Collections

Kids and Collecting are inseparable. I am sure of it. Having watched this curious habit take place in my own house for the last 14 years, I am still at a loss as to why it happens and what purpose it serves, long after the collections themselves have been forgotten.

Well actually I cannot say that I am at a complete loss, because I remember doing this myself when I was young. Piles of objects in cans or on tables were often an irresistable invitation to investigate thoroughly and separate each object carefully into sizes, shapes, colors, and functions. BUTTONS were an especially alluring treasure now that I remember them, and there was nothing more luxurious than plowing your fingers through each and every one and taking hours upon hours to sort the lot out.

The kids have been impassioned collectors of everything for as long as I can remember. Various choices that come to mind have included 'normal' things such as baseball cards, Pokemon cards, action figures, matchboxes, Legos, and series books, but some of the crazier things have also included walking sticks, dead bees, license plates, antique meat grinders, property line tape and markers, old VCRs, and wooden fisherman buoys, LOL.

I am pretty sure I know why they do it, or why any person must choose to hoard anything without a serious reason. Collecting and quantifying an object is an attempt to collect and quantify the world. Organizing something and putting it into a category is an incredibly sensible way of deriving meaning from a world that is complicated and confused, and it even helps exert a little bit of control over it. It is grounds for hysteria that the educational standard in New York puts such a heavy emphasis on 'teaching' kids to categorize objects, because no child has ever needed instruction to do something that is so innate and natural.


This Saturday we cut down a tree in the front yard. Once the guys with the chainsaws left, the kids moseyed on over to carefully survey the scene. After one or two moments of studied silence, Keith suddenly said "Quick. We need sawdust!" He ran into the house and took a ziploc storage bag out of the pantry, and banged out the front door again. In another minute he ran back in, grabbed a Sharpie from the jar by the phone and ran off yet again. A couple of minutes later he returned with a full plastic bag that was neatly labeled, 'Sawdust'.

Now the other guys got the idea, and decided that one bag of anything could not possibly be enough. They took the baggie box out the door and began to collect twigs and pieces of bark, separating them carefully and labeling them legibly. At this point, a full-fledged search began as the potential of this project was realized, and backpacks were dug out of closets, sandwiches packed, and markers, tools, bags, and compasses were thrown into the bag along with assorted, unrelated stuff. Each kid grabbed his favorite walking stick (bunched in a pile from an earlier collection), and set off into the woods towards the pond.

An hour (or maybe more) later, they came back home with this:



Included with what they found were cattails, leaves, fungus, milkweed, and an assortment of other objects, some of which were too big to fit into any old ziploc.

There was a bunch of----

and some carefully stored-----

And this, my absolute, ABSOLUTE favorite, a stroke of genius by any stretch of the imagination IMO! :-D

And closer still--------

I don't have any idea what the kids will eventually do with any of this. I'm sure they don't either. The point of it, and the point of anything that children seem to do in my honest opinion, is that it is not the result that matters, but the process that gets us there. Things were learned this day that would have pleased and impressed an academic, but I am sure that their reasons had nothing to do with educational skill. A child without fear needs no reason to do anything, because learning is as natural as breathing. We could all do with taking lessons from collectors, especially the young ones:).

Where Have All the Children Gone?

There was a time in the past when all a child had to do to find a playmate was open the front door and walk out. Not everyone lived in close neighborhoods, of course, but even those who lived in the more remote places could usually count on 2-3 other kids living nearby that they could wander off to impulsively and visit. In the country neighborhood I grew up in, kids could always be found playing, visiting one another, plotting adventures and escapades, and building imaginative new things. Some of the most fun (funnest?:)) things I remember included treehouses, wood forts, lemonade stands, bike rides on the street and trails in the woods, stone stepping and skipping, on ponds and over streams. Once I remember some kids down the street putting on a 'kid carnival', setting up games and activities that each cost a dime but that always resulted in fabulous prizes that nullified the profits completely. Not an adult was ever in sight, and everything was organized, planned, initiated, and finished solely by children from dawn until dusk:).

In today's world, there is a different scenario that plays itself out in towns and cities. The life after school and in summer that kids used to call their own with no interference from prying adults was long ago terminated in favor of more structured, 'beneficial' play, more organized 'enrichment', more competitive sports, and upscale daycare that leaves no stone unturned in their quest for the perfect child . Gone are the days when a child would come home from a stressful day at school, throw his/her books on the bed, change into playclothes, and run out to see who could play that day. Nowadays they are lucky to get home before dark, often with fast food suppers on the way home and 2-3 hrs. worth of homework waiting for them before bed. That all important 'Socialization' that we homeschoolers hear of so much that is viewed as the advantage of formal education is utterly suppressed in these children, only because there is no longer time to do what every child since the beginning has done---play and play some more.

Our kids have some sports that they play, and they have activities that they attend when they want to. For the most part, these things are done only because they enjoy them, and because they wanted to try something new and participate. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view:)), we do not have the money to enroll our kids in a multitude of different classes. If there is something they love and really want to get involved in, then we think hard and figure out a solution, but most of the time they are left to their own devices and their own imaginations, just as we once were:).

Today the boys found a new friend in the house next door. They played this afternoon while I washed the dishes, folded the laundry, and took care of the things that I needed to do. I kept an ear to what was happening, as usual, but never interfered with what they were doing because that was their time and not mine. I hovered near the edge of their world as my mother, her mother, and all the mothers that came before us have always done, trusting them to do what was right and become social, well-adjusted human beings (with or without our enrichment:-).

Quotes and Free Thinkers

Here are a few more wonderful quotes having to do with education (or just life in general as it pertains to what education really is). It is not enough to walk blindly through life accepting limitations that are imposed on us in the public school anymore. It is becoming more and more necessary to break through convention and allow children to express their talents so that they will know what to do when the consequence of past human action comes crashing down on us (which it most certainly will at some point). It does not behoove us in this day and age to raise conformists. The hope of the future depends on original solutions and unrestrained intellect like it never has before, and there is no way to create true thinkers other than trusting children to be in charge of their own learning. The philosophers of the past understood this very well because they were free thinking, non-conformists themselves. As a result, their words ring as true today as they did tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years ago...


Valuable achievement can sprout from human society only when it is sufficiently loosened to make possible the free development of an individual's abilities--Albert Einstein

The heart has eyes that the brain knows nothing of--Charles H. Parkhurst

Nothing in this world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come--Victor Hugo

A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.--Bernard Iddings Bell Chaplain

J.M. Barrie - - I am not young enough to know everything

Ansel Adams - - Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.

Aristotle - - it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Sir Francis Bacon - - They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher.


