Day 97 of AY20-21: grateful for another day together

I woke up for day 97 with my hand swollen and in plenty of pain. It seems that perhaps when I fell filming an update video on Monday morning that maybe I broke or sprained something in my hand or wrist. But I already had an appointment that morning and time was short, so I figured I would deal with it later in the day. I packed up everything I needed for the day and did some writing but the morning sped by way too quickly. I arrived at the cell just in time for the morning meeting which I was facilitating that morning.

I planned on a longer meeting than usual. The first prompt for that meeting was, “what makes you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome when meeting new people?” Each came up with something that puts people more at ease or initiates a conversation. The second prompt was, “society picks and chooses when to treat adolescents as adults or children. What are examples of each and is it fair?” I was pleased to see that most of the Learners said they felt treated as an adult at home where their guardians treated them with respect, trusted them, and respected their autonomy. Only one Learner was miffed that their guardians treated them as adults. Where they are treated as children was much more diverse. One response was of a time a Learner went back to her old school with her mom (in a different city) and the teachers kept asking questions about her, but to her mom. Another response was “where it is children-oriented (e.g., children’s museums).” And another response was whenever he walks around his neighborhood, and adults focus in on him as though he should not be alone. And he’s 14-years-old!

Unfortunately the morning meeting ran so long I missed the 10:30 a.m. morning check-in for the remote Learners. I went on a quick hike up to a pretty lookout spot at the top of a small but steep hill and then jumped on Discord and apologized to the remote Learners for missing the morning check-in, made myself available to them, and asked if there was a better time to meet given that future morning meetings could potentially run long, as well. Then I filmed a quick daily check-in to post on Instagram, which was pretty impromptu yesterday but I guess is going to be my thing for this cycle. The weather was beautiful and I could have stayed up there all day, but most of the Learners chose not to walk up the hill with me that morning, so I headed back toward the lake, and refilled my water along the way.

When I got back to the lake there was lots of buzzing around by the Learners. One Learner had asked to speak to both me and Facilitator Ariel at some point about something serious, and Facilitator Ariel had planned to host a Flying Squad planning meeting at some point. I decided that I would like to eat lunch, then have the meeting with the Learner, and then we could have the Flying Squad planning meeting later in the afternoon, and I asked if that would work for the Learners and Facilitator Ariel. Everyone agreed and I settled in on my lunch. While I was eating my lunch a Learner was delaying his own. Instead, the Learner had harvested a bunch pecan nuts and brought them out to the dock to break them open and eat them.

After lunch the Learner, Facilitator Ariel, and I walked out to the middle of a large field and sat down in a circle to have the meeting that was called by the Learner. It started out with some concerns she was having related to family life. We listened to her perspective, and then I asked her how she wanted us to support her: listening, brainstorming, advice, etc. She said she wanted advice, so we began to work through a better understanding of her circumstances, the possible explanations for what different people’s motivations and intentions were, and a wide variety of possibilities that were available to her. It turned out that the initial concern was only a tiny piece of the bigger picture, and had we jumped in with feedback right away we would have never been able to work through that. Then the conversation shifted to relationship issues and we went down a similar path. The conversation lasted well over an hour.

Hanging with the Abromies

After the meeting, Facilitator Ariel and two Learners headed out on a bike ride. They roamed a bit, and then the chose to test some of the limits of their biking skills. They went for a mixture of speed, jumps, and vertical drops. It was fun watching them challenging themselves and taking risks, but also choosing to avoid unnecessary risks that were clearly well beyond their capabilities. One of the many benefits of a psychologically safe space where they are free from assessment, judgment, and ridicule is that Learners do not feel a need to perform for others. The crew also came up with a new name for a group of Abrome Learners and Facilitators—Abromies.

A home for the roly-polies

The other cell, composed entirely of young Learners, was having a blast ten miles away. Their day started out great with full participation in the morning meeting. The much nicer weather allowed them to be more comfortable staying in place and soaking up the sun, while also making moving around and exploring more enjoyable. One of the Learners got really into the roly-polies that were rummaging around in the dirt. Growing up we called them pillbugs. Little did I know that they have a whole slew of nicknames to include woodlice and wood shrimp. I’m glad I grew up knowing them as pillbugs because I think I would have been less likely to play with woodlice or wood shrimp. They are also called doodlebugs, cheesybugs, chiggypigs, and penny sows. On this day, the young Learner chose to make a fort for the roly-polies.

