.

Sandra Dodd: 33:30
And that's less crazy here.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:33
I don't I can't speak for all of you.

Sandra Dodd: 33:34
No, it's caused a lot of problems. Yeah, but even when I was first involved in unschooling, and I don't think that had that was in effect yet everywhere. It's different, different states. If they had enough money to you know get it together to have a fancy system, then they could do that sooner. But there were two stories that were going around. And I I one may have been in Australia or it may have involved Australia. I think a girl, I think she was American, but she was invited to begin an international orchestra and she played violin. And they were going to go on tour in Australia. I think that was the story. And the school said no. And we were all saying, Well, the parent shouldn't have asked. It had already happened, the story had come and gone, so they didn't let her go. And there was another story like that where the family wanted to go on a sailboat or you know, something very, very cool where where most people never get to do that in their entire lives. The kid would have learned more than they would ever learn in a year of school, and the school said no, and the parent said, Okay. So it was really easy for those stories kind of fresh, with those stories true and kind of fresh, for people to go, okay, well, screw the schools, they don't own my kid. Yeah, and that is true, but it goes too far for some families. When I was a kid, my mom, well, when I was a kid, my mom was an alcoholic and she was getting worse. And school was way better for me than home. I loved school. I loved school because one time I told this story and I started crying, so but I'm not gonna cry, it's not a big story. In first grade, I was six and I went to school and I learned to I learned to read as the teacher was telling us how to read. So it seemed to me she taught me how, but I think I would have learned if I'd had more books at home. But but everything she told me, I took it in and it made sense. So I was just right. And she told me some phonics things, and I went, got it? Okay. So I thought she was a genius and you know, a miracle worker, that was great for me. She liked me, she looked at me, she asked me questions and she listened to the answer. That wasn't happening to me at home, except with my dad, who was super busy. But when my dad was around, he was a sweetie and he was nice. But he worked really hard and then he came home at eight and fell asleep. But he was a welder and used to let me go with him to buy the oxygen and the acetylene and stuff like that. So I would get to ride in his truck and hang out with him sometimes on errands, but pretty much he was super busy. But my mom was mean, ignorant, and drunk, and that's not a place to homeschool. So when people say the schools should be taken down, I hate them, they're they're terrible for everybody. Yeah, if everybody's them, if everybody is sweet, responsible, has two parents, has a place to sleep and some food, that's different. That's way different. So, you know, we had a house, we had food sometimes, but sometimes we didn't have very good food because my mom was being sneaky with the grocery bill so she could hide beer. And so there are I've never been a person who said your kids should never go to school. And some some people come to unschooling before they even have kids for political reasons of their own. They say, My child, if I ever have a child, will never see the inside of a school. It's like, whoa, how about you just don't ever go back to school?

Cecilie Conrad: 36:53
Yeah, yeah. How about dad with a child?

Sandra Dodd: 36:56
Right. How about you you solve your own childhood trauma in some other way? Because that's the same as a parent saying, I always wanted to be a ballerina, so my daughter must be a ballerina, isn't it? It's almost the same thing. Absolutely. It's close.

Jesper Conrad: 37:10
I understand they can be inspired by the idea and and think it's not the right for their child, but again, to to push unschooling or homeschooling down over your child is uh is it's not the right thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 37:26
I'm not sure I agree. I'm sorry. I think I think it's really annoying the way the whole society is spinning around the idea of school, and when the child is five years old, everybody are like, Oh, you're going to school soon enough. Do you have a new school bag? Would it be a teacher's name? What's subject to you? What's your favorite subject? Oh, you're so big now. You can go to school and the whole circus of manipulation, kind of making the child feel wrong if they don't want to, and and and trying to sell it as this very exciting, amazing thing, which is obviously in your case it was better than home, but in most cases it's not.

Sandra Dodd: 38:18
Right. But if you take it down and it doesn't exist, well, that's another thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:28
I don't know. I think it's a very fictional thing to say, let's take it down. I mean, it's not gonna happen anyway.

Sandra Dodd: 38:34
I we can and I don't I don't discourage people from letting their kids try it because if the kids would rather be there than at home, there's something happening at home.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:43
I would just wish that but maybe we come from a place where we are, there are not a lot of homeschoolers, and and obviously unschoolers are even more scarce, so it's it's hard for the child also to grow up and know that some kids are actually not in school and they're perfectly happy, and so so, in a way, I think some level of force, some level of adult responsibility. I believe it's better for you to not be in the school and you might feel you're missing out, but I know what it is, and you know, we can go to the playground and we can take the art class after school activities of all sorts, we'll find you some friends, but the whole school circus, we're not doing that. I would, in hindsight, I would have liked that I did that with our oldest. She would have liked it, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 39:40
See, well, that's that's a legitimate thing. But what if my mom just didn't want to bother waking us up anymore in the morning and she just didn't want to bother picking me up from music practice?

Cecilie Conrad: 39:50
Yeah, we're just really in the trouble. I come from broken home as well, with youth. So I'm totally on board with you. But on the other hand, I think we should come up with a better system to help broken homes than schools.

Sandra Dodd: 40:05
I also want to admit that schools aren't as good. I don't believe that schools are as good now as they were when I went to school. I went to school the the time that I was in school from 1958 to 1970 is probably the glory days of the American school system.

Jesper Conrad: 40:20
Okay.

Sandra Dodd: 40:20
We had a big post-war boom. President Kennedy had his whole um physical fitness program. So uh we had two recesses a day with nice equipment, jump ropes, balls. Um, it was let's beat the Russians, let's go to the moon. It was so we all had new science books and math books that were interested in.

Jesper Conrad: 40:41
There was there was playgrounds when you came home, you could hang out with the neighbors. There wasn't this, uh people weren't afraid yet on that.