You cannot teach a crab to walk straight-- Aristophenes

Farm Life

Here in our family we live on a small 'farm', or what might more properly be termed a 'farmstead'. We do not own any large livestock or have the land to support large numbers of animals, but we do have a rather good-sized chicken flock that is kept for meat and eggs, a large herd of French Angora rabbits who provide meat and a small income from stock sales and wool, and a large, 1/2 acre vegetable/fruit/& herb garden. In addition to this we have a sizable orchard of apples, pears, plums, and peaches, and all in all we keep very busy cleaning, maintaining and breeding animals, weeding, harvesting, preserving, and planting. There may be pigs in our future someday around here too, but for now that is a ways away yet, and will only happen after we can build an enclosure to keep them safe from the bears:).



Farm animals (and gardens) are not only a great way to save money and control the quality of your family's food, but they are also of infinite value in teaching children the cycle of life and, most important of all, the principle of cause and effect.



Cause and effect means precisely what it sounds like, which is to say that the cause of something on one end invariably produces an effect (or consequence) on the other. From the very youngest age children have a perfect understanding of this principle. They know from infancy that when they cry, someone will feed them and attend to their needs. When they become older and decide to snatch their siblings' toys away, there are definitive consequences for that too:). The beauty of life on a farm is that the rule of cause and effect is an absolute, ever present force. It pervades every facet of the working family's existence, and without this symbiotic relationship that exists between animals and their owners, neither can produce or survive.



One of the reasons kids love farms so much is because they are so delightfully easy to understand. An animal is provided with food, water, and shelter, and it return it provides us with meat, eggs, milk, or fiber to spin. Seeds are planted in the ground, they are watered, weeded, and protected, and after a few suspenseful weeks there is food on the table to show for your efforts. Farming is a lifestyle that is so concrete and perfectly balanced, that children gravitate to it naturally as an extension of their own experience with the world.



We have seen many, many homeschoolers embrace the idea of growing food and raising livestock, but there is an alarmingly large number who also shun the idea of exposing their children to some of the 'darker' sides of farm life---which necessarily include sickness and death.



Of course, the ultimate 'cause and effect' principle is life and death. Whether you butcher your own animals or they sicken and die through one circumstance or another (as happens on every farm regardless of living conditions), it is important for children to see death as the natural outcome of life whether it occurs naturally or as a result of human effort. When the boys were small we carried on our work of raising and butchering chickens and rabbits. If they chose to be present during the culling they were certainly allowed, but if they didn't they were never forced. Over the years we also lost many housepets (dogs and cats, etc. who died of old age), but even though the kids were always sad at the loss of their pets, they never panicked or became overly distraught. I believe this was because they had an understanding of death as the natural effect of life, and there was no opportunity to develop irrational fears of the process.



The society we live in has an almost schizophrenic fear of death:(. Every day we hear of new products and research that promise to stop us from aging, keep us young and alert, and extend our lives no matter how ill, worn out, or compromised we have become. The refreshing thing about life on a farm is that events must be accepted regardless of how they come, and the emphasis on quality of life vastly overshadows the question of how it will end. This is a good way to look at the world, and a pretty nice way to grow up:).



Here is (an unfortunately dark!) photo of the chicks we ordered from the hatchery this spring to replenish our laying flock. Take a close look. Aren't they just the cutest darn things?:) Included in this batch are hens (and 1-2 roosters) of every possible description, a group we put together of the most endangered heritage breeds we could find. From a geographical standpoint it is interesting to point out to the kids that each of these breeds originated in different countries. This year we ordered breeds from Spain, Italy, Egypt, and a variety of other places. No doubt the yard is going to look seriously colorful come Fall.

Anonymom:)

Writing With Purpose

My oldest son never much cared for writing. Like so many boys in homes and schools across the world since time has begun, my son declared that while writing was something potentially useful in certain situations, it should not under any circumstances be embarked upon without a vital clear purpose and motivation of intent. In other words, there is no reason in the world why any child with zillions of more important things to do like wading in streams, reading comic books, and playing with tinker toys should ever be prevailed upon to take time out of his schedule for things such as rote copying or report writing. There is way too much to do in the course of a day, and life is just too darn short.

Brandon was a reader from the time he was young and has loved books passionately since the day of his birth. Every chance he ever got to listen to a story or find books on a subject that interested him were almost religiously followed up on, and he was one of those kids who just woke up reading one day without anyone ever showing him how to do it. He was (and is) a voracious reader, but his attitude toward writing was the complete and total antithesis of voraciousness, and astonishingly enough he never got the slightest inclination to do it. The only evidence I had that he even knew how to write came every Christmas when it became 'necessary' for him to write an extensive list of requested toys at the risk of something getting overlooked. In these situations, he miraculously sat down and churned out 3-4 page long descriptive toy lists with next to no effort in near-perfect penmanship. I was aghast.

I witnessed this phenomenon several times before realizing that there was a harsh and vital truth behind the idea that children need a reason to learn. Without a purpose for every element of skill that takes place in a person's life there is just no way that 'lifelong' learning is remotely possible. It is a wasted pipe dream at best. Even worse, everything that the tax-funded establishments spend years teaching kids around here is promptly forgotten the moment a child walks out the door in 9 out of 10 instances. Why? Because it does not serve the purpose of the learner at that time. Education is more a matter of timing than anything else in the world:(.

Something interesting I have noted lately, is that a child will never lose face in the event of a forced activity. Rather than subjugate him/herself to a higher authority and risk losing his (or her) identity entirely, kids will revolt in ways that are incredibly, logistically brilliant. They daydream, they fail to apply themselves, they misbehave accidentally and on purpose, they become downright disruptive, and most brilliantly of all, they simply forget what was taught as soon as it is no longer necessary to remember it. Are these marvelous examples of creative non-compliance, or what? It's very simple when you think about it. The human spirit refuses to be broken, and refusal takes all forms from babyhood to adulthood. No child will allow herself to be shoved and humiliated without mounting some sort of defense. Should we be surprised that kids revolt in school nowadays? It has nothing to do with peer pressure and course materials. It is purely an act of self-preservation:(.

Back to the writing issue. I decided that since no one can stop the flow of the ocean after all it was better to run with the tide than against it. Suddenly, at the age of 13, my darling son found a group of kids who shared many of the same interests and used email to communicate their battling monster/hero gangster swordsmanship scenario sequences every day. Suddenly, the boy who never wrote was whipping off page after page of questions, comments, opinions, and discussion points with textbook grammar usage, standard spelling, and shockingly creative expression. I spent weeks in a state of astonishment at the volume of material that was pouring out of him, and I realize now that my years of worrying and wondering were all in vain, and that the ability of Brandon to express himself perfectly resided in him all the time waiting for the right time, the right place, and the right purpose.