Tree hugger approved

The younger Learners also covered a good amount of ground on Tuesday. Around midday they decided to go on a hike to a place they call the cave. On their journey they were able to scale an impressive stair system made out of tree roots. When they arrived at the cave they were able to break out the solo stove and enjoy a small fire. One of the Learners also decided to take a nap on a tree.

Back at the cell that I was in, Facilitator Ariel was hosting his Flying Squad meeting to plan for a Flying Squad day next Wednesday. After being remote for the last two cycles, and having not gone on a formal Flying Squad day all year because of the pandemic, we wanted to have a Flying Squad day as a prelude to the Flying Squad cell that is planned for the next cycle. Abrome is a part of both the Flying Squads and Agile Learning Centers networks, both of which firmly believe in Self-Directed Education and child autonomy. I can explain why at a later date, but I will say that being part of each network has uniquely prepared us to safely navigate this pandacademic year. In the case of Flying Squads, we support young people in their right to be in public spaces, using the city and land as their rightful space and place as much as anyone else, and advocating for that in the face of those who may challenge them. Most of our pre-pandemic Learners participated in at least one of our Flying Squads (one was play-based and typically filled with younger Learners, and one was social-justice oriented and more typically filled with older Learners) and easily accepted that the best way we could be more safely be together was to go outdoors all day in small groups, knowing that they were capable of doing so even in less than ideal conditions. So while we had not had a single formal Flying Squad day into the city yet this pandacademic year, we have essentially been doing Flying Squads every day in nature. And next Wednesday they will venture into the city.

After the meeting I chose to read a more interesting than expected book on homeschooling during the pandemic, while Facilitator Ariel pulled a light saber out of his back pack. I had seen another Learner with his own light saber, but I did not realize that they had planned a light saber duel. Fortunately, these light sabers seem to only cause temporary death, although each of them experienced very painful light saber deaths at the hands of the other.

As the day was winding down one of the adolescent Learner’s said that he had taught another one how to tie their shoes. This took me by surprise, as I was pretty certain that all the Learners knew how to tie their shoes. The Learner amended the statement saying that he taught him how to fast tie his shoes, and then showed me what that meant. I was impressed—I could have saved hours of my life if I had been fast tying my shoes all these years. The Learner then decided to teach the Facilitators, and then other Learners jumped in offering to teach as well. Sadly, a pair of AirPods fell out of a pocket and into the lake during the lesson, teaching us all a very different and unexpected lesson when near water. We finished the day with the afternoon roundup with each of us sharing one thing we are grateful for, one thing we are going to do to make the most of tomorrow, and one thing we are going to leave behind. It helped us shift from the awkwardness and frustration of a lost pair of AirPods to focus on how fortunate we are, and what we can still control.

The humbling experience of busking for the first time

When Abrome decided to launch an Austin chapter of Flying Squads, we hoped to be joining a fun, liberatory, and supportive community of Flying Squads from across the country (and someday the world!). What we didn’t expect was how seriously they took the fun part. After a big box scavenger hunt challenge that we, along with the Brooklyn, Eugene, and Portland Flying Squads all participated in, we moved on to a busking challenge. Specifically, our squads would go out into the city, set up on some street corner, and busk. Busking is when one performs in public for monetary donations, usually by singing or playing music. The Flying Squads would then donate to a cause or organization they believed was doing good in their community. 

We decided that we would take to the streets on Thursday, March 5th, the last time we would meet as a squad before our spring break. However, between family emergencies, community members supporting our March 1st communication about taking extra precautions to prevent the spread of the flu and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) which we anticipated would soon hit Austin, uneasy conversations about how Austin police have harassed buskers, and perhaps some stage fright, we only had two young people and one Facilitator show up for the busking challenge.