Sandra Dodd: 40:49
We could ride our bikes around town. Yes, yes. And and um and I I was in marching band, which was fun. I was in choir, you can't do that at home. Um, my my cousin Nada could do harmonies, so we could do two-part harmonies, but to be in a place where I could do four and five-part harmonies with other people thrilled my soul. I also did music at church. I was I so I really liked music. Um, and that's something that school was good for for me too. And then I was a when Keith and I also I liked the school library, and I used to read a book under the table and stuff. I was always reading a book. And when Keith and I started the homeschool band, yeah. When Keith and I started homeschool, we went, but what about marching band? Because both of us were in school music programs a lot. And we said, What if our kids really want to do marching band? And we actually found a homeschool marching band or not marching band, concert band for Kirby to try. And he's like, Oh, it's terrible, the leader's terrible. I don't want and we thought, okay, okay, let's think. Why did we like that so much? Because it got us out of class, it got us out of the classes. Why did I love the library? Because you got a pass from the teacher to go to the library. I liked all the music. Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:00
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 42:01
So I would do extra to get to stay at school longer. If there were any after-school things happening, I want to do it. If there were early morning practices, I want to go.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:12
So Peter's who said that maybe we we what we can see in the future, would hope to see in the future was that the libraries would open up to be learning centers and maybe nobody needs a library anymore if they have a computer. Well, they do need community. Yes, and they might need the band and the choir and the football. They're not there anymore. What bands and choirs aren't there anymore. No, but can we have them back, please? And maybe can we do it at the library, not at the school? Because the library, that would be awesome. Go there of your own.

Sandra Dodd: 42:51
Community programs of different ages. That would be good too.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:54
It would be wonderful to sing with all ages, not just all of the 11-year-year-olds.

Sandra Dodd: 42:59
And I shouldn't say the band in choirs aren't there anymore, but they're not there the way they were when I was younger. So a lot of those things started falling away right after I was too old for it. Yeah, I got you. Universities too, universities in the in the United States in general aren't as good as they used to be for various all kinds of reasons, and it's getting worse. So pretty soon a university degree is gonna be about like a high school diploma used to be.

Jesper Conrad: 43:25
Yeah, I know.

Sandra Dodd: 43:26
I think it already has passed that. I think it's gonna go another time. It's gonna be like the high school diplomas now, but you're kind of worthless. You don't even have to know how to read. You can get a high school diploma. It's horrible, it's really bad. So, so I

Sandra Dodd: 43:39
think I think when I talk about school now, I don't know what I'm talking about. And you know, and that's been true of all people. Like my grand grandparents would talk about school, they're talking about school that they went to in the nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties. My parents are talking about school in the nineteen thirties, nineteen forties, or whatever, right? The the school, the image they have in their head.

Jesper Conrad: 43:55
And I have a mental detector when you came to school.

Sandra Dodd: 43:59
Oh no.

Jesper Conrad: 44:01
No.

Sandra Dodd: 44:02
No. I know. Yeah. No.

Jesper Conrad: 44:05
It's just weird.

Sandra Dodd: 44:06
So I just I think I think things are changing so quickly that the the kids with the most stability in the world are those who are home with their parents. Because there's some continuity. Yeah. There's some routine. There's something that that there's safety, there's expectation. And I I I would like that more parents were that way. If you have not seen any unschooling fail, I salute you and I hope it stays like that for your whole life. Because I've seen some people botch it badly. I had something to say about dads already. I have a note. I have notes. But is that let's give pause for the notes. I think the note is a good thing.

Jesper Conrad: 44:46
I look forward to the notes.

Sandra Dodd: 44:47
When I was a kid, when I was in this glorious school, it was a little school in northern New Mexico, Espanola. I went to Espanola Elementary, Espanola Junior High, and Espaniola High School. No one else can do that because they're all have different names now. And that's um, but when I was when I was very little, I hung out with girls and boys both. And then when I was in junior high, when I was 12, I guess, I started hanging around with girls because I thought I should. And because the girls say, Who's your best friend? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So I in when I was 12, 13, 14, I hung around with this group of eight girls, and of those eight girls, they were best friends. So it's me and Deanna, like that, like you know, pairs of girls getting into this bigger batch. I didn't like it. They tended to talk about makeup and about clothes that I couldn't afford, that they saw in magazines that I didn't have, and how to get a boyfriend. I usually had a boyfriend and they usually didn't. So I don't I didn't want to take their advice about getting a boyfriend. I also didn't want to discuss it. Yeah then I started playing guitar. I sold my clarinet and I bought a guitar. I'm glad my parents let me do that because they had paid for that clarinet, and I decided I would just do choir and not band anymore when I was 14. And so they said, yeah, okay. Um, and I bought a guitar and learned to play guitar. Now I started hanging around with boys because they played guitar because they would talk about music. And uh I my boyfriends would be in bands, so I knew all their bandmates and their friends, and I would very often be hanging out with guys. And in college, I mostly hung out with guys, and I would always have a boyfriend, but that was separate from the activities hanging out. Yeah, so I understood how women operated together, and I thought it was a little nasty, a little mean for my tastes, a little cruel. Like women are always complaining about men being violent, but women are violent, it's just very verbal. And so I um went to college, got out of college, hung out with mostly female teachers, that was fine. So when I was teaching, uh, it was all about how teaching works. And I had been interested in that since that since that first grade teacher I liked so much because I thought, how come some kids don't like a certain teacher, other kids love that teacher because it's it's there's a relationship between the child and teacher?