So this is what unschooling is all about, in my opinion. Free-schooling also. And even the movement of homeschooling in general. We are born with inherent tools and timetables, and all the instincts need is a little time, space, and self-motivation to develop. We as adults cannot force these issues. We cannot bestow tools that do not exist or force a talent to surface before development dictates that it should. All the cleverness in the world will not bring a horse to water if it does not want to drink. It has to need to drink.

In my opinion the most important thing we can do for any kid is not to teach them skills. It is to have perfect faith in their ability to unfold. No one knows what a person will do later in their lives. No one can see the future or find a way to tailor education to individual destinies if no one has the remotest idea of what those destinies will be. Self determination is the only hope for reaching adulthood intact and becoming mature, self-actualized human beings. That must be the future of education as we know it.

More streams of consciousness next week (with luck....:^),

Anonymom:)

Honesty

Honesty seems like the simplest concept in the world when you think about it. It means, in the most basic sense, 'abstaining from telling lies'.

Lies are not always terrible things when we tell them to protect someone else, or to spare a person pain that would not have benefitted them, that could only have made things worse, etc. These types of lies are known as 'white lies', and everyone in the world has told one at one time or another for any number of reasons. 'Honesty' as we know it does not usually mean the exclusion of 'white' lies, but the absence of a much more important kind of falsehood----the lies that we tell to ourselves.

Where children are concerned, honesty is of the utmost importance. When we say 'honesty', we should not include occasionally shielding a child from events that may be too upsetting and abstract to bear (for ex. exposure to rude or offensive adults, x-rated internet content and pathological situations, etc.), but it is of paramount importance to answer the serious questions that children ask at all times, no matter what.

The adult track record for honesty is admittedly horrendous, and probably has been since the beginning of time, LOL. Some of the worst examples of lying to children (IMO) are listed below:

1) A child asks, "Mommy, why does it thunder?", and the parent replies, "Because God is bowling". Answers like this to basic questions seem harmless and even humorous at times, but they definitely fall into the category of dishonesty because an adult has deliberately misled a child who has asked for a specific explanation to something. It also assumes that the child is not capable of understanding a scientific answer (or how the world works in general), and in this case there is no reason for failing to offer the explanation other than not wanting to expend the effort to supply a person with a detailed answer. There are situations in which stories like these are told in fun and that's wonderful, but the objectionable versions involve children being made fun of, with their intelligence deliberately being insulted on a basic level, and adults lying sheerly to get a laugh at the expense of someone young.

2) Ignoring or brushing off questions. A common tactic for avoiding unwanted questions is simply to push them off until a later date. For ex, the child asks, " What happens when you die?" and the parent answers, "We'll discuss that later". Of course, there sometimes is no time to discuss a subject of this magnitude at length, in which case "we'll discuss it later" is an honest response provided that someone actually does so at a later date. Unfortunately, answers like this can also be a shield that adults hold up to deflect questions that may be uncomfortable for them (putting a whole new spin on the subject and demanding more in the way of personal reflection).

A famous poet (who I forget the name of now), once said that the worst types of lies are not those we tell other people, they are the ones we tell ourselves. Dishonesty like this is the plague of child rearing, IMO. That kind of denial pervades not only families but public institutions of every description including those that handle our children. Schools are rife with dishonesty, teeming with manipulation that is almost impossible to believe. The worst untruths are those that tell a child that he will never amount to anything if he does not conform to rules and acquire skills and abilities by age-graded deadlines.

Children are honest to a fault, everyone knows this is true. The only time in all my years of working with them that I have ever seen them lie is when they are afraid or trying to protect someone they love. They see more clearly than any adult is capable of seeing, and their observations are often embarassingly on target as a result of this amazing clarity. If we as adults try to evade their honesty every chance we get, then there are issues at stake that need to be addressed immediately. The toughest part of raising kids (especially those being raised in less restrictive environments), is addressing our own fears so that we do not pass them onto our children.

The concept of honesty relates directly back to the idea of unschooling and free-schooling. Children who have been raised without deception do not have to spend years of their lives restoring themselves afterward. That original clarity remains intact, they are unafraid to address challenges, and there is no delay (or utter failure) to launch themselves later in life. An honest relationship is totally reciprocal, involving the willingness to fix ourselves before we even think about paving the way for our children.

A tough job, but we've all got to do it, LOL.


Anonymom:)

Summer Fun (to Come)

What the heck is this thing, do you think??

Funny you should ask. It's a 'Splongee Ball' (!!) that one of the boys concocted over the weekend:).




I admit this seemed like sort of a funny thing to make (except for the fact that it was loads of fun, which means that it wasn't funny at all:)) . According to the book Jonathan borrowed his instructions from, it's best use is outside in the summer, as a tool for radical, splash fight 'hoedowns'.

As everyone who raises boys (and probably girls too:)) knows, there is nothing quite so important every summer as staging the all-out, ultimate, championship water war. This conflict must be replete with water guns, hoses, water balloons, buckets, and a variety of other creative weapons employed solely for the use of soaking your opposition into submission. Each year there is an entirely new plan and much discussion about how everything will work ahead of time (with some incredibly sophisticated rules and pre-war strategies in place), and then as soon as it is hot enough to run around outside in soaking wet bathing suits (or regular clothes, as the case may be), the fun begins.

Jonathan found his book called, 'The Ultimate Book of Kid Concoctions' by John E. Thomas and Danita Pagel, in the library. The wonderful thing about this book is that it makes project and craft ideas out of EXTREMELY cheap ingredients (perfect fodder for the single income HS family), and it is easy to understand the simple instructions for each project.

The 'Splongee Ball' project is located on pg. 24 and reads as follows:

What You Will Need:

-3 large sponges (use 3 different colored sponges) preferably nylon
-1 plastic cable tie
-Scissors

How To Concoct It:

1. Cut each sponge into thirds lengthwise
2. Stack the cut sponges on top of each other in three rows of three
3. Grab the stack of sponges in the center and twist the stack once.
4. Secure a plastic cable tie around the center of the twisted stack, pulling it as tightly as possible.
5. Trim the plastic cable tie down as close to the eye as possible.


Jonathan made his ball out of cellulose sponges because that was all his dad could find and because he was impatient to make it immediately. However, nylon ones would really be best because they stay soft and are easier to twist and tie (and as a bonus, come in lots of 'radical' colors:)).

