Children More Sensitive To Negative Feedback

Click on the title for the link. from Eide Neurolearning Blog -- which looks like it is going to be a great resource for me and my own cross-section of 9. More than a hat tip -- almost a levitation of the mortarboard!-- to Amy of Among Women

In high or low risk testing situations (here, a modified gambling task in which 9-12 year olds made predictions about which piece of cake to choose), kids seem to have stronger aversive responses than college students (in the their orbitofrontal cortices) after they found out about their mistakes.

Seems to fit in with my home life experience with my young ones!

How Home Education is Working

It's interesting to talk about homeschooling with young people. I am a mom of 4 teenagers, and as they get older their perspective on their lives is a resource for me and a corrective device, helping me see what is really longlasting and good and what is unnecessary and perhaps counter-productive. This is our 12th year of education at home; 4 of my kids have never been to school and the oldest left after 2nd grade.

Yesterday, my daughter was describing the reaction of her peers when they first find out she is homeschooled. She says that their reaction is usually envy. Ah, you get to sleep in every day and you never have to do anything.

My daughter went on to say that she thinks they misunderstand what homeschooling is about. In the first place, she doesn't WANT to sleep in every day. She isn't exhausted all the time and when morning comes, she wants to get up so she can do all the things she has planned. So she sets her bedtime so that she is rested in the morning. Sometimes she stays up late with her father and brothers to watch a movie -- for instance, last week they watched Henry V and she didn't get to bed till midnight. Well then, she CAN sleep in. Most of the time, that is. Last week, for instance, she had choir rehearsal for the Triduum and had to get up early. But she was able to take it easy the next day and catch up on her sleep.

Plus, she went on, they don't seem to understand that doing nothing is not fun for very long. In the past few days one of her projects has been to read several Shakespeare plays alongside with the movie and audiotape versions. Today she was googling for information on Latin declensions so she can get more fluent in Latin. She took the day off algebra yesterday because we were exhausted from Easter rejoicing (and Cadbury chocolate eggs) but she is going to get herself back on track today. This math schedule is her choice, though I help her with accountability at her request, because she wants to stay on a college math track and it helps her to have someone to check in with occasionally.

She plans out her day to include the things she values: her reading, her music, her walking for exercise, her sewing, her message boards, her nature notebook, her time playing with her little brothers or conversing with her older ones, her movies; and yes, her math and Latin and daily chores. She can take it easier on days after a busy day or week, or when she isn't feeling altogether well.

One major difference between her life and those of the people she talks to is that the pace is varied and set to her internal meter. There are lulls, and bursts of activity. She can set herself challenges and work on them in different ways in different times. For example, she plays violin and piano and also is working on her singing. She wants to learn more about music so she has been listening to classical music CDs and reading commentaries about them, and also reading some books about music history a bit at a time. But she doesn't do all of these every day. Sometimes she just wants to listen to her old favorite folk songs and musicals, and that's all.

Another difference is that there is no real distinction between school and life. We discussed a friend of the family's who wants to homeschool her kids. Part of the reason is because when she went to school, she was involved in several unconventional extra-curricular activities. Since the school wasn't sponsoring these, her "school life" was hermetically sealed from her "extra-school life". Only the school-directed things "counted" as learning, and she could even be penalized for devoting attention to interests outside of the curriculum, if they interfered with her school performance and requirements.

My daughter said that in her life, one thing flows into the other seamlessly. She finds our Henry V soundtrack while she is looking through our collection for something else. She listens to it for the first time in a few years and it's familiar, but enjoyable on a deeper level now since she is older and knows more about music. Since we have the videotape of the movie, she digs for that and gets her father and brothers to watch it with her. She discovers that the composer Patrick Doyle also wrote the score for some other movies she has watched recently. She listens to the music again and again, trying to pick out the instruments. She works at figuring out one of the songs on her violin. She teaches her 6yo special needs brother to recite part of the St Crispin's Day speech. She reads the play and we have a discussion about Kenneth Branagh and how his performance in Henry V is different from his showpiece role in Harry Potter.

Meanwhile, her family is coasting on her enthusiasm, and my 10yo asks me if "the French really killed the baggage boys." So we google it and find an article that compares the play with the actual historical record. My 6 year old makes a play on words with the speech she taught him "And crowns for convoy put into his purse" -- he substitutes "wallet" and is delighted with how everyone laughs at his joke. Then he gets to recite to his dad, to his brothers, and to everyone else.