Jesper Conrad: 47:14
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 47:15
Personality differences, similarities of of background or whatever, and that all makes a difference. So I paid attention to that when I was in school because I knew I wanted to be a teacher, then I was a teacher. Then I quit being a teacher because it was frustrating and and schools hadn't changed, and I couldn't stand giving bad grades and hurting people's feelings, and just being part of that whole for the for the kids who were having fun, I wasn't hurting them. For the kids who were having a miserable time, I was contributing. Yeah, that's okay. So that was before I had kids. That was before I knew I was gonna have kids. So that was already in my little arsenal, too, when I pulled out all my tools to decide what to do. Then I I was started going to adult children of alcoholics meetings. Some friends of mine took me there. It was wonderful, and that was led by men and women both, and it was done on a 12-step program tradition, which is not about men or women. It's been working for years for men and women both. So well, this is interesting, it's a very neutral sort of delivery, and it's uh formulaic a little bit, like you know, you go down the steps and you talk about these ideas, and because it was not, excuse me, because it was not alcoholics anonymous, we weren't in there saying, Oh, I'm an alcoholic, I'm ruining other people's lives, I need to stop. We were in there going, I was an innocent victim of alcoholism, but it wasn't my fault, and I could pass these things on without meaning to if I'm not really careful, because even grandchildren of alcoholics can pick up bad tactics about living in a family, living in a home. They can be abusers, they can be like just cruel, casually mean, casually cruel, or inattentive and justify it because that's the way their parents were, that's the way their grandparents were. And they they I was in a group then where people are telling stories, and we were learning from the stories that the other people were telling. And then I was in there for three years, and then we lost the building, and I tried another meeting, and it wasn't the same. And and by then I was involved in La Lecha League anyway, which is all women, all women all the time, all women all the time, but talking about something that only women can talk about. Yeah, so in La Lecha League, what had the way it worked is we're nursing our babies in front of each other, and I also lived through the worst of the United States as to breastfeeding, because nobody was doing it in scientific early 20th century, 30s and 40s, 50s, unless you were really poor, you wouldn't do it because you need to sanitize the bottles, you need to measure the input and the output because we are scientific, and and so I had never seen a baby breastfed, and that's hard for people to believe now. But there was a time when, unless you were super poor, um you had no reason to see it, it was it was considered unsanitary, ignorant, and gross. So when I decided I wanted to live a more uh natural life, you know, how do people because I when I was in college, I studied English and psychology, secretly education, because it was embarrassing, because that's what the dumb girls did, unfortunately, in those days. And and uh anthropology. So I started taking anthropology in my second year. University of New Mexico was a big anthropology school, and it was it was just you know, everybody was enthusiastic, it was glorious. I loved it. And so it started making it was also the hippie days, early 70s, and I started thinking, so what's natural for humans? What you know, humans as humans as a thing, as a big thing, what do they do? What do humans do? And that became a way that I started thinking about all kinds of aspects of life.

Jesper Conrad: 51:01
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 51:01
Um, what what does shelter need to be? Yeah, what does a bed need to be? What what do humans sleep on? Not what do Americans sleep on in my town, but what's the average of all humans kind of, you know, what's in common.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:15
What do we really need?

Sandra Dodd: 51:16
So I was interested in that just as a kind of a hobby because I couldn't I didn't have any room to take more classes. But if I could have started over, I didn't know about anthropology when I first went there, and I loved it. So I've kept writing that reading that over the years. So so I I went to La Leche League because I wanted to nurse babies, and I saw people nursing babies and I heard their stories and they helped me. And uh now I've done something with women that's super useful and it's not mean, there's nothing mean about it. So now I've calmed down about can I work with women?

Cecilie Conrad: 51:53
That helped. Yeah, I get that.

Sandra Dodd: 51:56
And so when very soon after that, during that, really, because I was still I you know, Holly wasn't born yet, uh, started helping people with unschooling. I thought, I'm doing this penance to make up for what I did to Nada, inconvenience her and discourage her. And I kind of owe people in general to help with what I know how to do, what I've what I can do in front of them. With La Legend League meetings, I had to ask Kirby, is it? Oh, do you mind going with me? To even though, even though you know you're a bigger guy, will you go anyway, even though you're not nursing anymore? Because it helps the other moms to see that a baby who was nursed a long time can still be normal, you know, not a weirdo, not a clingy mom's baby. He said, Well, yeah, sure. And then we quit

Sandra Dodd: 52:46
going for a while after Marty was two or so, and then and then I had Holly, and and so we started going back. Holly had problems nursing, and so we started going back. And Kirby said, Why are we going back, mom? Because you already know how to nurse babies. And I said, Partly I'm having some problems, but partly it just helps for them to have more examples. Um, and so it helps it helps other moms, and it helps other moms to see Holly nursing, even that she's having problems and that we can figure out a way. She was a preview and she wasn't sucking right. Okay, so so Kirby went, okay. And sometimes we would talk about that. I would say, Thank you so much for you know, that was so nice when you talked to that other mom because it made her feel so much better. So when I started unschooling, I said, Do you mind if I tell these stories? If I tell this story when I'm speaking at this little conference, they knew the people who were running the conference. So at first it was like you know, friends of ours doing things together, same kind of an outgrowth from La Legend League, the same adults moving into talking about education. And they said, No, that's fine. I said, if I tell these stories, then those moms will be nicer to their kids. It's a way for them to see some, see some things. They said that we don't mind. And over the years, even when Marty got in trouble for looking at porn, um, I said, Can I tell this story? Because and he said, sure. Um, he wasn't looking, it's on my site if you want to look it up. It's like uh center dot slash sex. It's actually funny now in retrospect. But he they had been playing a table game, and somebody had said, There's porn about everything. These are all like 13-year-old boys, give a take a couple of years. Yeah, and he said, No, there's not. And the kid said, Yeah, there is. There's and he said, There's not Minotaur porn. And he said, I bet there is. So Marty was off looking to see if there was. But when I came in in the morning, there were pop-ups, and I said, Eke, um, Marty. So he it turns out he knew how to take them off. We were all sharing a computer at the time, and it was dial-up. So, but he knew how to clean it up, and that was fine. So we talked about it, and that's what that article's about. Um was it centaur? But anyway, yeah, there was. He found um it was probably story, you know, written words, um, erotica, but still. So they there was there were a few stories that they said, don't tell this one. When Holly was was uh uh detained by the police for having wrestled in pudding at a party. She said, Yeah, no, tell it. So there are photos. Um, and so they were so used to it because they had seen because other parents had come to them and said, Because of this thing that I read about you, I was I was calmer when my kid got in trouble driving or whatever, you know, had his first driving ticket. Okay, I wasn't so afraid. So uh about men, about men. Um so now I'm I'm I'm in a situation it's almost all women online talking about unschooling. It's all mostly women, because partly it's because the women are doing it and partly because the men are off at work and they're not for fun writing, you know, typing. Typing was for the longest time what women did, and they would type letters for men and type newsletters for men's groups and all that. So I was aware of that. Um and a man came into a chat one day. So we're having a chat, and there would be usually 20 women, sometimes 20 women in one man or two men. This guy comes in. I don't know him, he doesn't know me. He's I've never seen his name on you know on the screen before. He shows up and he says, he writes this are you willing to risk your child's future on your theory? It wasn't asked nicely, right? I couldn't hear his tone voice about it in context. He was pretty much wanting me to shut up. And I said, Yes, aren't you? And he shut up because his theory was sending school kids to school is better, yeah, or using a curriculum is better. It's like, okay, well, if you do that, you're gonna risk your child's future on your theory. But yeah, but I it was hard, it's it's hard to explain today. It's always been hard to explain how prepared I was. It's like looking back. If if a if a person becomes a zoologist, you look back at how they were collecting lizards when they were little kids, to get about particularly an unschooling dad in Australia. Um, and when I look back, although I knew when I was a kid I was gonna be a teacher, and I was, and I was a I got to be a teacher. I was 21 when I started, and I was 26 when I quit.

