How to Raise a Writer (A Choose Your Own Adventure Story)

For anyone not familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure, they were a series of simple chapter books that were really popular with kids when I was growing up. The format is essentially that you get a little bit of story, and then must choose what happens next. Choose right, and the story keeps moving on toward a happy ending. Choose wrong, and you are inexplicably sent hurtling into space, or eaten by a dinosaur, or whatever. Most kids backtracked, of course, and read the whole book. That is how it works.

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Bonnie, who liked to do lots of things. She loved to play video games, swing on her swingset, play with her cats, go swimming, and play chess with her Granddaddy. But her very favorite thing to do, more favorite even than swinging, was making up stories. She would spend hours in her room, making up new stories about Dorothy and the Scarecrow, or Kermit and Fozzie and Miss Piggy, or the Babysitters Club. She thought that these stories were pretty interesting, and wondered if she should write them down.

Option A: Bonnie tells her stories to an adult, and asks them to help her write them so she can save them forever. Turn to page 2.

Option B: Bonnie feels very shy about her stories and does not tell them to anyone. She dislikes writing because it makes her hand hurt, and she doesn’t want to write anymore after writing at school all day, so her stories never get written down. Turn to page 4.


Page 2: Bonnie tells her story to an adult, but the “adult” turns out to be the SkiFree monster and it gobbles her up. THE END.


Page 4: Since Bonnie doesn’t like writing, she spends a lot of time thinking about her stories so she doesn’t forget them. This gives her a lot of practice rewording things until she likes the way they sound. She even goes around narrating everything she does in her head, saying “And then I got the toothpaste, and then I put it on the brush” to herself as she brushes her teeth. Occasionally other kids will catch her mouthing words to herself, and they think she is odd.

A: Bonnie’s parents become very concerned about her odd behavior, and sign her up to be tested for psychological problems. Turn to page 6.

B: Bonnie’s parents were also strange as children and thus do not notice anything unusual about her behavior. Turn to page 8.


Page 6: Bonnie is diagnosed with autism, and her parents are instructed to keep her on a tight set of schedules and routines. This leaves her little time for making up stories, and also causes the sun to explode and everybody dies. THE END.


Page 8: Bonnie does not have a lot of friends, but she likes to play by herself anyway, so this isn’t a big deal. She seems happy playing in her room alone, so her mom lets her do that as much as she wants. As she gets older, her stories get more complex, involving dozens of characters and complicated plots. She writes a story for 6th grade which prompts her teacher to tell her she should be a writer, and the other kids even ask her for copies of her story.

A: Bonnie is thrilled to be told she should be a writer, and decides to write lots and lots of stories and pass them out to all her friends to read. Turn to page 9.

B: Bonnie decides she must be really good at daydreaming and continues to do this all the time. She almost fails 6th grade because she refuses to write an important essay. Turn to page 11.


Page 9: Suddenly, ninjas. Thousands of them. You wouldn’t believe the carnage. THE END.


Page 11: Bonnie realizes that since she is good at tests, it doesn't really matter if her homework gets done, because she will still pull a C. She starts skipping whole assignments and even staying home from school a lot. But eventually she has to write essays, because her school decides essays are very, very important and should be written in every class, even band and gym. Fortunately, her teachers like her essays a lot, so much that they almost always give her 100s on them. People keep telling her she should be a writer when she grows up, but she really doesn’t like writing and is kind of offended by the idea that out of everything she does, her only special talent is being really good at homework. She would rather be outgoing and good at something flashy and interesting.

A: Bonnie meets a fairy who teaches her about how everyone is special in their own way, and being smart matters more than being popular. She decides writing is important and chooses to write more essays, both in and out of school. Turn to page 14.

B: Bonnie drops the fuck out of high school after one semester and proceeds to waste away her teen years reading Pokemon forums. Turn to page 16.


