I'm not talking about shopping for clothes. I always found that part of back to school painfully mysterious. Girls my age, brows furrowed, discussing the latest fashions, merely confused me. What I loved was the new school supplies. Pencils and protractors, flesh colored erasures and crisp, clean notebooks. I cherished the feeling of brand new pens in my hand and the look of fresh, undoodled PeeChees. I thought it was because I was excited for school in spite of my ambivalence. I didn't know it was because I was a writer and merely had a fetish for office supplies.
My daughter shares my delight in office gadgetry. While other mothers and daughters are staring frantically at back to school supply lists my daughter and I are enjoying the heady, old fashioned aroma of school paste. We moan in frugal pleasure over the prices. We swoop in and out of aisles in our local Office Max, pushing buttons, comparing prices, and generally enjoying ourselves. Pens are inspected and discarded, calculators tested; nothing escapes our ecstatic scrutiny.
Sometimes, after carefully consulting the Sunday advertisements, we will place something in a basket slung over one arm. We write, draw, and calculate while living our daily lives and we do occasionally need to replenish our supplies. But that isn't why we do it. For us, it is a ritual of learning in our unschooling life. It is unschooling. We learn while doing something we love. While other parents and students are frantically picking up the supplies needed to learn, we learn while getting the supplies we need.
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