The learning is organic, and also relationship-oriented. Just as I always smile when I see a picture of a salamander because of my second son's early interest in them, I'll always see the Henry V play through a filter of affection -- first for my husband, who loved the movie and taught my older sons the speech just by declaiming it around the house; then for my daughter. A richness accumulates over time, layers upon layers of meaning.

My daughter also talked about socialization. She points out that she is not spending her days lonely in a crowd, or being told "school is not for socializing" by her teachers. She has some close friends with interests in common. She could have more friends and more activities, but chooses to balance out her active life with her interior life (she is an introvert and needs time and space to recharge her batteries). She doesn't have to feel strange about this, and if she wants to change her lifestyle to include more or less social life, she can.

Homeschooling is not for everybody, no doubt, but it is working for us and it works better when I look at what we have, not at what others have or what we are lacking. There is an expansiveness there. There is a kind of energy based not on achievement and production necessarily (though those things can be a good byproduct and over the long haul the achievement and production is definitely there) but on making connections at different levels at different times.

Strewing

I have been thinking of "strewing" a whole different way recently.
I always thought of it as an indirect, even manipulative way to introduce things on my educational agenda. OK -- I don't have nerve or energy to actually TEACH this or direct it, so I'll put it on a coffee table hoping you'll do it on your own.

Please be aware I'm not saying that I thought strewing PEOPLE were manipulative or sneaky. Some of the greatest people I know are strewers.It was more to do with how I thought I'D feel if I was relying on this as a way to educate.

Actually, it was an article about something other than strewing that made me understand the concept better. Strewing is about opportunities to share. To start something that might lead anywhere. Charlotte Mason wrote memorably about "one child's bread and butter being Plato, and another's Peter Pan." One way we can strew is with books. I can read aloud a Narnia book, say, to several children. I get one thing out of it (reading it for the 20th time with a new child), the teenager sewing nearby gets something else, and the 3yo phasing in and out of the room gets something else). It plants seeds that can grow in many ways. Plus, aside from that, it's just a great, great way to spend time together.

When we strew, perhaps it's almost better, according to the article above, to strew something that could lead to anything. What I mean -- rather than strew some activity that is very directed towards a certain kind of learning experience, strew something general that gets people using their hands and minds and interest -- even better if it's done together.

If I planned to talk specifically about castles during castle block days, I might have missed the discussion of why one little girl is jealous of other friends and how she might best be encouraged to play in groups. We might not have discussed compost piles while playing with magnets had I said that what animals eat has nothing to do with magnetism.

Sometimes my 10 year old brings me a book to read, though he reads well himself. We sit together, and after a few sentences of the book he is talking about something all together different. I realize then that the book is a way of getting me to "be there" focusing on one thing, so he can bring up his thoughts and concerns about something all together different.

And strewing is about putting yourself there, being available to relate with the thing strewed and with the child who picks it up. So I would not want to strew something that made me feel bored or trapped, myself. But maybe the "bored" or "trapped" part is in myself, and if I think about it differently, I can redeem something now that was spoiled for me "sometime back then."

Strewing is reciprocal. In fact, you can learn from your kids how to do it naturally and well. If I go outside with my toddler, he will "strew" all kinds of things in my path -- he'll bring me an acorn, draw my attention to an ant, find a new way to play with sticks and stones. He will strew more things than my tired adult mind can handle. But he is a natural Socratic teacher -- he asks questions, he shares his enthusiasm, he comes to everything without any preconceptions about how to use it or think about it.

I have learned more from my kids "strewing" things and opportunities and playing ideas than I have taught them, probably. And this gives me a good insight into how strewing contributes to an active, exploring, enriched life.

Back to Unschooling

The first part of this is here.

As I mentioned, some major life events propelled us into a coping mode and I see now that it spilled over into our homeschooling. Checklists and schedules and planning helped me deal with our daily lives. But when things got calmer I realized that this was a bit reductionist.

I am certainly not saying that schedules or planning are bad things. But I think education can become boxed in this way. We were doing fine, in one way. My oldest son had applied and been accepted to the college of his choice. The younger kids were cooperative if not exactly on fire with enthusiasm.

My second son was showing some signs of becoming demoralized. He was feeling the effects of being pushed into a sort of mold. College prep or non-college prep. Scylla or Charybdis. The first meant a kind of academic structure and expectation that went against who he was, and the second was like accepting being second-rate, which he is not and doesn't want to be.