Page 14: The “fairy” was actually a hallucination brought on by a fever dream. Bonnie has died of dysentery. THE END

Page 16: Bonnie is not good at typing, but learns to do it quickly so that she can keep up with online chatrooms. Wanting to become popular at the Pokemon forums, she begins writing silly and barely coherent fanfiction to entertain others. As she gets more involved at these forums, she meets lots of interesting people with opinions she has never heard before. Some of these opinions piss her off, and she writes lengthy, organized posts responding to them. She occasionally notices these posts are the same length as the essays she used to write in school - sometimes even longer!

A: Bonnie realizes she likes writing essays after all! She decides to go back to school, because this will make her successful someday. Turn to page 17.

B: What? She’s not writing essays! She’s just talking to people! Piss off! Turn to page 18.


Page 17: Alligators bit off your face :( THE END

Page 18: Bonnie eventually becomes good friends with some of her Pokemon forum buddies. One of her best friends likes blogging on Xanga and Myspace, and convinces Bonnie to join those sites to read her posts. Bonnie thinks blogging is sort of stupid, but she likes the little gadget that says what music you’re currently listening to, so she joins and just starts posting memes. Eventually, she realizes blogging is an easy way to tell all her friends at once when something awesome or enraging happens, instead of telling the same story 20 different times. She’s also very opinionated and likes to rant, and sometimes people like her rants. She finds this to be a much more exciting kind of writing than she did in school, because she has a real audience giving real feedback. Over the years, she becomes completely addicted to blogging, because basically, she likes attention. THE END

Concern Trolls: A useful idea

If the first rule of the internet is Do not feed the trolls, it follows that the second rule is Know thy trolls. Gotta know it's a troll to know not to feed it, right?

Usually trolls are easy to spot because they don't bother to hide their trolling. They're the loud, obnoxious assholes of the internet. They tend to get banned and blocked quickly. But there's another kind of troll that is more insidious, and sadly, not always recognized as a troll: the concern troll. I'm pretty familiar with these from queer, feminist, and fat acceptance discussions, but as unschooling is becoming more well-known, they're quickly cropping up there, too.

According to WiseGeek:

"Concern trolling is a form of Internet trolling in which someone enters a discussion with claims that he or she supports the view of the discussion, but has concerns. In fact, the concern troll is opposed to the view of the discussion, and he or she uses concerntrolling to sow doubt and dissent in the community of commenters or posters."

In other words, a concern troll does not want to understand your perspective. They just want to mock you and piss you off, but they're doing it passive-aggressively. So how do you tell them from people who are actually misunderstanding you and need clarification? A concern troll frequently:

- Has only just recently joined the site of the discussion, perhaps having joined specifically to post in the current thread. This is mostly applicable to forums and email lists, but concern trolling also happens on Facebook, blog comments, sometimes even Twitter.

- Persistently attributes ideas to you which you have not expressed, even after you have reworded your position multiple times.

- Claims to be a subscriber to your same philosophy, except for [insert idea which is incompatible with said philosophy]. For example, "radical unschoolers" who believe children must be controlled at all times.

- Relies very heavily on fallacies such as strawman, slippery slope, ad hominem, and so on.

- Invokes Godwin's law for maximum emotional impact, especially early in a discussion.

- Has no problem making ad hominem attacks (subtle or otherwise) which clearly apply to you, your family, or your friends, often while insisting that they think you are just lovely and they're only worried about those other people. When called on the fact that their attack applies to you, they continue to insist they did not mean you.

- When cornered, complains that we should all be entitled to our own opinions, after spending the entire discussion making it very clear that they do not feel you are entitled to yours.

- Leaves virtually the same comment on everything you post, even if your posts are not all on the same subject.

- Uses extreme worst-case-scenario examples in a persistent and insistent manner. This tactic is designed to convince you that your beliefs are "fair-weather" and that you'd drop them in a heartbeat when Shit Gets Real.