It's a little early to think about summer yet, but once those triple H days roll around there is nothing better than to send everyone out with buckets of water and an arsenal of splongee balls to hurl across the yard at each other (while you position yourself somewhere w-a-a-a-y out of reach). They are cheap, fun, and best of all, indestructible!!

All the best,
Anonymom:)

Whole Language--A View of the Past

When I first started teaching 20 years ago, the big rage in methodology was Whole Language. The Whole Language technique was a method of teaching reading that was originally borrowed from New Zealand, the country with the highest literacy rate in the world at that time. It involved teaching with the 'Whole' child in mind, and focusing on the 'Whole' literacy process. Instead of picking language apart into minute components such as consonants, vowels, and grammatical details FIRST, it began with enjoyment of the reading process, and introduced real literature first to extract the phonics skills AFTER the child had become accustomed to reading whole words from whole text. In short, it was a method based on the natural joy of literature which bolstered a child's desire to read and gave them confidence in the written word before anyone thought about getting down to the nitty gritty of mechanics. Whole Language built on the concept that the human brain synthesizes information in Wholes rather than Parts, and that successful retention could not take place until each skill was embedded in a much larger, more meaningful context. Lifelong readers could not be built without a favorable view toward the reading process from the beginning, and you could not isolate skills on a daily basis without losing all sense of purpose, motivation, and retention for the child in the future.

Whole Language was the main reason I got into teaching. I still believe that it was the single most child-centered learning approach that the public schools had every attempted, however it was a short lived 'fad' in reality because it had the disadvantage of requiring faith in the child's ability to learn, it did not produce instantaneous, measurable results (emphasizing process over product at all times), and it did not fit neatly into educational plans and instructional curriculums. WL required teachers to research and create their own units (often based on needs and interests of the children themselves), and it required the ability to shift gears quickly and an unusual amount of creativity on behalf of the teacher. In other words, it reflected the true nature of a child and the zigzag fluctuations that the path of a learner always takes. In hindsight, there was no way that an approach this radical could have survived when it came down to it. Big bureaucracies demand evaluation at every turn and house teachers who favor long-term structure over child-led curriculum, and I don't see that changing anytime soon:(.

There are several techniques in the Whole Language philosophy that coincide extremely well with the ideas of homeschooling and child-led education. The following are a couple of ideas that have long been forgotten in the world of hard-core phonics and skills based instruction, but they are still effective today and (in my view) far superior to those that are employed in modern schools:

1) Stimulating, learner based environments. The presence of books and reading materials of every description pervaded real WL classrooms. Art supplies, math manipulatives, toys, writing implements, paper, and environments decorated entirely with homemade materials of the child's making were key. No child-based classroom ever had teaching aids of the type one always sees in teacher-stores and catalogs (factory made bulletin board kits, pre-fab signs and decorations, etc.) All of these objects did nothing but convey to the children that the teacher was in charge of the learning process, not them. WL classrooms emphasized the work of the children who 'lived' and learned there, and valued them. While a few pre-printed aids such as alphabet and number lines could be glimpsed here and there, the majority of the room was always covered in the childs' creations. Indeed, some teachers had nothing to do with decor of the rooms at all, it was all done by the children themselves in whatever way they saw fit to make the environment happy and comfortable.

2) Skills learned within the context of Whole books, Whole concepts, and Whole themes. Skills are best learned when they are not isolated from the context in which they originally appear. For ex, the 'th' consonant blend is best learned when it is encountered in a repetitive, interesting story filled with examples of the 'th' combination. Fractions are best introduced in the context of cooking and measuring ingredients where they have real world applications. Dates and events in history are best learned as part of the larger historical events to which they belong, and the Parts of a Plant are best learned in the context of the outdoor investigations that come naturally to children of all ages. According to the WL Philosophy there is no reason to take a skill out of context EVER, and part of the success of the method in New Zealand relied heavily on connecting all activities to a larger whole that made sense and was instigated by the children themselves 90% of the time;

3) Modeling. Another important tenet of the WL Language philosophy involved modeling the reading/writing process to children. Modeling meant that kids could get to see adult writers making mistakes and rethinking their ideas, becoming interested in reading for it's own sake and not just for the sake of encouraging it in children. It was critical for kids to see adults as fallible in other words (something that is seldom allowed for in classrooms today).

4) One-to-One Time and Attention. Whole Language also involved an inordinate amount of face to face contact and time devoted to each individual in the learning program. Time was spent talking and reviewing what the child was working on, discussing the child's interests and asking the child what they thought, and what the next step should be in their development that day/week/month. The opinion of the child was a major factor in their own progress, and negativity was actively discouraged at all times.

5) The Mini-Lesson. Whole Language teachers made efficient use of a concept known as the 'Mini Lesson'. This was a short lesson (usually 10-15 minutes in length) that introduced or reviewed a specific concept in Math or Reading, which then led to hands-on experimentation with manipulatives or games to reinforce the IDEA behind the concept. As most people know, the aim of instruction today revolves around endless repetition of a skill until the solution grinds itself into the consciousness of the child and temporarily boosts test scores. The only problem with this method of repetitive practice (or kill and drill, as the case may be) is that research has shown that retention does NOT improve past a certain point, and that the vast majority of children utterly despise the practice, making it less likely than ever that they will associate joy with learning:(.


There were many interesting concepts in the practice of Whole Language that unfortunately live on only in dated books and articles (at least in this country). Though the homeschool setting is different from the environment for which this method was originally designed, many of the principles align themselves perfectly with what unschoolers and freeschoolers believe (the ideas of child-empowerment, holistic learning, confidence, participation in the learning process, and emotional well-being). Someday the public schools may wake up to the idea that children are people and treat them accordingly, but until then it will be up to the mavericks among us to uphold principles that keep their spirits intact and continue methods that were tried and could have worked had they not existed in a vacuum of compulsion and austerity.

Til next time,
Anonymom:)

Daring to Begin

I recently talked to some parents who were just trying homeschooling for the first time, specifically 'unschooling' one or more children in their homes. All of these mothers had babies and one or more toddlers approx. 2-3 years old, and all were extremely unsure of what they were doing. They were unsure of whether homeschooling/unschooling was something that they ought to be doing considering the current climate of hyper-accountability in schools, and many of them were just plain wondering if all this grief would really be worth it in the end.