That was one clue that something could be better. Some other things:

• I wanted my children to love learning, and yet I was having to require them to do schoolwork. This set-up implied that schoolwork WAS learning and that it was not something they would choose to do on their own. These were not really principles I actually believed in.
  
• I wanted my children, above all, to learn life skills, how to manage themselves, and yet I was managing them and often the life lessons were on the back burner because of the school lessons.
• I wanted to spend time with them companionably, but the time I spent with them tended to be largely in front of a schoolbook.
• I wanted a relationship that was richer than teacher/student. I am a bit of an either/or type person. I have trouble wearing two hats. But why should I? Why can't I go for both/and? Why can't I just be my primary identity as a mom, and work from there?
  
• I wanted my homeschool to bring out the uniqueness of my children, yet I was working through an outcome-oriented lens. Oh, how trite that sounds but it was a real process -- to SEE myself and my kids and my family, and see that we didn't have to measure up to a generalized ideal. Principles start from the beginning and work outwards in different ways, whereas "outcome-based" starts with the end of the story and tries to make the beginning fit. One is a bit like Prometheus and the other more like Procrustes.
  
• Last but not least, my husband is basically an unschooler at heart. He let me manage the details, but whenever he did get involved it was in order to loosen things up. He'd come and talk about current events when I was trying to get a kid through an algebra lesson, for heaven's sake! He'd tell me to take the day off and he'd plan outings and tell me they were field trips. Why was I trying to pull him and the kids along on my trip? I don't know. Probably fear. Fear is big.
  

Some of the other things that I knew but felt I was often pushing to last place, I have written about here and here.

Last year I decided to do what I called an unschooling sabbatical. My kids were all on grade level or above. Even if we wasted the whole year, it wouldn't ruin their lives. (this was my thinking process). The sabbatical turned into a kind of deschooling, I see.

I was so unmotivated all that year. I often woke up uncomfortable and went to sleep anxious. I'm not sure what kept me going. I read many, MANY books about organization-- putting all my scheduling energy into house management. Also, many books about personality types and productivity. Interesting how many life productivity books parallel unschooling principles. That was an education in itself. Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness was a particular example of a pivotal read. Here's another and here's another.

I prayed. Every time I prayed I got an answer to just keep going. It was not easy and I don't think I can ever give myself a guilt trip about unschooling equalling laziness or lack of discipline! It was such a stretch beyond my comfort zone.

I think it would have been easier if our former methods had been drastically NOT working, but such was not the case. Our methods had not been disastrous and they were "working". But working towards what? I had to consider that I was focusing on one part of the whole picture and it wasn't necessarily the most important part.

So now, after a brief flurry of indecision, and searching, I'm commiting for another year... I think. Some of the ideas here are useful. Especially the one about taking "school" out of the picture and seeing what's left. Ooh, I can do that. In fact, that sounds really good, since I've never seen learning as being more than incidentally compatible with schooling. And the one about replacing the verb "teaching" with "learning" and looking back at how I learned and my kids learned. This gives me an outlet for my thinking that's NOT logistical and directive.

Unschooling Carnival

Click on the title for the link. I want to wait for my next cup of coffee to REALLY read it.

Also, Homeschool Carnival #15 i sup.
I especially liked the Charlotte Mason Tutorial.
and this is a good one about readiness and desire to learn

"In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six years' worth. Every one of them knew the material cold......A week after it was all over, I talked to Alan White, who had been an elementary math specialist for years in the public schools and knew all the latest and best pedagogical methods. I told him the story of my class. He was not surprised.

"Why not?" I asked, amazed at his response. I was still reeling from the pace and throroughness with which my "dirty dozen" had learned.

"Because everyone knows," he answered, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff---well, twenty hours or so makes sense."

I guess it does. It's never taken much more than that ever since."

Stressed Babies

Click on the title for the link to the article. Hat tip to Andrea

American childrearing practices are influenced by fears that children will grow up dependent. But they say that parents are on the wrong track: physical contact and reassurance will make children more secure and better able to form adult relationships when they finally head out on their own.

"We've stressed independence so much that it's having some very negative side effects," Miller said.

Unschooling Questions again

1. Unschooling my child(ren) has enabled me to see ________

• That learning doesn't occur the same way for every kid.

• That learning is most often a matter of planting seeds and watching some take root and flourish almost on their own. It is not so much a factory progression -- addition here, times tables here, algebra at the end of the line. At best, the artificial progression follows or guides the natural one, and I think that can often be the case, but sometimes it gets in the way.
  