Jesper Conrad: 57:34
That's enough.

Sandra Dodd: 57:35
Um, but I did it, you know, my life dream. So I wasn't even 30 and I'm done. Now what? So I thought there's something about men and unschooling, and it's just like you were saying, Yes, for it's about fear, it's like like about almost panic, and almost because they have a small window to look at it, they can't easily like you have now, relaxed into a whole life 24 hours. Men never put 24 hours into anything before, especially in the sleep because they have to go to work, yeah. And so if you if you get to the place where you're retired or you work from home or something, and and you can relax even a little bit, you start to you start to feel the rhythm of the little kids' lives. Like, okay, they're really energetic, but now they're gonna be tired and grumpy, they're gonna be energetic again, and it's not a 24-hour cycle, it's maybe six or eight hours when they're little, yeah. And and so when you start to see that, everything goes slower, like your heart beats slower, and you see the world slower, and you can see that a week is a long time, but until you've hung out with little kids at their speed, it's hard to even consider it. So if a man can only look for a half an hour and that's it, he's he's gonna come and say, Teach him to read, I'll see you later. Bye.

Sandra Dodd: 58:49
Thank you.

Sandra Dodd: 58:50
Um,

Sandra Dodd: 58:51
so that happens with unschoolers too. And I I've known a lot of unschooling couples, and the dad would go to conferences and he would be involved in conversations, and then five or ten years later, my husband or whoever it is says something really stupid. It's like, what? No, I thought you were getting it, but they don't, it's hard to get it. It's hard for a person who really wants to understand unschooling, it's not easy.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:18
No, I usually say when people ask me, What are you doing? I ask them, Do you really want to know? Because then I'd need like three or four hours to explain to you what our life is. And I say this from the kindest point of view because understanding it, if you just look at it for a few hours, even for a few days, it just looks like vacation, basically.

Sandra Dodd: 59:41
And we've had interviewers see what it is who said, Well, I'll hang around with you guys for a couple of days. I'll come and stay for hours, days. It does still doesn't work, they still don't get it. No, no. Um, Peter Gray wanted he's been reading what unschoolers have written and asking unschoolers questions and doing surveys and stuff for years. And when he put an article in in excuse me, psychology today, he he titled it unschoolers teach themselves to read. And I was like, Oh no, no, no, no, listen, yeah, unschoolers learn to read. Yeah, no, he didn't have the difference yet that learning is not teaching yourself, no, and so I think that's an English language problem.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:00:29
So, anyway, I I understand about now's no no no, it would be the same in our language, and it is not just a language problem, it is the point of view. Do you believe or understand that all the things we learn, we learn because we absorb them while we do something that is meaningful instead of uh like kind of almost punish ourselves, force ourselves to tick some boxes to make sure we get to a certain point. That's very different strategies, uh idea-wise, as to how we reach a certain destination. And while we're at it, maybe we don't need that destination. We're not afraid children will never learn to walk. Obviously, they will learn to walk. And we shouldn't be afraid whether they would learn to read, they will. Some do take till they're 14 or 15. Well, we had one 13, our first took some courage, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:01:27
Yeah, if you can get men together, that's great, it's admirable. I've seen it attempted a couple of times, and it kind of falls down around the men don't have the kids with them, they can't be as pushy with the other dads as the moms can be. As the moms can say, Well, if you're gonna act like that, of course it's not gonna work. And the men don't seem to have that. So it may be that the way women communicate and are willing to be mean, they're willing to push back. That maybe the men can't, because men are all like, you know, pat them on the back, and you gotta be friends, even if you just had a fist fight. You have to make up.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:02:03
But you're not like that. You like to provoke.

Jesper Conrad: 01:02:07
Uh I don't I don't find it provoking, I find it fun.

Sandra Dodd: 01:02:12
You like it. Well, then that's good. That's good. But I've seen a couple of there have been a couple of online places, but it's not men's style to check in there very much.

Jesper Conrad: 01:02:21
No, but but what I feel is just you know that when I look back at all the mistakes I did. Um, for example, see we talked breastfeeding. I thought it was weird that she wanted to breastfeed for a long time. Uh, and for me, one year was a long time. Um and and and now when I have absorbed the knowledge about what breast milk is and how it works, and how a child naturally uh chooses to leave the breast. I I feel like why weren't that knowledge presented to me in a way where I would understand it? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's why I said present it to me. You got this little window because we are not uh I cannot speak for all men, but it's not always some men do not listen to their ones. No, no, no, but there's no hook to hang it on.

Sandra Dodd: 01:03:17
It's like any other learning. If you have something else you can connect it to, yeah, but if it's just like if somebody gives me a long phrase in Chinese and says, learn this, remember it. I have no way, I won't be able to pronounce the words, I won't know what I'm saying, it won't stick. And so I think breastfeeding to men can be like that. It's like, remember this. Like, I I can't even picture this. I sorry, it's biological beyond me.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:03:42
And I think also for the men, it's about where actually this conversation kind of started with the with the what will neighbors think that it's really helpful. It is for women as well, to be honest, but it's really helpful to see someone else who did it or who are currently doing it, just someone not me, that or not my crazy wife, someone else who says, Oh, we do that every day, and then suddenly it's normal, or at least it's it's normal in certain circles. Uh, just like you said, just seeing a child that has been breastfed for for breastfed for a long time, or seeing right now we're in this amazing social situation that we are gathered with, I think 15 families that are world schooling, and just by coincidence, they are mostly unschoolers. So we have teenagers, huge teenage group of unschooled teenagers, and are most of the dads there? So you could hang out with dads are all there, yeah. The dads are there, except for like one or two.

Jesper Conrad: 01:04:54
A lot of them are working.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04:56
But but this would be preaching for the choir. This is teenagers who've been on school for years.

Sandra Dodd: 01:05:01
It's just amazing to see them, and now I mean the people with younger kids, when they see that the teenagers are still talking to their parents, that's so valuable.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:05:09
Yes, it is, yes, and that just the teenagers are just happy and and and content, human beings carrying themselves in this nice and will be nicer to younger kids.