I remember feeling exactly the same way years ago when we first began homeschooling. I remember having a child that was 4, one toddler that was 2, and another baby who was a few months old and in need of nursing 24/7 (or so it seemed at the time:)). I had already committed to homeschooling despite the fact that 'formal' education would not begin for several more years yet, and I remember my worst moment of uncertainty being when the kindergarten bus passed our house on the first day that my oldest would have started public school, and having to tell the bus driver not to stop because there would be no one here who would be getting on. As a person who had gone all the way through public schools, studied through college and teaching classes to get an education degree and then gone back to traditional school to go to work again, this was a defining moment that was literally fraught with terror. I knew down inside that I was doing the right thing, but the conditioning of early schooling is such that panic is almost a knee-jerk reaction in us, causing us to disregard what we know to be true in favor of what everyone else expects of us (school, teachers, parents, administrators, other kids, and so on).

The earliest days of homeschooling here were like what everyone else seems to describe. Very strict, very regimented, and very accountable. There were schedules, charts, word lists, and maps stuck to the walls, and I wanted very much to make it look as though there was serious 'school' stuff happening in our home and my children were not missing out on a blessed thing. Looking back now, none of those charts or schedules were for the childrens' benefit at all---they were solely and strictly for me. Those props were hanging up to reassure me, the 'trained' teacher, that my children were acquiring every possible skill from every known corner of the universe via 1000 different vantage points. They had nothing whatsoever to do with my kids or my kids' educations. They were purely and simply a product of my own fear.

Anyone who homeschools (or does anything outside the mainstream for that matter) should think alot about fear. It is the one thing, almost without fail, that clutches us all unconditionally and makes it virtually impossible for us to see the world clearly or find the brightest possible future for our children. A.S. Neill (and other pioneers like him) saw the danger in bestowing this kind of fear on children. He saw the limitations and handicaps it would evoke and realized that there was no going out into the world successfully unless a person could somehow manage to throw it away afterward. Since that is such a difficult thing to do, his solution was to create a place where it would be prevented from taking hold in the first place.

Most of us who have been weaned on conventional educational systems understand fear well. We spend 10-20 years after school is finished trying to shed what has been thrust upon us in favor of who we really are and what we truly believe in. Even if we should manage to slip the chains (and practically speaking, most of us never do), we will still have our moments of sudden fear, panic, and the 'knee-jerk' reactions that occur where we are sure we have done something that is about to get us in trouble with someone somewhere.

I believe that it is this innate fear that stops us from trusting our children, that makes us fortify each experience with thousands of theories, walls, and safety nets. Simply put, we don't trust kids because we don't trust ourselves. Our FIRST duty as homeschool (unschool, or free-school) parents, is to examine our own insecurities and lay them to rest in order to give our children a more confident future. There is no other way to 'slay' this beast:(.

Last of all, homeschooling is a 'process-oriented' approach. This means simply that trying DOES matter, and every little step you take benefits a child in some way, though perfection will never be attainable (Thank Goodness:)).




Anonymom

More Inspiring quotes

Here are a few more inspiring (education-related) quotes from some of the great thinkers in history:


The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything--Edward J. Phelps


Statistics are no substitute for judgment--Henry Clay


No one knows what he can do till he tries. -Pubilius Syrus


I am still learning. -Michelangelo (his motto)


If someone tells you who they are, believe them.--Maya Angelou


The whole is more than the sum of its parts--Aristotle-Metaphysica


It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.--Aristotle


The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge. --Daniel Boorstin


The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.--Eric Berne


What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish writer


Never offer to teach a fish to swim--Proverb


Those who know how to think need no teachers.--Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) Preeminent leader of Indian nationalism


I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.--Socrates (BC 469-BC399) Greek philosopher of Athens



Anonymom:)

Neat Project

Here is a neat project that one of the kids built this week on his own. We were watching 'Building Big Bridges', a great film out of an original set of architecture videos hosted by David MacCaulay, and Keith decided that he would make a bridge of his own in his Grandfather's workshop out of junk:). He used wood, pins, ropes, nails, and pushpins, and when it was finished he tested the stability of it by pointing a large fan towards it and blasting the thing over a long period of time with ever increasingly high rates of speed. Neat, huh!?

This wonderful son of mine is one of those classic spatial learners who roam the halls of public schools everywhere that no one ever knows what to do with, LOL. He is brilliant when it comes to building things, dissecting the inner workings of machines, and deciphering how the world works in general, but he loathes anything having to do with reading, writing, textbooks, worksheets, or organized learning. When it comes to paperwork I have to be honest and say that he is just plain not interested. He is his own investigator and taskmaster, and it is fascinating to see how easily he puts things together, performs the necessary calculations in his head, and engages in advanced problem solving on a regular basis when there is no doubt whatever that a child like this would have been slapped into Special Ed. in a heartbeat in the public school. He is learning the skills that he will need to survive in the future, but since his main (natural) interests are spatial, everything will always take a back seat to them somehow. It shouldn't be surprising, because that is what talent really is when it comes down to it. We depend on individual strength to supply us with every innovation we have in society. Where would we be if no one could lead us out of mediocrity with an independent, novel solution? Where would we be if talent never surfaced at all because it was overlooked in the name of 'well-roundedness' in a stuffy classroom? Interesting things to think about, particularly when you have a 'lopsided' kid of your own:).

Anyhow, this is a fun example of a classic project out of classic "junk" materials in a basement. Who needs building sets when you've got a packrat for a Grandpa??:-)

Btw, the 'Building Big' Series is a wonderful set of films that unfortunately is not available in DVD right now:(. Since we were wearing out the titles in the library every month I decided to look on Amazon to see if I could find them there, and to my surprise I was able to get the complete set (in video, used of course), for $1.95-$2.99 each! Well, I nailed those suckers down one by one, and now we have the complete set sitting on our bookshelf for everyday use. The 5 titles in the series include:

Building Big--Skyscrapers

Building Big--Domes

Building Big--Bridges

Building Big--Tunnels

Building Big--Dams

Have a great weekend!