There’s certainly strength in numbers, and having only two other folks to provide each of us with emotional backup made the challenge all that more daunting. We procrastinated on getting out the door of the public library where we had our initial meeting, and then we hopped on a bus and made our way north toward our favorite anarchist bookstore. We decided to get off the bus in the Hyde Park neighborhood at an intersection with multiple restaurants, a bakery, a grocery store, and some other businesses. We figured this place would have enough foot traffic to make busking worth the effort while not being so overrun with people that they would fail to notice us. 

One of the Learners decided it was best to ask permission to perform in front of one of the restaurants, and with their blessing we secured our spot next to the sidewalk, placed our tip jar in front of us … and stalled. Standing up and performing in front of others is difficult, and being the first to stand up and perform is doubly so. After we found enough excuses to not perform (e.g., I want to eat my lunch first, I want to wait until more people start walking by, I will go after you) we finally bit the bullet and began. One Learner planned to sing she knew by heart, the other Learner planned to play his guitar or sing songs by the band Queen, and I planned to sing songs on demand by looking them up on my phone and just feeling my way through the song. The Learners called it “cringe singing,” and I think the Learners felt a bit more at ease once they realized how painful my experience would be (for me and for those listening). 

Not many folks walked by us while we performed, and no one stopped to listen. We decided to throw a dollar bill in the tip jar to prime the pump, but that had no effect. The only engagement we had with anyone was when we recognized a University of Texas student who stopped by our booth at a recent alternative education school fair. When he met us the first time he was blown away by the notion of trusting young people to control their own education and lives, and he was beyond thrilled to see that these young people chose to exercise their autonomy by coming to a random corner in his neighborhood to busk. But he didn’t leave a tip. 

The Learners and I discussed relocating to a place with more potential spectators. We considered moving toward the bakery where people were sitting outside in the sun enjoying cake, cookies, and coffee, but decided against it because it would take us too far away from the main street. We settled on moving next to the bus stop because it guaranteed a steady flow of people coming and going, and it also left us with a captive audience who couldn’t just walk past us if they were hoping to hop on the bus. But despite the superior location, we still received no tips or even acknowledgements for our efforts. 

The experience was humbling. Singing solo, a cappella to an audience of strangers is nothing like singing karaoke with friends. And while we were doing it for the experience of it, as a challenge, we know that many people busk to survive. The experience was also quite informative. We became comfortable with public embarrassment, at least for one afternoon. We were able to piece together why performers are found in some parts of the city and not others (e.g., foot traffic, law enforcement, neighborhood). And we decided that if we were going to do it again, we would have to take it more seriously by accepting and embracing our feelings of embarrassment. And we need to practice. 

 Cross posted on the Flying Squads blog.

Puddles and kids

Yesterday a young Learner and I decided that we would spend the first half of the day at the Thinkery, a children’s museum in Austin, TX. We had a wonderful time crawling through the museum and interacting with every possible exhibit, and climbing on the ones that invited us to. By lunchtime we were both pretty hungry (and tired) so we decided to eat lunch. However, every table in the cafeteria was taken so we moved into the courtyard to look for a place to sit down and eat our bagged lunches. We eventually found our way to a smaller courtyard that was filled with large foam blocks and plastic pipes situated around a large puddle on sandy gravel. We sat on the lone bench and tore into our food.

Soon after comparing lunches and allowing the young Learner to have some of my food, a group of students from a nearby public middle school walked into the courtyard with two of their teachers. As the students made their way toward the foam blocks and the puddle, one of the teachers yelled at them, warning them to stay away from the water. The teacher then sternly lectured the students individually, whenever they so much as looked at or moved toward the puddle. The teacher also told a student to spit out his gum because, as she said, “you’ve been chewing on that piece of gum long enough.” I asked the Abrome Learner what she thought of the interactions between the teacher and the students. She said the teacher was mean.