Now, not everyone who uses one or more of these unpleasant tactics is a concern troll. Some people are just bad at arguing. But when a discussion is going nowhere, draining your energy, and distracting you from things that are more important (including the original point you were trying to make - concern trolls are good at that), it's worth taking a step back and asking yourself: "Does this person actually care about my ideas?" A person who is worth engaging in a discussion, whether they ultimately agree or not, genuinely wants to understand where you are coming from. A concern troll does not. They are trying to undermine you. And you have no obligation to feed them! Go have fun. Let them feed somewhere else.

Chess Theory

In chess, when one player is outmatched, the game is over.

-Mr. Spock

Life is not a game of chess.

I mean that in a couple of different senses. For one, much to the chagrin of our Vulcan friend up there, life is not as clean-cut and logical as a game of chess. Life is big and confusing and messy and unpredictable. In chess, the queen is the most valuable piece (save for the king), and you know to protect her. You can see all her enemies coming a mile away, and you have plenty of time to prepare. In life, a rook may sneak right up behind your back, and you often have no idea which piece was the queen until it's already gone.

In chess, everyone starts with identical pieces with which to fight their battle. Not so in life. In life, all the pieces are thrown into a bag and spilled out in front of you at random, so that you may end up with any mix of pieces. Some people have seven queens. Others have nothing but pawns. A certain few are born without a king; their game is over before it started.

But the most important way that chess differs from life is that life is in color. Chess has only black and white. It is clear who your enemies are; they are the ones Not Like You. Your goal is to destroy them. In life, you've got all the colors known to Crayola running around. I like to think I am a nice rich shade of purple, maybe Violet Red. When I look around the world, I may see other shades of purple and try to join with them, but very few will be Violet Red. And if I want to look for an enemy, what then? I never did like Cornflower and Yellow-Green, but if I look at them closely I'll realize we're both made of blue. And anyway, the goal of coloring was never to defeat the other colors, but to combine with them and make something nice.

But I may be getting too deep into the world of metaphor. What I'm trying to get at here is that a lot of people, using whatever measuring stick is most relevant to them, try to divide life up as if it were a chess game. They choose a team, choose an Other to oppose, and try to outmatch them. Sometimes it really is white vs. black. Sometimes it's gay/straight, old/young, liberal/conservative, traditional/radical, vegans/omnivores, lactivists/bottle-feeders, unschoolers/"Muggles"*, or whatever else you can think of. And then it becomes a zero-sum game. In extreme cases, it can slip into wild statements about wishing the other group would stop existing. Because remember what Spock said about chess: "When one player is outmatched, the game is over." The only way to stop the Others from outmatching you is to outmatch them first, to end the game. A world where I cannot "win" without defeating someone else is not the kind of world I want to live in.

I firmly believe that life-as-chess is the mindset that leads to all of the most heinous, reprehensible acts in the world, whether on as large a scale as the Holocaust or as small a scale as kids beating each other up over small-town football rivalries. But the life-as-chess mindset requires tunnel vision. It requires imagining life as purely logical, instead of wonderful and tangled and messy. It requires pulling only the black and white crayons out of the box and dumping all the others on the floor as if they simply didn't exist. It requires you to behave as if everyone had all the same pieces, and ignore the people who don't. If your view of the world includes only Us and Them, you're missing all the people who fall outside of that dichotomy. If your answer to all the world's problems fits on a bumper sticker, you're not seeing the whole picture.

I like chess, but if I have my choice of all the games in the whole wide world, I'd much rather play Beatles Rock Band. Let's get some harmonies going in here.

*I have to admit, I can't resist the cuteness of the "Muggle" metaphor. But I like it precisely because it is only the evil wizards who oppose the Muggles; the good guys respect the Muggles' rights, even if they cannot share their worldview.

Gay test

Consider everything that's going on in this video... and I'm looking at the girl. Ahem.

Cool song though!

Edit: removed video because it was fuckin' up my blog layout. Video here.