Sandra Dodd: 01:05:21
That's another thing that kids at school are not allowed to. The older kids are not allowed to play with the younger kids. I believe them alone. And so to see kids playing with with kids of younger ages can be very impressive too.

Jesper Conrad: 01:05:32
But what you just said reminded me of uh a lot of the years we have spent in uh Spain. We have had a base with our boss in Spain for some time and traveling back and forth to it. And there uh a lot of our friends and people surround us called us uh La Familia, the family. Uh and it it took me some time uh pondering about it, but then I started looking around. Also, our dear friends, some of them, when they have small kids, the kids are near their parents. But as you say, uh when they become teens, uh they they weren't there. So the families kind of break apart uh on an earlier scale than you see when when on school we became La Familia because we're always together.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:06:16
That's sweet.

Sandra Dodd: 01:06:17
That's very sweet. Uh you said um uh who did I overhear this? You talked about uh in Italy, I think that the parents stay the kids stay home until they're married. They might stay home when they're when they're still in school. And uh in the United States, uh I don't remember who which which one of you is telling this where, but that in Denmark people leave when they're 18 pretty much. Yeah, yeah, they get up and go. I know people here who charge their kids rent when they turn 18. Yeah, but that happens in Denmark.

Jesper Conrad: 01:06:47
That happened as well. Yeah, it's

Jesper Conrad: 01:06:48
harsh.

Sandra Dodd: 01:06:48
And so I was at a little conference in Minnesota, which is way north by Canada, and this uh there were some guys from Mexico there doing some work, like they were up there contractors working on the hotel or something, and we're in the computer room, it was in the days before laptops, and I'm in there with the with a couple of young Mexican guys who are 22 or 23, and they're talking about they still live with their parents, but they're on this job with their uncle, blah, blah, blah. And and I told them about unschooling, you know, so we're talking about what we're doing there. Well, you know, why are you in Minnesota? I'm not from here, I'm not from here. And I'm from the very southern border too, so you know, we're from the far end of the United States. And and they and one of those guys just went off and he said, I don't know why Americans throw their kids out in Mexico. You can stay with your parents as long as you need to. And I have a place to go home. So, like when he was calling home, he's calling his mom, right? Not his roommates. Yeah, and and and he said, I I don't I feel sorry for American kids who get thrown out when they're not ready.

Sandra Dodd: 01:07:48
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:07:49
Well, that was that was a weird difference, it's a huge difference. It really is.

Jesper Conrad: 01:07:55
And also when I look at American culture from outside, uh, I am weirded out by what is going on because what what I see from outside is uh children very in my world world overprotected, driven to and from school, don't have uh cannot roam free after school. Uh, and then when they turn 16, they move away and can just go crazy without having had the tools to learn how to behave themselves among other people and and and even also not having had the we talked about hair recently. I I don't have a lot of hair, but we talked about what does it do to a person when when someone decides when your hair needs to be cut, so you don't actually have autonomy over your own hair. Maybe your parents have put out clothes in the morning, so you don't have autonomy about what you're wearing. What does that do on a deeper level of your ownership to your own body? That that I find quite interesting.

Sandra Dodd: 01:08:58
Um my son cut his hair last week, last Friday. He had it to his waist, and I was over there picking the kids up Sunday, and I didn't notice till I was leaving, like I'm backing out, and I see the back of him, and his hair is gone. Yeah, that's about the fifth or sixth time in his life he has cut waist-length hair short. He just goes straight from waist long to this, and he said he threw his neck out in the shower with his hair wet. He threw his head like that, and his hair was so heavy when it was wet that he hurt himself. He has the thickest hair, and then my other son is thinning already, and he's 35, so they don't match on that. But my dad had really thick hair too, but he never let it grow because it he was a World War II guy and they didn't. My husband and I both have really long hair too, can have mine, mine's I had a short perm a year ago and it's grown out this much, so that we Keith and I and Kirby can grow a lot of hair quickly. So Kirby's will grow back and he'll forget and he'll throw his neck out again, and then he'll cut it again. I think when a parent, especially tells a kid, don't touch alcohol, don't even touch it, don't even think about it, don't even look at it, don't touch drugs, don't even think about smoking pot. If you smoke pot, I'm throwing you out of here, you know, and is really harsh about stuff like that. They're just pretty much making a checklist for that kid to do when they go to college. And the kid will not have any practice with um how much it is too much, and how do you act when you're drunk? And you know, not that we gave our kids practice on purpose, but if we knew they were going to a party, we just said, you know, be be careful.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:10:40
And the funny thing is you say this when they go to college, and we come from a culture where so on the one hand, kids where we come from, and obviously, especially in our unschooled family, they grow up with a lot more personal freedom than children in general, as I understand it, in the United States. But we would find it quite radical to let a 16-year-old go off and live by themselves hundred kilometers, hundreds maybe of kilometers away from home. So we we wouldn't so if they move out from home when they are 18, it's usually not that far away, and they would still go back on Sundays, and you know, it's not like it's very this this college thing is very radical. It's like from one year.

Sandra Dodd: 01:11:31
I shouldn't say college, I should try to say university because college, especially in England, is a whole different thing. It's like 16 and 18 year olds, but they still live at home, like the specialty high schools. Um, but we don't have that. We have you're in high school until you're 18, and then you go to university for four years, and then maybe you two more, and then maybe three more. And so some people just stay at university till they're almost 30. I did at that point, they've done all the drugs and alcohol they want.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:11:57
We don't live at the university where I come from. We don't have that campus thing.

Sandra Dodd: 01:12:02
I think World War II, uh, in World War I, people went to war in home groups like their local militia, and that caused some problems. I don't know the whole stories. I don't and I and so sorry, military history buffs who are watching this, I could be wrong. But it seemed like in World War II they tried not to do that, they purposely tried to mix people up so that they would send people for um basic training to other places and they would station them other places, not by their mom. And then a lot of those guys then met women from other places, had friends when they went to the military. They were all mixed up in World War II, and they when they came home, then they knew people from other parts of the country, which wasn't so easy before. And I think on purpose, they it might have I don't know how conscious it was that they shuffled people around a little bit, and that just became an ideal almost that that people shouldn't live in the same place their whole lives. And I guess you probably know the United States is huge. It's hard for Europeans. I mean, there are like eight states that that the UK fits totally inside, including all their water, um, including Ireland, you know, the British Isles, just drop into Mexico and with extra space.