The teachers then shepherded the students out of the courtyard as a couple ventured in with their young son. The little boy made a beeline for the puddle and immediately began jumping up and down in the deepest part of the puddle. This made his dad roll his eyes while his mother laughed with delight. Instead of trying to get the boy to stop jumping, the mother asked him if he was having fun while he tried to splash her. She told him that he was coming up just short of hitting her with water, so he experimented with different ways of jumping to make more of a splash. Only when he started to drift toward me and the Abrome Learner did the mom gently ask him to come back toward her so that we didn’t get hit with water. The boy soaked his pants with muddy water and eventually tired of the game, and then the family said goodbye to us. I asked the Abrome Learner what she thought of how the boy’s parents responded to him jumping in the puddle. She said they seemed nice.

Soon thereafter, two moms with several children came into the courtyard. The moms were deep in conversation and let the children roam freely. Only when one of the girls walked into the puddle did one of the moms ask her to please not step in the water. The moms repeated the request a couple of times, but never raised their voices. And neither mom prevented the children from playing at the edge of the puddles or from trying to manipulate the water with the pipes that were laying around.

The young Abrome Learner and I decided it was time to get on with our day so we left the moms and their children in the courtyard. We moved across the street to an outdoor playground where a group of elementary school students were having lunch. As the Abrome Learner took to climbing on a large dragon sculpture, I listened to the teachers telling the young students to “keep your butts on those benches,” “drink your milk,” and “my name is not ‘hey.’” I turned and watched the Abrome Learner challenging herself as she climbed the various parts of the sculpture in a carefree but determined way. And I reflected on how differently the children were treated in the courtyard with the puddle.

Like the elementary school students eating lunch, the middle school students in the courtyard were treated as if they were unruly troublemakers, sure to make a mess that would do harm (or at least greatly inconvenience the adults) if they weren’t prevented from exploring and engaging with all of the world around them. Kind of ironic considering this children’s museum was built with the intention of visitors physically interacting with the exhibits. Time and time again, the children were sharply rebuked before they had done anything that was remotely close to socially unacceptable; they were unable to even begin to engage in activity that might turn problematic in some way. The kids looked miserable—on a field trip!

On the other hand, the little boy who was jumping in the puddle looked elated. His parents may not have fully approved of how he threw himself into what was readily available in the courtyard, but they certainly seemed to appreciate it. Only when the boy came close to getting us wet was he redirected back toward his family. And while the boy soaked his pants with muddy water, it did not seem that the parents considered that too much of an inconvenience. Maybe they brought towels with them.

The final group of children also seemed to have a lot of fun. They were treated respectfully by their moms, but were given more explicit boundaries on what they could not do—walk into the puddles. While these children missed out on the joy of learning the best way to jump in a puddle, they still found ways to play with the water without getting their clothes soaked. Maybe those parents forgot to bring towels with them.

I know there are many who believe that kids are trouble waiting to happen. That they should be seen and not heard … and keep their hands in their pockets, of course. But I doubt that even those adults would argue that the middle school students were not deprived of learning opportunities while they were in that courtyard, relative to the other children. The only group of people that I believe might argue that the middle school students were better off than the other kids are those who have been trained in “classroom management” techniques. Those folks may have felt that anything that was not related to an exhibit was not educational, because it was not directly tied to some scientific principle (meaning no one had put up a placard explaining what scientific principles were on display), and hence it was a waste of students’ time. And because they are forced to spend so much time trying to force students to learn what they are tasked with teaching them, and because classroom teaching is so difficult if all students are not in line, control becomes a precondition for learning in their eyes.

But when one is trained to believe that the job of students is to learn from institutions (e.g., schools, museums), then they also start to miss out on what the parents clearly had not yet lost sight of. What matters for young people goes well beyond learning, particularly academic learning. The parents recognized the value of children being able to explore and play. They knew that the children would be better off when they were free to play. And quite frankly, parents are much more likely to care about the happiness of their children than many teachers are because what really matters to parents goes far beyond test scores and grades.

Austin joins Flying Squads as a collaborator

Abrome is a Self-Directed Education (SDE) community in Austin, TX, that is now in its fourth year. As Facilitators (adult staff members), we regularly critique our approach to interacting with Learners and building community, as well as how the culture of Abrome is evolving. It was through this process, for example, that we recognized the benefits of working more closely with Agile Learning Centers  Attending their trainings and bringing some of their tools and practices into our community helped us improve our skills as Facilitators and enabled us to better cultivate and protect an inclusive, non-oppressive culture that was building within our growing community. 