How religion almost ruined it

A few days ago I wrote about how cool my mom was. In that post, I hinted that she hadn't always been so lovely - didn't like black people or Jews until I befriended black and Jewish kids, didn't like gay people until her own daughter was queer, etc. While the fact that she ultimately turned completely around in her views, and the fact that she seemed to do it almost entirely for my sake, is amazing, it would've obviously been a lot better if she hadn't held those not-so-nice views in the first place. I had to grow up hearing them. I had to consciously choose different values from hers in order to feel like a good person.

So here was the icky side to my otherwise sweet mom: She was very Southern, in all the more unpleasant ways, and used the kinds of words very old-fashioned Southerners use, the kind which make liberals like me, who have no problem using "fuck" every five seconds, flinch. She was Southern Baptist, and for those who don't know Southern Baptists, that's one of your more, shall we say, brimstone-oriented churches. I don't remember learning anything in church about how to be kind or how to be a good person. All I remember was the word "saved". Get saved, or go to Hell. Get your friends saved too, or else they go to Hell, and it's all your fault. Get random strangers on the street saved. I was skeptical of this idea from the start, but my mom embraced it. She believed anyone who failed to be "saved" was going to Hell, and that meant they were evil. Now, I'm not against belief in a higher power, by any stretch. I'm not even against adhering to a specific religion for yourself. But I am against such belief being used to shame and control others, and that was the way it was used where I grew up.

She made some effort to try and force me to believe this way, but I resisted every time. I wouldn't read my Bible. Too hard to understand, was my excuse, although I was reading encyclopedias by that age. I argued with her about whether Jews would go to Hell if they were God's chosen people, because that didn't make any sense. And what about people way over in, I dunno, China, who maybe never heard of Jesus at all. They'd go to Hell? Really? Why?

My mom's successes in raising me came from the fact that when I asserted my own ideas, she listened. She took them seriously and discussed them, even when she didn't agree. She did not simply tell me I better do what the Bible says. She liked the fact that I was thinking about it. And when I said something that seemed a bit more, well... kindhearted than what we were learning at church, she tended to recognize that, and sometimes would decide she agreed with me.

Ah, but her failures... Every single one of my mom's failures as a parent came from the times she tried to force her values on me. The time she stole my Dungeons and Dragons manual and hid it because she thought it would somehow get me involved in the Occult, thus ensuring I would forever be secretive about what I was reading. The time I tried to convert to Wicca and she screamed at me that it was "devil-worship", thus ensuring that I would never share any of my religious thoughts or feelings with her ever again. The times she decided the music I was listening to wasn't "Christian" enough and told me to stop - this never lasted more than a few hours, but it ensured I would never again freely share with her the music that I liked.

This paints a pretty different picture from the happy-unschooly post I wrote the other day, huh? The fact is, my family was both. My mom was forever torn between a set of values that said her daughter should be free to make her own choices, and a set of values that said there is some higher power we all must obey, and that that higher power is not very patient or nice. I'd say 90% of the time, that first set of values won. But the second set was bigger and scarier, with a lot more institutional muscle behind it, and so even her kindest, most patient moments were tainted with a sense of "What if I'm sending her on the path to Hell?" It must've been really hard for her.

I see lots of people who want to call themselves unschoolers, even radical unschoolers, but they've got this other set of values hanging over them. Maybe religion, maybe the environment, maybe hardcore feminism, whatever, but it's a set of values that does to them exactly what my mom's religion did to her: It tinges their choices with fear and guilt. I am here to say, from experience, that if you raise your kids this way, it will affect your kids. There's a price to putting your own set of values above what your kids need.

The price you should be worried about isn't that somebody on Always Learning will say "That's not unschooling". There are no unschooling police. Nobody can stop you from calling yourself that. The price you should be worried about is that your kids will stop feeling they can be honest with you. They'll stop sharing their favorite music and books and games with you, they'll stop letting you meet their friends. They won't tell you they'd like to try Wicca or they have a crush on someone of the same sex. They will still DO all of those things, mind you, or at least they'll want to. But when they want someone to confide in about it all, it won't be you. You'll have lost that forever, and more importantly, your kid will have lost having a safe place to turn when they need someone.