• That the bottom line of learning is relationship and connection -- with the knowledge, with the teacher. Trust is important. The trust ought to be reciprocal.
  

• That "safety" is necessary for learning. Civilization doesn't emerge until the people are winning the struggle for bare survival, until they have some energy reserves left over for creativity and development. Similarly, children who are intimidated and threatened will not have reservoirs left for intellectual flourishing. Kids like me who felt intimidated in school, but were relatively secure at home, will compartmentalize their learning -- do the minimum to get by at school and save all their real learning for the afternoon and evening hours.

• That even if you don't teach your children or set them down with lessons, they will learn. They learn from everything. They learn "meta-lessons" from the way they are taught, too.
  

• In fact, even if you do formally teach, at best this will be only the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of what makes them successful learners is what you do informally.... talking, reading, talking, listening, talking, sharing experiences.... hugging, guiding, bracing, praying, life lessons, family ways. The bulk of the learning curriculum goes on outside the lesson plans.

Marshmallows and Thoroughbreds

This is part of a post that I wrote for an unschooling list. I'm putting it on here as I consider Ron's questions

One insight that unschooling offers to me is that formal education is the merest tip of the iceberg. I suppose that all people, even unschooled ones, sometimes take classes or participate in formal learning experiences. But what a person brings to that experience is more important than the experience itself. Unschooling acknowledges that, while most forms of "schooling" emphasize the power of the teaching and forgets the huge aspect of self-learning. I have seen that over and over.

Say, I sit down with a child to "teach him to read". In essence, I'm not really teaching. I'm seeing where he is now (some kind of formal or informal evaluation) and at best, I'm helping him build on where he is, giving him guidance to progress along a channel called "reading". But at worst, I'm teaching him a lesson that he is inadequate and doesn't measure up, which makes most kids either mad or discouraged. And if I am coercive about keeping them in that experience, it can be very destructive. They have that anger and discouragement and they can't walk away from it. They can't learn anything good from that. They learn tricks and devices and helplessness. John Holt describes it very well in "How Children Fail".

I am also teaching him to "channel" or "focus" his previous knowledge. Hard to explain, but.... say, he has all these skills that lead to reading pre-readiness -- he can visually discriminate, visually track an object, he can listen to and understand complex literary prose. These skills are BIG -- bigger and more important than phonetic decoding. They can spill over into decoding, but they are not only FOR decoding -- they are skills that carry over into all areas of life. So I don't want him to inadvertently learn that these BIG, beautiful, powerful thoroughbreds are just carthorses meant to carry the relatively small cart of beginning literacy. They CAN carry that cart but that is only a tiny part of what they will do naturally if they are not whipped and channeled along that single track. (metaphorically speaking).

I think there can be a "good" kind of learning stress, but that's probably another post. Psychologists call it discrepancy. You see where you are now and where you would like to be, and try to get to where you want to be. This kind of learning stress involves a goal, a path to get there, and support as needed. For instance, it IS important to learn to read and kids can pick up that message in many, many ways aside from putting their personal sense of self on the line in a negative way.

Another insight that unschooling offers to me is that learning is largely about relationship. Trust is the bottom-line of an effective relationship. Not blind, naive trust but commited, optimistic trust. Most "systems" of education think of relationship as a peripheral benefit. But to me it seems central, fundamental. No one can teach anything or learn anything if there is not trust to start with.

My daughter and I were discussing that famous study about the kids given a choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows later. That study is usually used to demonstrate the benefits of discipline and delayed gratification. The children who could discipline themselves to wait a little received more, and this reflected itself in their later lives -- the ones who could wait for the second marshmallow were more successful later in life.

But it occured to me that the kids that were able to control themselves and wait for the second marshmallow had a basic TRUST of their environment. The kids that went for the one marshmallow probably hadn't acquired that sense of orderliness and stability -- that promises made are kept, that people are basically reliable and looking out for you. I think this is supportive evidence for a loving, "attached" environment leading to "natural" self-discipline. Those kids expected more -- they felt "safe", they were not "hungry" and grasping. Their emotional needs had been met.

Unschooling Unconsidered

I have been revisiting my homeschool history with an unschooling perspective.... To see what unschooling has given me, to focus on the good things, and not worry about all the possible down sides. I can get where I shortcircuit myself with too much thinking, so I am trying to "recount" and reconsider.