Anonymom:)

Freedom Vs. License

In our house we try to homeschool according to the principles of democratic schooling, or ‘free’ schooling. Many people are aware of what this means since the concept has grown widely lately, but just in case they don’t (and because explaining these things helps me to reinforce them for myself), I will explain them all here again:).
The idea of a free school operates on the principle that the school is a living community. As a community, it must be alert to issues that arise and address every problem ASAP in the context of the weekly all-school meeting. The purpose of this meeting as it exists is to solve problems, review upcoming events, and handle subjects related to school business as they arise. A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill in Scotland who died approx. 30 years ago, believed that these meetings were more important to the health of the children than academics or practically any other event that took place at his school. He said that during these get-togethers the children learned to respect each others’ opinions and emotions, bring problems out into the open so that they could be dealt with honestly, and most of all, explore issues that arose so that emotional healing could take place.
The other foundational concept of the free school that is even more important than weekly meetings is the idea of Freedom vs. License. A “free school” is NOT a place where children can cut loose with abandon and do anything anywhere to anyone or anything they please. It is not a place that is rabid chaos 24 hrs. a day either, but an idea that makes a very clear distinction between rules that apply to the individual and those that apply to a group. According to the democratic school view, INDIVIDUAL freedom is sacred. This means that what a child does not want to do he/she should never be forced to do so long as it does not impede on the rights or freedom of anyone else. For example: if Johnny decides that he does not want to learn math or make his bed or attend the party or play baseball, then no one has the right to make him because those decisions are INDIVIDUAL, and affect only him. In another example, if I do not want to eat broccoli with my dinner then it is my prerogative not to have any on my plate because the decision does not affect anyone else but me. The preference for certain foods is my own peculiarity and no one has the RIGHT to tell me to do otherwise.
Freedom regards the rights of the individual specifically. License is another thing, and not at all related to the idea of freedom. License means that in pursuit of your own freedom you tread unfeelingly on the rights or property of someone else. It means that instead of just doing something that is going to affect you individually, you take it upon yourself to do something that is going to negatively affect a group of persons or a single person, OR something inert such as the environment or private property. Deciding that you are not going to wear a blue shirt today is strictly a matter of personal freedom. Deciding to bully/beat up/or manipulate someone falls under the category of License, because you are then encroaching on the right of that person to live happily without fear.
In the town where I live in there are many upscale, boutique-like shops owned by people from NYC that are filled with breakable and expensive things. A huge complaint of many of these shopowners (even the owners of the toy shops), is that children often enter these places and wreak havoc as their parents look on unconcerned. They run around the store, swing on the walls and ceilings, break merchandise, throw tantrums, scream, and generally make holy terrors of themselves, and yet their parents make no attempt to curb their behavior (or just plain leave the store) because they believe that their children should get no restraint of any kind from anyone.
This type of a situation is NOT what freedom is—rather, it is a perfect definition of License. As A.S. Neill might have put it (and did say in several of his books), this is not a free child, it is a spoiled and desperate child. In Summerhill (and other democratic schools such as the Albany Free School, etc.), a child who behaves in a way that threatens or infringes on anyone else would be reported by the victim at the general meeting and a fitting punishment would be meted out by the members of the community in a general vote. New rules might be suggested and voted on as to how to prevent transgressions like this from happening in the future, but adults on the whole generally stay out of these discussions and let the children handle them, though everyone votes at the end and any rule is subject to change.
What is important to note here is that a free school is NOT devoid of rules—–far from it. The difference between this and more traditional models is that children have ownership of the process and participate actively in it at all times, bringing their own charges to bear and then acting to resolve them. People are often surprised to learn that free schools often have long lists of rules, it’s just that these rules are made with personal freedom and the welfare of a community in mind, and are directly controlled by the people who live there.
Essentially, a free child is a child without fear. She is not afraid of authority because she is not subjected to any but her own. She is not afraid of the opinions of others because she has learned to live according to her own opinion. She is not afraid of adults because adults have no more power than she does in her world. They are looked upon as equals first, and an occasional resource second. The argument of Neill, Holt, and others is that when children get respect they learn to give it, and when they have been allowed to live out their childhood impulses in play, natural conflict, messes, dirt, and the pursuit of their own unique interests, they eventually become mature, sociable, mannerly, empathetic, and most of all, independent learners. This is what education is all about, IMO. This is the true definition of what it means to be a well-adjusted, functional human being.
There is SO much more to learn about freedom and license, the concept of self-regulation, raising children without fear, and understanding what all of it means. It is a difficult concept to grasp because the vast majority of us were not raised with freedom—-we were raised with punishment, coercive learning techniques, and the use of guilt to manipulate our every action. As A.S. Neill or any of the people associated with the free school movement would say, we were raised in fear in an oppressive society by anti-social people, and that is a difficult thing to overcome:(.
I have tried to apply alot of the free school concepts to my school-at-home, here. I have found that there are modifications that have to be made due to the nature of a home and family vs. school, but I believe it can be done with quite a bit of success, and we have experienced loads of positive encouragement in the way that our kids have grown up so far. I will try to write more in the future about adapting democratic schooling to the home, raising self-regulated children, and trying to organize life around the complications of HSing in general, LOL. No one method of education is 100% perfect all the time, but there is never any doubt that things are moving forward steadily and there are lots of things to think about for the future. It’s the process, not the product that’s important. This is what we’re striving for.
Anonymom:)

Good Books and Beowulf

Today I took the kids to the library (actually 2 libraries), in search of some really great, well-written old books.
One of the books I was actively looking for was ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ by Phillipa Pearce. I remember reading this book when I was very young and absolutely loving it, but I had forgotten the title as I got older and only remembered it again when I saw it on a recommended booklist several weeks ago. There are no two ways about it. This book HAS to be read to my kids:).
I also had a really great discussion with an older librarian here about the recent trend in watered down, overly simplistic childrens’ books. This woman I was speaking to has always been a diehard advocate of quality books in libraries, and believes that the greater majority of what is now published for children is basically all-fluff and no substance, with too much emphasis on elaborate illustrations at the expense of the story itself. I have noticed this problem the last few years myself when we brought home new books for the kids to read. The pictures looked absolutely incredible on the shelf and the boys gravitated toward them instantly, but once we got home and read them they were almost always disappointed because the quality of the text was so poor, and they never got picked up again until they were brought back to the library and stuck down the chute.
I am thinking lately that this drop in book quality has something to do with societal trends. Children today have an attention span that is approximately 1/16th of what it was even a century ago due to the invention of television, video games, and other distractions. I imagine that publishers today are catering to short, thematically simple books in lieu of the longer, more detailed ones for obvious reasons. Picture books in particular have illustrations that either overwhelm the text or completely obliterate it lately, and the quality of stories in these books is so poor that it is a wonder they are able to turn a profit at all:(. Of course I don’t want to say that there is something wrong with illustrations because there absolutely isn’t. What I think I have a problem with is the replacement of content with pictures. In the era of ‘throw-away’ culture it seems that these books aren’t MEANT to last for generations or be meaningful—they are meant simply to grab the attention of an adult or child, get purchased ASAP, and then sit on the shelf gathering dust for the rest of their lives after that. Of course, there have been a few children’s books coming out that have been good quality recently. The Captain Underpants Series were positively hysterical IMO, and the kids have literally worn them out with repeated readings, re-readings, and knock down fits of gut-wrenching hysterics. Also, who can forget the inimitable Harry Potter Series (yet another series:-)), which has inspired MANY a formerly lackadaisical reader over the past few years? There are some great new contributions to children’s literature out there, but sadly they are few and far between compared with the sheer volume that is produced every year.
Anyhow, here is an old book that I took out tonight that I absolutely love. It is called ‘The Story of Beowulf’ by Strafford Riggs, and it was written as a retelling of the original epic in 1933. I have worn myself out trying to find this book online and in various bookstores, but from what I have been able to tell it is hopelessly out of date and next to impossible to locate. I guess I’ll just have to content myself with taking it out of the library whenever I get a hankering to read it to myself or the kids. Or just myself, LOL. Such is the way of the world.
Here is a picture of this wonderful book. (Clearly I am an UN-skilled photographer in addition to being unable to find rare books, but I’m sure you get the idea:)).

