E. is learning to walk. He's very determined about it -- sort of an "immersion walker". I don't remember my other two being quite this obsessed with *learning* how to walk, although once they'd figured out how it was all they wanted to do. E. has discovered that if he uses a walker he can get all the places he needs to go faster than if he scoots on his bottom (his previously preferred method of locomotion), so he doesn't want to *stop* using the walker to do things like eat, or to go inside because we're all freezing to death. This can be a problem. The other problem comes when he wants to independently go down steep driveways, or when he's pushing the walker inside and there's too much furniture on which to get hung up. Any of these things can make him *really*, *really* mad. If the walker gets stuck on a book or a chair leg in the living room, he screams, "'tuck! 'Tuck!" at the top of his lungs. If I try to stop the walker (and him) from careening out of control down the driveway, he screams at me inarticulately.

I made a list yesterday of everything I had learned since I've been out of school (that I could think of) vs. everything I learned *in* school. Grades K-12 provided very little for the list, since I've forgotten a lot of it and most of what I learned during those years were things I taught myself. Even in college and grad school (my brief foray into grad school), most of what I can *remember* were topics I researched independently for papers. The list made me feel better about myself, maybe my first baby steps toward an unschooling of *me*. I can catch a brief glimmer in myself sometimes of that fierce joy and drive that is propelling E. to walk, usually when I'm writing and the writing is either going very well or very badly. Maybe especially when the writing is going badly, because it takes a lot of guts sometimes to pick yourself up off the metaphorical (or perhaps the literal) floor and keep at it. For the past year or so I have had to invent guts for myself, not just in writing, and it hasn't been easy. But homeschooling my kids is helping me unwind a bit, to unlearn those lessons, particularly as they pertain to writing and work, that say there is one right way to go about it, one right path to follow, and that such a path involves maximum efficiency and some sort of mediocre well-roundedness. I have E., who works on one skill at a time in cohesive, brilliant bursts, to show me that learning (and working) don't necessarily progress in that kind of stair-step, gradual and smooth fashion, but sometimes happens all at once or not at all.

Sometimes I wonder who's really doing the teaching here.