I came to unschooling circuituously. My older kids went to school for a couple of years, even though (gasp!) my husband really wanted them to be homeschooled. I didn't want to inflict school on them at home. I had hated almost every minute of my own K-12 school years. I wanted to be their ally, not their prison-guard. I wanted to make them cookies and listen to them when they got home. But of course, it wasn't that easy. So often, I felt stretched between the imperatives of the school situation and the imperatives of their own development, which sometimes seemed to conflict, and rarely coincided directly.

In particular, my second son floundered. He wanted to check out everything the library had, say, on volcanoes and pour over them for hours, asking me to read the captions until he memorized them, asking me question after question. But the pre-K wanted to do one theme per week -- dinosaurs, neighborhood helpers, solar system.... cute, but completely irrelevant to what he was about. The only thing he got out of that school year was when the class hamster gave birth. He LOVED those hamsters. He pored over them with intensity whenever he could. He flipped out when the teacher tried to redirect him outside to recess. He got to bring them home for Thanksgiving vacation. He got to adopt one of the babies. He grieved when it grew up, got loose from its cage, and soon afterwards died: "Mom, I HATE my hamster." (tears in his eyes).

My more quiet-natured oldest son suffered a bit in school, too. He came home grouchy and withdrawn every afternoon, wanting to be left alone to recover. He got the highest reading comprehension scores in his second grade class, yet told me he "hated reading".

It was reading Growing Without Schooling in the public library, plus the writings of John Holt, and Nancy Wallace's Better Than School, that made me think that possibly, I could do this -- and it might actually be fun and liberating to try.

That was 12 years ago and now my oldest is in his first year of college. It has been fun and liberating -- AND challenging.

We have experimented a lot with different types of structure. Our first year, we found ourselves using a very structured correspondence curriculum. The disconnect that resulted between what had brought me into homeschooling and what was happening as a result was very hard to bear. I can see now that it pushed me into a compartmentalization mode similar to what I had gone into in my own school years. "Schooltime" was for enduring and getting through; the rest of the time was for "real stuff." But with this irony -- that I was the teacher, so I had to work hard and invest myself in these schooly things. Since I was a mom of 4 and pregnant with the 5th, that was enough to wear me out and I'd spend the rest of the time just recuperating and maintaining for the next day.

Our second year and for the following years, we moved to a classical/Charlotte Mason blend. This was a much better fit. When life events hit, we'd move into a sort of "default unschooling" -- basically, just let the bookwork slide in order to cope with the demands of whatever was going on. This worked to some extent. There was still that dichotomy and compartmentalization, but since the "school" stuff we were doing was closer to the "real" stuff, the disconnect wasn't so enormous.

The last few years of our homeschooling have been VERY chaotic in life terms. We've had two children born critically ill. This pushed me towards a resigned checklist mentality. I see now that since we were going through so much tumult, our academics became my "center of stability", my focal point. The kids responded similarly. Their schoolwork was their "job", their duty.

Last year things calmed down medically, and the babies of the family were getting less time-intensive. At that point I *should* have finally felt in control, like we could finally *really* move forward. Instead, I felt restless and uneasy.

I will have to stop and continue this at some future time. Until then...

Oh, well, maybe next year....

Looks like we missed National Tartan Day... but I'm putting it on my calendar.

Unschooling Questions

Atypical Homeschool has asked for a favour:

This week would be the week for another unschooling carnival. For this carnival I’m asking you to consider writing a post (and leaving a comment on this one) about one of two subjects:

1. Unschooling feels, sounds or appears like a good philosophy to follow, but ________ prevent me (or make me hesitant to) follow through with it.
2. Unschooling my child(ren) has enabled me to see ________

If you can spare the time to write a post on one of those 2 subjects, it would be great. Both subjects would allow us to share the 2 sides of the coin and perhaps we can help one another see our way through one difficulty or another

Spring is traditionally my time to plan for the next homeschooling year. So these questions -- both of them in fact! -- have been on my mind a lot as I try to discern where I am going as a homeschooler? What does homeschool planning look like to an unschooler? How do I acknowledge the fact that I am not a spur of the moment, spontaneous type person when I am seriously trying to make a go of unschooling?

I have 7 children. Six of them are at home and one is at college. The ones at home are ages 3 to 17. All are very different in personality and interests. Frankly, there are not that many things we can do all together that span those ages and ranges.