So in honor of old, quality books with few pictures but a wealth of words today, I have decided to end this post by quoting one of the very best parts of the Beowulf story, the last chapter where he dies a hero’s death after many great and heroic deeds ( but didn’t die tragically because he did what he had wanted to in life and left an inspiration that renewed the lives of everyone else).

“Now, at the last, Beowulf was laid upon the sweet-scented pyre, and all about him were heaped countless treasures from the dragon’s mound. Then Wiglaf approached with two flaming torches, to do the dead king honor. Proclaiming the greatness of his dear lord, he held high above his head the flares and plunged them into the pyre. The flames leaped up, staining crimson the dark night, and so great was the glare from the burning that the stars put out their light, and the sea stopped its sad mourning.
Higher and higher rose the flames and with them the lamentations of the people. And the noble earls took up again their sad marching about the burning pyre, and all night long they marched, until at long last there was nothing left of the pyre but a high mound of gray ashes in the gray dawn.
Thus passed to his own gods Beowulf, King of Geatsland, in the North.”

Best to all,
Anonymom:)

Why We Homeschool

There are days when there is no need to wonder why homeschooling is a good thing. Like days when the guys are doing this:). For those of you who are wondering, this is not about a swing. It is not about two brothers pushing each other up to catch their feet in the branches 20 feet above. It is about joy and perfect health and what it means to be alive. Most of all, it is about freedom.
There is a court case in CA that is currently making headlines regarding the right of families to homeschool. There are some mitigating circumstances that make this case less than ideal, but our country was built upon the democratic ideals of personal freedom, so we must ensure that this notion applies to education forever if we are to survive into the 21th century. My hopes go out to the people who face resistance to homeschooling in local school districts and states. It is important at all times for us to educate ourselves about our rights and keep a professional attitude 24/7 about what we do. Being informed is the best defense.
Good Luck to All!
Anonymom:)

Home Sweet Home (School)

Homeschooling as a method is incredibly versatile and is something that is nearly impossible to define when it comes to the purposes and goals of individual families. Anything and everything can fall under the homeschool umbrella. Methods, materials, resources, times, or places that any one person or family prefers will work well as long as they are suited to that family, and as long as a child has free choice of whether to use them. Today I have listed several of the materials and supplies that many homeschool families have in their homes. This is by no means an exhaustive list and notice that I have completely neglected to mention curriculums, workbooks, and lesson plans, only because they do not matter one iota in the greater scheme of things, and the main ingredients listed provide the firm foundation upon which everything else rests.
–# 1 Supply) One of the first components of any HS program (and most homes with one or more children in it) is SPACE. More than anything else, children need room to spread out, spend time, and play to their heart’s content. Contrary to popular belief, healthy children do NOT happily sit in one place with their hands folded in classrooms drinking up knowledge. They move around pounding the furniture, fiddling with toys, and making noise. Space can be defined as a general room where there is minimum furniture and maximum floor space, nooks and alcoves that are devoted exclusively to children with tables, chairs, and pillows, or simply an entire house where no one is forbidden to get dirty, make messes, or drag things around for whatever reason makes sense at the moment, at any time.
–#2 Supply) BOOKS. In my humble opinion, books are probably the most important items anyone can have in their house beside food and water. Books may mean the difference between education and ignorance in most subjects nowadays, and even if a child (particularly a boy) does not seem interested in them at first, the very fact that they are valued and integral parts of the household will speak volumes for the future days when a child becomes detail oriented and begins to require better information about various subjects. Along with books comes the mandate that parents read regularly to their children from Day 1 (of course), because this simple act alone develops vocabulary, imagination, attention span, listening and visual comprehension skills along with a whole host of other things (including general knowledge and even mathematics), so it is a valuable/important use of time. The value of reading cannot be overestimated in any education, and the majority of homeschoolers rely on the library and personal book collections to do the bulk of their teaching for them.
–#3 Supply) PAPER and WRITING TOOLS. Paper and writing utensils are almost as important in the homeschool setting as venerated reading materials. It doesn’t matter what type of paper it is or what kind of implement gets used (though markers and smooth mediums such as pastels, paints, etc. offer very little resistance on paper for young children and are very easy to use). Most children do NOT use paper for what we would expect or want them to use it for, btw ( meaning highly complex poems, stories, or math problems, LOL), but most use it for drawing pictures or making the occasional sentence or phrase to complement what they have created. Certain masterpieces may appear on the refrigerator as valued works of art, but most end up on a pile on the floor or on the table somewhere, finished and forgotten. Occasionally a kid will become an avid writer or artist while still young, but most homeschooled youngsters who have been allowed to follow their own inclinations do not become highly productive on their own or focus their energies to that extent in the beginning. I have noticed in kids that art and writing seem mainly to be a function of the moment with the sole purpose of supplementing the theme of play, and when those themes have been played out at a later age, the desire for communication in earnest takes over and the available materials get used in a more efficient way. A practical paper supply that we have found in our house consists of old computer sheets that are still serrated on the sides and that have to be torn apart piece by piece. The kids found this to be a bit of a pain (pulling it apart over and over again), but they soon realized that they could unfold several sheets at once and make long, complicated murals of fight scenes, space battles, and such. See? Necessity absolutely is the mother of invention:-).
–#4 Supply) BLOCKS and BUILDING SETS. Different types of blocks and building sets are imperative to have around the homeschool house, simply because they are such open-ended objects and offer so many possibilities for imaginative play. My crazy boys make towers, every type of structure known to man, weapons, living things, monsters, characters, shapes—- and I have seen girls use blocks in wonderful ways too, creating houses, villages, towns, and even shrines for imaginary creatures. There are umpteen building sets available in the educational universe today and unfortunately many of them are ridiculously expensive:(. The best and most basic toys we have found so far have been wooden blocks of various sizes (found at second-hand toystores and yard sales), legos and megablocks (found at yard sales, as hand-me-down toys, or set by set on holidays and special occasions), tinker toys (old sets we had when we were young and yard sales), and several assorted building sets that are not well known but were picked up in various spots like yard sales and given as Christmas gifts. It is wonderful to know that it is not even necessary to spend money on building materials when it comes right down to it if you can be creative. We have had some of our best fun with leftover pvc piping, scrap wood which was cut into small pieces and sanded down, and smooth branch logs which were cut into various thicknesses to build and stack with. Remember that one cheap toy that requires a person to come up with a novel solution is better than 100 expensive, battery operated building machines that serve no purpose other than to be built and passively observed.
–#5 Supply) The last ‘Home Ingredient’? ACTION FIGURES. Now, when I say ‘action figures’, I don’t necessarily mean the superheroes and movie characters that are standard issue Wal-mart fare (though there is nothing wrong with those if children like them), but the important figures to any child are dolls, characters, animals, monsters, and any other object allowing him/her to set up pretend scenarios of impersonation and elaborate character displays. In our house we keep buckets of knights with their horses, dragons, and a wizard or two, zillions of large and small stuffed animals (especially beloved by my cuddle-happy 8 yr. old), other figures of people—action or otherwise—and a collection of animals having to do with farm, ranch, wildlife, and zoo. In addition to action figures it must be said that there is an elaborate costume box stuffed to the rim upstairs that gets used on various occasions. Old halloween costumes, sheets, clothes, hats, scarves, and masks get stuffed into it on a regular basis, and all props are used for spur-of-the-moment games and in-depth theatre projects.
This is just an overview of the types of things that one normally finds in a homeschool or child-centered household (despite those that are added, taken away, or never used to begin with:)). Since it is next to impossible for anyone to ever anticipate the needs and interests of a child in these situations, it is best just to keep a well-stocked house with a myriad of resources available at all times should anyone need them or find them necessary to use as a stepping stone to more important things in the future. The environment in a Homeschool house is 80% of the child’s success, and while materials in a home are important, the attitude of the parents is paramount to dictating how and when those items will be used, and what, if anything, will be learned by them (in another post:)).
Catch you on the FS,
Anonymom:)