Jesper Conrad: 01:13:18
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:13:19
And so they when they accuse us of, oh, you don't know a lot of languages, it's like we can drive for days and still English speakers.

Jesper Conrad: 01:13:26
Yeah, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:13:26
I find that we might have a little pocket of Spanish or French, but that's it. That's all. And um, and people and people will say, Well, let's just go visit the Grand Canyon and then let's go to Florida. It's like, uh, no, you can't do that. It's two different trips. Um, it's just too big, it's huge. And so when people want to get away from home, I think it's like when I, you know, those rubber band airplanes that you twist, twist, twist the propeller and made out of balsa wood, and you twist and twist and twist and rubber band tightens up. If you over-twist it, it's just gonna go crazy. It's not gonna fly, it's gonna wreck. I think that's what parents do when they tell a kid no, no, no, no, no. They wind it up and wind it up and wind it up, and the kid turns 18 and wants to go as far as they can. Yeah. Because they want away from their parents, they don't want to go to a university in that town and come home. Why would they do that? They want to go as far across the country as they can.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:14:19
It's just too bad because obviously it comes from love when parents tell their children no, comes from wanting to do your best and really wanting your child to have a good life, and really wanting your child to have the best opportunities and and not fall into all the cracks that might open.

Sandra Dodd: 01:14:42
That's the kindest way anyone has ever described that in my whole life. You are a very nice person.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:14:47
No, I'm not.

Sandra Dodd: 01:14:49
Ask him, I'm not a very nice person, but I don't think of it that way.

Sandra Dodd: 01:14:52
I think some of them are just doing it because it was done to them. It's like hazing. This is how you treat teenagers. You tell them no, because I was told no, and I get to pass it's my turn then.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:15:01
Yeah, okay. I get you there, I get you there. But the another deep reason for doing it is they are really trying to take care of their children, they're just doing it the wrong way. What I would consider the wrong way, but it comes from love. I I I my I love my parents deeply. I have four because of an early divorce, so I have a surplus of parents, but the parental energy was not very huge. They have their reasons, all four of them, and I respect them. But I have seen from my own personal life, and all the many different families I've met, that all the parents really try to do their best. They love their children, they want to do the best they can. Sometimes it's horribly bad. Like you can't believe it. But they actually try, and I think we need to not judge parents who say no to their teenagers or push the younger ones in school, or we really need to be part of just shredding some light into that darkness because it's a vast culture, it's so big. The whole idea of ageism, the whole idea of the child that needs all of this instruction, the idea of the curriculum in and of itself, the idea that the adults know how to say that the adults know uh what the kids need to learn. This whole it is it comes from the idea of trying to help the children enter life the best way they can, but in reality, it's so hurtful. And I just want to try to unlayer it. Unlayer it, like open up and four more notes, and I think we're out of time. Yeah, I think we should talk to us again.

Jesper Conrad: 01:17:05
No, but I would actually love one more question. Uh, and but I also think that we should uh four more questions. We should go to bed, we should go uh we need to reschedule and talk longer.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:17:18
Step two.

Jesper Conrad: 01:17:19
If I can uh put in a question and then you uh take one of the notes afterwards, okay. How maybe it's not an easy question to answer, but how have on choosing on schooling changed the way you live your life?

Sandra Dodd: 01:17:38
I'm nicer to my husband, I was nicer to my pets after that.

Jesper Conrad: 01:17:44
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:17:46
I already knew that part of being part of being a wife the way I thought it should be done was to remember that my husband used to be a little boy and he still had bad memories and he still had wounds, and once in a while needed to be babied, or I need to avoid some topics that are piss him off because of his own childhood trauma. So I tried to do that. I tried to sometimes when he was really impatient or would get really angry at me, I would try to think, okay, what did I just trigger? What did I just scratch that I should that I could have maybe avoided in the future? That helped um even before. But with unschooling, I thought, well, you know, why shouldn't he also be able to make a lot of choices about what to do and how and where to put his stuff and how I didn't want to dictate to him exactly how to be. And that helped a lot. Um it helped me not to be as grumpy with myself about being a pack rat. I collect things, a lot of things. And so I know it makes a mess, and it's gonna be stuff my kids have to get rid of, but it also is kind of for me, it's the way I'm making connections between places. I have a collection of potato meshers. I made a video of them because I have one from India that's really nice, and I have some from Australia and England and the United States just to compare. Like this is this is the kind they have in England. You're gonna see them in thrift stores. And they they work better than ours, than the American kind, but the best one of all is the one I got in India. I didn't check all of the potato mashers in India, but I have one, and it's awesome. So, you know, most people would think that was dumb. You already have a potato masher, forget potato mashers, nobody asked you. You're not a potato masher museum curator, but in a way I am very small museum at my house.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:19:40
Do you also have the one that squeezes it through some kind of sieve? You know that kind of potato masher? Oh, so maybe send me a picture of one.

Sandra Dodd: 01:19:54
I will. It's an ingenious one. Um, a problem that I have seen with people who come to online groups and sometimes to conferences. I saw it a couple of times at conferences, people would go to a conference with a with a plan, with an intention that we couldn't or shouldn't provide. And that was hard to explain to them. Impossible. And that was they were coming to join an unschooling community. I know you guys are staying with a bunch of families, and that you have friends that you visit again, and that the whole uh living on the road deal becomes sort of a group because you have information to share other than unschooling, you know, totally separate from that about how are you storing food, how are you doing this and that. But they uh people will will find a group online and they'll go, I found my tribe. That's always really bothered me because I live in New Mexico where there are Indian tribes, and it's like, yeah, that's not your tribe. You just like those people for a minute, they're not genetically related to you. But people want to join. They it there's so many things like churches or clubs that you can join. If if the library gets those choirs, I'm joining.

Jesper Conrad: 01:21:02
Yes.