However, we still face a variety of challenges that many other Self-Directed Education communities struggle with. For example, accessibility will always be a challenge due to an absence of public funding. We also have limited diversity (e.g., race, nationality, religion) in a society that insists that only those with privilege can risk opting out of oppressive systems. And of course, our so-called radical belief that young people should be treated as people and not coerced for their own good is just a bridge too far for most families. Another challenge that we had not previously considered was that Abrome Learners were not in the world in the ways that free people should be able to be in the world. 

What we saw as freedom to do whatever the Learners wanted to do at Abrome, we eventually realized was freedom that was severely restricted by time and place. Abrome is not in the urban center of Austin, and public transportation does not extend to our neighborhood (intentionally so, unfortunately, thanks to lawmakers). Our Learners cannot easily walk to a library, museums, or busy intersections where people from all segments of society come into contact with one another. And even though we frequently organized outings to go to the library, visit museums, or go into the city for any other reason, we were doing so with a destination and goal in mind that resulted in time restricted outings—we did not allocate time for exploration, evolving interests, or emergent possibilities. So while they are free at Abrome in ways that schooled children are not, Abrome Learners were still missing out on leveraging that freedom in ways that would allow them to better develop their understanding of themselves as members of a broader society and as individuals who could influence that society. 

We decided that we would experiment with an unstructured day in the city that would give them the opportunity to assert their right to exist as full people in a city that does not fully honor young people, and allow their day to unfold in ways that were not limited by the Facilitators’ feelings of needing to transport the Learners back to our physical home base. 

I wrote the following letter to parents October 6, 2019:

“While we love our planned outings we recognize that they have been limiting to the Learners because we typically have a goal to go somewhere and do something specific and time bounded, and then when it is over we come back to Abrome. We are concerned that the Learners are not being given the opportunity to simply exist in the city where they can allow their plans to evolve emergently based on the combined interests of the group. Further, we want to continually push back against the notion that learning is confined to any given space, that learning objectives must be clearly defined, or that children and adolescents should not exist in public spaces during the day. We brought this up as an awareness at Friday’s Check-in and Change-up and we decided that we would experiment with an unstructured full-day outing in Austin on Thursday. The idea is that we go into or meet at a location in Austin, and then check in with the Learners and Facilitators to see how they want to collectively spend their time that day. … If this practice goes well we anticipate doing this once per week.”

Jennifer was the Facilitator who joined four adolescent Learners on that first “Get Lost Day,” and it went fabulously well. We decided as a community that we would continue with our Get Lost Days, which have been a wonderful change of pace for older and younger Learners. These days have stretched us in terms of finding consensus and building community outside of our physical space and away from the tools that we regularly use at our physical home base. 

Soon after starting our Get Lost Days, we learned about Flying Squads. Similar to our experience finding Agile Learning Centers, we found that our beliefs and intentions lined up very well with what Flying Squads was doing. I was particularly moved by this statement on their homepage:

“Even in the most caring of school and homeschooling coop spaces, a definitive line is drawn on where children learn and what space and materials are and are not for them. By intentionally not using a learning space or having predetermined tools and materials, Flying Squad participants learn the important value of abolishing these distinctions as the young people involved interact with the world outside on a regular basis, carving out a space for themselves in their city. And as they do so, they learn perhaps one of life’s most important lessons: how to find self-identity while caring for and developing a community with others.”

An added bonus was that I already knew Alex and Bria from their work advocating for children and Self-Directed Education, and I respected them greatly. After jumping on a call with them and discussing it with the other Abrome Facilitators, we decided that we would use Abrome as a vehicle for growing Flying Squads as the next step to extending greater freedom to participating young people, and in turn, helping to move society so that it begins to tolerate (and eventually embrace) free young people as full members of that society. Like the other projects, Austin Flying Squads will be operating two days per week, with one day more focused on learning through play, and the other day more focused on social justice and youth rights. We are excited to collaborate with the other Flying Squads, and we will be sharing some of our experiences and observations on this blog.

Taking up space is a political act

Navigating the city

Younger Learners searching nooks and crannies at a local book store