That's what you need to be worried about.

Conspicuous Consumption

Edit: It has occurred to me, upon rereading this post, that it potentially warrants a trigger warning for people with compulsive hoarding tendencies. As far as I *know*, no one I know has this problem, but people keep their issues to themselves, and blogs get around. So if this applies to you, consider this your trigger warning.

It seems that one of the more recent concerns that is driving people away from whole-life unschooling is the notion that unschoolers are wasteful, privileged, the Ur example of Western overconsumption. That we just buy, buy, buy, we waste gas, our kids are greedy and obsessed with stuff. That we are the people ruining the Earth.

With all due respect, this is a load of hot bullshit. I'll resist the urge to respond by snorting and saying "Have you met any unschoolers?" I will also (mostly) spare you my rant on how I believe the Earth is being destroyed by broad institutional and societal problems that will continue to destroy the Earth until they are changed, and that it is not fair to hold children responsible for society's fuck-ups. Instead, I'm going to try to clarify some things about how your average unschooling family lives.

First, let's talk gas. Consider that in the average American household, both parents work full-time outside the home, with an average total daily commute of 45 minutes. At 60 miles per hour, that's 45 miles a day = 1.8 gallons of gas in an average 25mpg car = $5.40 at 3.00/gal. x 5 days a week = 225 miles, 9 gallons of gas, $27 per week per working parent. These are conservative estimates; some people have less fuel-efficient cars, a much longer or slower commute, etc.

Your average unschooling family, if there can be such a thing, has one parent or caregiver working outside the home while the other is either a stay-at-home parent (or grandparent, or what have you), works from home, or works only a couple days a week outside the home. Supposing the mostly-home parent does not commute at all, that is a savings of 225 miles of driving per week over the average American family. Even when the "home" parent drives kids to activities, they have the flexibility to plan those activities so they don't require 225 miles of driving a week.

Does that put the occasional, few-times-a-year road trip into perspective?

But of course, having only a one- or one-and-a-half-income household comes with a price. How can unschoolers afford to give their kids all the things they want without going into huge debt or going broke? Two answers:

1) Unschoolers don't give their kids everything they want. Even higher-income unschoolers can't do that. I wanted to go over the rainbow, I wanted to live in the Mushroom Kingdom, I wanted to time-travel back to the 80s so I could be a teenager then instead of the 90s. Couldn't happen. I'm not trying to be difficult, but really, unschooling doesn't mean you can rope the moon or bend space-time, and kids understand that. If you explain money to them, they will understand that too.

2) When unschoolers do give their kids what they want, they are really creative about it. I've never seen any group of people that makes better use of thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets, Freecycle, Craigslist, eBay, bartering, etc. than unschoolers. With all the perfectly good used kids' stuff floating around in the world, telling your kids they cannot have something because you are anti-consumerist is a poor excuse. Getting stuff secondhand is saving it from the landfill. I know it goes against every "pay for every moment of joy with three times as much guilt" moral we are taught in this culture, but really, you can get stuff and help the Earth at the same time. Unschoolers keep a LOT of stuff out of the landfills, and their kids grow up knowing there is more than enough stuff in the world for everybody - and that there are better things to do when you don't want something anymore than toss it in the garbage.

"But kids in Africa don't have Barbies..."

First off, Africa is an entire continent made up of dozens of countries, each with its own economy and culture, and yes some of those economies and cultures do include Barbies. I think Africans as a whole are probably tired of being used as every white Westerner's example of the saddest most destitute people on Earth. Second, the kids you are talking about, the ones you see in Christian Children's Fund commercials with flies crawling on their eyes, also do not have medical care. They do not have reliable shelter, good food, good shoes, access to information, and plenty of other things any parent is going to make damn sure their kids have if they can. "Not everyone has this" is not a good enough reason to withhold something from a child. Third, I firmly believe the best way to make a child truly appreciate what they have is to foster a mindset of abundance in that child. The greediest people in the world are those who have been taught that there is not enough wealth to go around. These are the people who have billions of dollars, yet feel threatened by mothers getting $100 in food stamps to feed their children. Teaching kids that there is plenty for everybody will make them much more likely to feel a sense of injustice when they see people who have nothing.