Sandra Dodd: 01:21:02
And as soon as I join and they go, okay, you're in, then I'm in. But unschooling can't work like that. So all that we can provide them is information about how they might be able to learn to do it, to take that in to themselves. We can't put it in, we can't sell it to them, we can't, you know, they can't say, I'm gonna read all this and then take a test, and then I'll be certified unschooler. No, no, it's not it. It everything else works like that, and this doesn't. And so they will say, I would like to be an unschooler. And I'm going, Well, you're not really an unschooler yet. You can't say I'm not an unschooler. So there's they're so used to that if somebody else affirms them or blesses them or accepts them that they're in. And in 1997, Holly was just five, and we went to a conference in Texas. And I could tell the conference was trying to be more than unschooling. It was sort of a new agey thing. But I was just there to talk about unschooling because that's what it was about, it was called rethinking education, and I was there to talk about that. But I overheard a young man in the hallway, just on passing, and a young dad, probably late 20s, said to the organizer of the conference, so what do we think about dentistry? And I got a chill. Uh, who's this we? And why are you asking her what we think? So I think that's the biggest danger of people thinking community or tribe. I've also seen smaller groups of women families, but the women who got together, made best friends, became best friends, and then one of them who has a powerful personality decided that unschooling was stupid, and now I'm gonna go do this. And so the rest of them went too. Yeah, so they weren't so much unschoolers as they were followers of one individual human.

Jesper Conrad: 01:22:46
Yeah, that Sandra, what you're saying reminds me of um sometimes when I talk to people, I'm saying we don't do isn't uh at all. Uh and and and certainly not unschooling isn't. Uh we we have met people, and I think again it comes from from a good place, but it also comes from the schooling uh inside their mind that they need a checklist. If I am going to be an unschooler, then if I can take these things, then I have done it correctly. And I actually I totally agree that it it will ruin more than it will help them, because they they do not feel themselves, they do not know where their limits are inside uh inside what they think is right and okay uh as a parent to say yes to and to say no to. I I uh

Jesper Conrad: 01:23:38
quite like uh Pat Ferenca, who says um it's about giving the child as much freedom as you can as a parent manage. Actually, Don Hall, who said that was it? Patrick is yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:23:52
No, he he used to use that definition at conferences. I don't like it, but that's okay. Go ahead.

Jesper Conrad: 01:23:57
No, no, no, but what I understand why he said it, but yes, no, but it's what I what I like about it in this um in what I'm trying to say now is that if you try to be unschooling uh as an ism, then you will try to enforce stuff you maybe don't know about good enough or have felt and understood, and then you do it because I heard this was right, I should be a parent like this, and if you cannot be a parent like that, then I think you actually hurts your child more because your your child can feel if you have an inner conflict, inner conflict in your life about yeah, and that's what I like about it.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:24:40
John Paul's, you know, calm down, don't go any further, then you can comfortably go, but please do some de schooling, yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:24:48
Do some de schooling and exactly so so the problem is some people took that definition and said, Well, I'm not comfortable with any of this other stuff, so I'm not gonna do it, but I'm an unschooler, I'm still an unschooler, even though I'm an unschooler, I don't understand it. So that comes back to my definition of them wanting to be part of a group. So, unfortunately, Pat's definition was letting people into a group and saying, You are unschoolers as long as you're doing as much as you're comfortable with. And I'm like, eh, wrong.

Jesper Conrad: 01:25:12
Oh, yeah, I don't follow that. No, what I believe is that children are so fine-tuned to look at their parents because they that is part of how they are learning when they're young. Looking at their parents, am I doing is what is right, what is wrong, and then they they are mimicking. So if you have a parent who is saying, Oh, you should go just play the whole day, but you can see the parent is kind of twitching because it it doesn't work for them internally, then you leave a confused child. And and that is not fine, and therefore, I'm also sometimes not happy about this. Uh, the isn't that uh I feel that some people they need crutches in in their teach helping to learn helping their child to learn whatever the child wants to learn.

Sandra Dodd: 01:25:58
Yep, yep, yep, I like it. So, yep. Um almost everything can cause a problem. So it's just it's good to to like stay on the path and not get in the into the stickers.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:26:10
It gets very complicated because okay, I have two very different things to say about this. The first thing is I think people some people want to join the tribe or or get the stamp, you're a true on school or you can be part of the club because of something very, very hurtful that happens uh to children in institutions. You take children who are fairly young, they're five or six years old when they start school, and some of them have even been to nurseries and kindergartens before that. Take them away from the family every morning, and they will have to spend all day, five days a week, with strangers basically, um, feeling um there is no unconditional love in that context. And the adults may be the same as yesterday, may not. And uh you you there's nothing to rely on, basically. So you you they uh have they become very dependent on the field of social life going on between the children. I think that's also the reason so many people find it so interesting whether homeschool unschool children have friends or not, because they believe that that is the core of childhood. School divides friends. And and it it's obviously friends is nice, but but it's just not if you have a family, if you live with unconditional love, then then it it's not you're not that dependent on having a large group of friends. And the whole social life friendship thing becomes this power over the child, the the thriving of the child is dependent on whether that child has some friends or not, because they need a relation they can rely on, and they can't because it's other children and they. Actually, we need adults who love them unconditionally. So that's one thing that's really hurtful, but we are conditioned into feeling we need this, and we might need it more than we need our authenticity. We might need it more than we need to know ourselves. We just need this because something very valuable is lost when we let go of the children too early and push them out. So I think this need when you're an adult and you're trying to do good and you want to run school, you really need to be part of that group. And it's part of uh basically a trauma. So that's one really important reason I believe we should be very kind to those who feel they need that. And on that note, on that note, I I I have felt in the beginning when we called ourselves unschoolers or started our journey that it was really annoying when the older unschoolers would sometimes say something like, uh, you're not a real unschooler. It would become this secluded club of people doing it the right way. And I had actually several years where I wouldn't identify as an unschooler because I didn't want to take the bullshit. I just said, Well, I do what I do and I don't want to call it anything because no one should come tell me how and why and when and where to do what. I do what is right for my family, and I do it. It was unschooling all along, but there was this, I don't know.

Sandra Dodd: 01:29:35
Well, in a in a discussion, and some of these discussions were huge, 800 people. You know, they're not they weren't all there at the same time every day. It was it was you know, message boards, some of those are old, like 20 years old, and they're not as busy as they used to be. But if a person comes in and says, I'm just as much an unschooler as you are, but I make my kids do math workbooks and I do this and I do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:29:56
That's really annoying. Yeah, I'm just that group now who says to the others, no, you're not an unschooler.