So, there are two of my unschooling concerns right there:

One, how do I make allowances for my personality factor: that I do best in most life experiences when I have some predictability, some preparation, some over-arching goal in mind? How does that fit in with unschooling? Can you plan ahead, set goals and still be an unschooler?

Two, how do I do justice to the wide family variety I have in an "unschooling" way? When I am being more structured, it's pretty easy. In a word, checklists. I give them out to my kids; I use them myself. Can you do checklists with unschooling?

These are about logistics and how unschooling works in a larger family system.

I also have a philosophical concern. I have an ideal of what education should look like. It is definitely NOT what standard schooling looks like nowadays, but it is little emphasized in unschooling circles, either, as far as I have seen. (It may be an implicit undercurrent; that is something I am still trying to figure out). Historically, it was called "paideia". ... the enculturation of a child into what it meant to be a person. Obviously, this was an ideal, and not carried out perfectly. But the idea of paideia gives an idea of a dynamic, of an interaction between what society is, what human nature is, and what the individual child is meant to be.

The late Pope said in relation to a family's mission: "Families, become who you are." I want to give my children a chance to become who they are, who they are meant to be. That's in many ways, essentially, an unschooling mandate. But part of who they are is what they were born into, and the place they are meant to have in their particular society. That implies to me that there IS a role for parental direction. The details of that -- when, how, why we interact with our children to help them become what they are -- continually boggle my mind.

For further discussion on this, read an unschooling thread on 4reallearning

Normal, or Noble?

Karen E writes about "normality":

As Lissa so aptly noted in her post, "weird" (or "not-normal") usually just means "different" ... and it's the weird people who have often gone on to do great things in the world. And a lot of weird people, while they may never do outwardly great things, will find other wonderful weird people, marry them, and lead fulfilling lives, raising weird kids and having a great time through it all.

This issue of "normality" brings to mind David Hicks' book Norms and Nobility:
(the Headmistress has some notes on the book here and here are DominionFamily's jottings )

"The Greek doctrine of the Golden Mean prescribed man as he ought to be -- physically poised, mentally balanced and rounded off, thoughtful in action and active in thought: the living embodiment of the Ideal Type. The modern mean, on the other hand, defines the individual as he is in relation to a statistical point. The Golden Mean was a dynamic principles; the modern mean is a static one. Ancient man strove to fulfill in his person the Golden Mean and was rewarded with rare moments of fleeting achievement; modern man, however, is always at -- or so many points off-- the modern man....."

"How much easier and safe it (seems) to adopt the philosophy of the modern mean. Judging the student against what he is or against what his peers are, after dividing them by their numbers, seems far less arbitrary and demanding. What could be more democratic and less controversial? How could a student fail to measure up to what he is? Unfortunately, however, the statistical mean is a solution with mathemetical -- but not human -- efficacy. The past instructs us that man has only understood himself and mastered himself in pursuit of a self-transcendent Ideal, a Golden Fleece, a Promised Land, a Holy Grail, a numinous windmill. He defines himself in the quest, not on Kalypso's unblown isle, where he is only judged against himself, where all obstacles are removed, where the question of human significance seems insignificant..... on Kalypso's idyllic estate, Odyssean man is a nobody,.... seated "on the vacant beach with a shattered heart, scanning the sea's bare horizon with wet eyes". Only Odysseus' knowledge of the past -- his longing for Ithaka, Penelope, and Telemakhos -- keeps him alive; and only the responsibility he takes for that knowledge rescues him from Kalypso's pointless life of pleasure."

Striving to be "normal" does not seem to fit what we were intended for, or to answer the calls of our Master: "Be ye perfect..." and "Be in the world, but not of it..." Our built in longing is to be more than what we are, not something other than what we are, or not exactly what we are already. The humility and difficulty of a quest suits us more than the discomfort and hypocrisy of trying to fit into a set of clothes not made for us. ... or the comfort and complacency of fitting too well. It's a losing game both for the ones that fit AND the ones that don't.

The Golden Mean puts us all in search of bettering ourselves, and in the process helping us better fit society as it ought to be, not as it presently is. Hicks makes it clear when he talks about Odysseus's longing for his family as a spur to push himself to get past where he is now. It is our relationships, our love and connection with others and with things bigger than ourselves, that is our foundation and our motivation to grow past ourselves to nobility, not just a sterile desire to look good or gain power or approval. Striving to meet a standard of normality ultimately only pits us against others and throws us back upon ourselves.