I don't have any sort of hard concrete poll numbers to back this up, but I can say from experience that unschoolers in general are much more Earth-friendly than your average mainstream family, and that includes unschooling families who do not consciously practice "green living". There are lots and lots of unschoolers who grow their own organic gardens, raise their own chickens, have compost heaps, ride bikes, run their own businesses rather than working for megacorporations, buy local, buy used, handmake stuff, cook from scratch, and so on. I know lots of unschoolers and lots of not-unschoolers, and I personally see much, much higher rates of these activities among unschoolers. In addition, I don't know one single unschooler - and by this I mean the parents *and* the kids and teens! - who is not socially conscious in some way. Some are moreso than others, but in general the unschoolers I have met are very awake and interested in what is going on in the world. They have strong opinions and values and beliefs. They don't all agree on those opinions, but they've all thought carefully about what they believe. They're not greedy, they're not selfish, they do not blindly follow what society tells them to do. I can't prove any of this stuff with statistics. All I can do is invite you to really spend some time around lots of unschoolers and get to know us before you judge the way we live. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

...but she was THAT mom?

Wow! I have been totally floored by the response to my last post, about my mom. I knew she was That Mom, but I didn't know she was that mom. The kind of mom people want to be like. The kind of mom whose everyday actions make people cry. Because the sad part is, nobody but me ever appreciated my mom while she was alive. She had some mental and cognitive problems that meant she mostly just stayed home all the time, and she was very awkward socially. I was the only person who got to see her shine. Me and my friends. I don't think I ever had a friend over who didn't tell me my mom was awesome. But other adults... well they kinda just thought she was dumb. So hearing so many people say they wish they had my mom, or they wish they could be like my mom, has healed something in me. It's wonderful.

It almost seems like my mom was like Vincent van Gogh, and no one appreciated her work until she was gone. But if I say that, then I'll be calling myself Starry Night, and that's not what I mean at all. I just wish she could've been here to hear people say how cool she was. (She wouldn't have believed a word of it though. She would've just shrugged and said "I'll do anything for my daughter.")

The embarrassing thing though is that I sort of took her for granted. Not in the sense that I didn't appreciate all she did for me, because I did. I just didn't see it as unusual. Having a mom who loved to play Barbies and bake cakes and let me do pretty much whatever I wanted was just normal to me. When I got older and realized other kids got grounded for stupid things, or weren't allowed to do totally harmless things I was allowed to do, I thought THAT was weird. When I tried to get other kids to play in the dirt with me at recess, sometimes they'd say "I'm not allowed to get dirty", and I'd look at them like they had three heads. I was always like, "Don't you have a washing machine? That's what they're FOR!" I couldn't conceive of the idea of clean clothes being more important than having fun. (I realize now that they were probably going somewhere after school, but still. Birds fly, mosquitoes buzz in people's ears, kids get dirty. It ain't rocket science.)

So anyway, everything I wrote in that post just seemed normal to me. I keep rereading it, trying to see where the magic is that makes even unschooling parents see it as special, but I don't. It all seems like the same stuff you guys do! Maybe it just looks different through a kid's eyes. Maybe your kids will take your parenting for granted, too - in a good way. In the "this is just how you should treat kids" way. Hopefully the number of kids who grow up that way will keep growing and someday eclipse the number of kids who grow up saying things like "My dad always beat the snot out of me and I turned out okay." I always feel like a judgemental asshole when I say that conventional parenting, all of it, seems like child abuse to me, but well... if you treated your spouse that way...

I guess I just wanted to say that I think all you unschooling parents are awesome, and if your kids ever seem to take what you do for granted, take heart - it means they see adults treating kids well as no big deal, just the normal state of things. And that's a very good thing.