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:01
If I just said welcome and come in and sit down, I didn't, I didn't. I said, that won't help. If you're clinging to this, unschooling will not, the unschooling that we're talking about won't take root. But the thing is that when people first asked me about unschooling, they were asking about me because there wasn't an ism. There was there were the stories in in growing without schooling, which is people would write in a question, and two months later and four months later, they would get some responses. By then the question was too old, it was all over. But some other people could learn from reading those responses. That was like we could do that in a half an hour.

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:38
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:38
What used to take four months.

Jesper Conrad: 01:30:40
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:40
So we're getting stories and information in front of people. And the question was to me at the beginning, how are you doing that? What are you, Sandra Dodd, doing? So I could come from that in a group that was mine that had my name on it. That's why I could do that.

Jesper Conrad: 01:30:55
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:56
But it wasn't like we're not all going to unschool like Sandra Dodd. Okay, there are 25 people here who have been doing this for 15 years, who have been in this discussion regularly for 15 years, who've been turning these ideas around. We've seen people come and fail. We've seen what happens if you require math. Next, you're requiring reading, next you're requiring the enter the science fair. It can go the other way. Your progress can go towards school if you're looking at school and thinking about school and talking about school. So the reason that that I have been in situations where we've said this is not unschooling is because we're trying to stay on topic, stay on topic of what will make it better because all the little decisions are going somewhere. Are they going toward more peace and more options and more choices and more understanding of how kids learn? Or are they going back to we got to back up, we got to stop, we got a limit, we've got to.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:31:49
I totally, I'm totally on board with you, and I find it it's hard. It's hard frustrating when people call it unschooling and it is homeschooling. I don't mind homeschooling.

Jesper Conrad: 01:32:01
But they're unschooling on Thursdays.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:32:05
And in some holiday.

Jesper Conrad: 01:32:06
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:32:08
I believe in everybody's freedom to organize themselves as they please. I'm not trying to judge homeschoolers. I'm just saying if we can't separate homeschooling from unschooling as the home, if the homeschoolers start calling it unschooling, then we have no word for what you and I are doing. And we need a word so that we can agree on what we're talking about. I I I totally I I'm there now, but I felt before I would find it really not that I did math, but but if I did something some of the homeschooler unschoolers would would not agree with, it would be like now you've ruined it all. And I I found it unsettling, and I would like to find at least from my journey, I would like to find a nicer way, more kind and inclusive way to talk about people you're staying with this week in in the place where you are.

Sandra Dodd: 01:33:17
Um, some of them will probably be friends of yours in 20 years or 30 years, and that will be your personal community, but it won't doesn't have to be the world schooling community. No, no, no, no. You have to try to manage people and gather them back in.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:33:29
But I think that's a beginner's thing. Once you start, you want to try. Once you start, you want to find your group. Then what I always say when I coach about this is yeah, you can look for play groups and unschooler groups in the beginning, but what happens is you make some friends.

Sandra Dodd: 01:33:46
And then your group needs to be your family. The people who need to be happy with the way you're doing it is your kids. You and you're you're the the parents and the kids, if they're satisfied with it and call them in their learning, that's what's important. Not that theirs matches the neighbors or their friends. But for but my defense is that we were trying to run a discussion where people came and learned about well, if something that we had that we had pretty much purified. We purified it. So we don't want people sticking a turnip in our potato soup or whatever.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:34:16
If we are to put a button line on this, you have been the one walking in front with the light. So I'm not going to start to judge the way you've done it personally. I am very grateful you did it. Uh, it has carved out uh a much wider road for the rest of us to find our way in. And I I find it amazing. So it's not you personally, no, no, no.

Jesper Conrad: 01:34:43
No, it was reflection back up when we started. And I and I think the search we did for community ourselves back then was we felt so alone in uh in the start, you know. Um it felt alone in uh having found another way, uh, because in Denmark we were very few families uh that even homeschooled. So it was every time we met someone, you were almost clinging to them. Oh, should we meet again? And and until you until we found bigger inner peace, our need for meeting often with other people that did the same as us, uh leveled out.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:35:30
I think it's changed now. Now we just live, it's changed like we become kind of experts, yeah. Yeah, so I'm very sorry to say this. We should, but one hour has become almost two hours, yeah, and uh I love talking to you, and I think we should do uh part two because there is so much more, and I know you have a note with more questions, but I also know we have some children that need to be fed. Well, I'll keep my notes. The sun is setting here, and maybe we should do.

Jesper Conrad: 01:36:06
Um I would like to say something.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:36:08
Yeah, okay.

Jesper Conrad: 01:36:09
Yeah, no, no, Sandra. Uh first of all, thank you for all you have done. Uh for all you have done during the years. Uh, I I know you have changed many more people's lives than the ones you accidentally, as you said, hurt by uh saying, Hey, stay in school. Um, you have helped so many people over the years that that the sin has been gone for many years.

Sandra Dodd: 01:36:38
I'm absolved, thank you.

Jesper Conrad: 01:36:40
It has not been absolved by us. No, no, no. No, so what what I'm saying is if if people who are listening in uh want to uh get to know you better because it's all not all who have read your book out there. So where do they find information about you and um what should they do?

Sandra Dodd: 01:37:04
No one has ever asked that that way to me. I think if they want to know more about unschooling, I'm writing I write one thing every day and I put it at just add light and stir, and I'll I'll send you the link. Um and it's a it's a photo and a quote or something I've just written depends and a link to something. Sometimes two links. And I and I then subscribe by email or just go to the blog every day. I will totally do that. Yeah, I will totally do that. And they so that will eventually lead into lots of other things. Right.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:37:39
What a great way of doing that.

Sandra Dodd: 01:37:40
Because I also have a couple of intro pages for people who are new and would like to start there, and I'll I can give you those links.

Jesper Conrad: 01:37:48
Perfect. And then some books also.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:37:50
Yeah, they can always buy the book.

Sandra Dodd: 01:37:54
I like mine and I like Pamela Riccia's first one, her first one, Free to Learn, is a miracle book. It's

Sandra Dodd: 01:38:00
that's the one people should give their grandparents. The kids' grandparents.

Jesper Conrad: 01:38:05
Perfect. We will recommend that in the show notes, and then it's uh we should say goodbye, and we will promise everybody who listens that will be more time uh where we can uh go even deeper. I look forward to it.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:38:18
Thank you very much. Thank you for this.

Jesper Conrad: 01:38:20
Thank you.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:38:21
Thank you.