Perfect Quotes

One of my favorite things to do (when I am not working, teaching, cooking, gardening, shoveling, feeding farm animals, doing laundry, making beds, washing dishes, and cleaning) is to collect quotes. Since I was young I have always been fascinated by these tiny phrases, probably because they were almost always found in a historical context and written by “ancient” famous people. Reading through quotes on any subject always made me think that despite the ravages of time and the checkered history of the human race, there were certain truths that remain as valid today as they were when they were first spoken hundreds and thousands of years ago. In other words, we haven’t changed much despite the advancements and technological progress that we have made, and wisdom can still be found in dusty old volumes of ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations’.
An exceptionally good English teacher in high school years ago once told our class that ‘Times may change but people never will’. Of course, the things that this man taught ignored the curriculum entirely 9/10ths of the time, but they resulted in a deeper understanding of what was important in life, and I will always be grateful to him for that. The ‘Times’ quote was one of his most important pearls of wisdom.
I compiled a few nice quotes on education that I have collected over the years, and I am listing them below for fun. The most wonderful thing about these expressions is that they get to the heart of what education really means and it’s original purpose in expanding and fulfilling human potential. The most important skills we learn are those that have nothing to do with study habits, decoding, grammatical sentence structure, and arithmetic. We have been raised to believe that the key to success is the intimate knowledge of unrelated factual tidbits, but it remains true that a person could be highly educated without knowing any of these things, so the current definition of education needs to be revised.
What education really is and what the bureaucracies and governments want it to be are two different things. At this time we need to quit assuming that workbooks, tests, and repetitive drills can in any way replace the mental and spiritual nourishment of a young child, and create wisdom where none existed and conditions never fostered it to begin with. We are facing a future where wisdom, so heavily valued in the past, will be vitally necessary again in order to circumvent challenges that lie ahead. It has never been so important to raise kids with good heads on their shoulders, in other words. The time to get started is now.
- I am not young enough to know everything—J.M.Barrie
-I have never let my schooling interfere with my education—Mark Twain
-I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught—Sir Winston Churchill
-A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.—Bernard Iddings Bell Chaplain
-Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten—B.F. Skinner
-Valuable achievement can sprout from human society only when it is sufficiently loosened to make possible the free development of an individual’s abilities—Albert Einstein
-Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught—Oscar Wilde
-You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.—Galileo Galilei

Goodbye and Good Luck,
Anonymom:)

First Post

I decided to sit down and start a blog today because I have 3 children who are homeschooled and there are important things that need to be said about education nowadays. In a twist that may seem ironic, I not only homeschool my kids using liberal methods, but I am also a certified teacher who tutors kids in the local school district with disciplinary problems and chronic health issues. Years before I had children I taught 5th grade at a local public school, but at this point I tutor mainly high school and middle school kids, and am so busy most of the time that I have a regular, full-time schedule from student to student during the year.
Many people who know me have inquired as to why I work for an organization like the public school when I clearly embrace homeschooling in it’s most radical form in my ‘alter ego’. They would like to know why I participate in the ‘dumbing down’ of our kids in the nation’s federal education program when I am clearly against the indoctrination of children in almost any form, and their methods are so clearly the antithesis of everything I believe in. The answer to these questions are simple and complex at the same time and it will take months for me to answer them completely, but the most immediate reason is strictly practical. I am a stay-at-home mom the majority of the time whose husband does not make the kind of salary that enables me to throw caution to the wind and forget about gainful employment entirely, so I tutor because it helps me to earn money and map my schedule around my own kids’ needs. In addition to this, the children I work with (difficult as they are) are a wonderful inspiration to me and expose a side of education that is often pathologically hidden from those who practice the greatest and most time-honored sport in our society, fence jumping.
I have seen countless unusual situations in my 15 years of teaching in the classroom, in the homes of poor and disadvantaged children, and with my own, homeschooled children. Over the last couple of years interesting patterns have emerged among people I have worked with from rearing children to conform to public school expectations, to the reinforcement of behavior using fear and assorted cocktail medications, to the final subjugation of our kids following years of conditioning designed to fit them neatly into a society that they were groomed to join from the beginning.
I am not here to say that there is anything more totalitarian about this society than those that existed in the past, and I cannot claim that the knowledge we gain will do anything to protect us in the future. The fact remains, however, that while mankind has been at war with itself since the beginning of time, this is the very first moment that we have the ability to actually threaten the biological stability of the planet. We have been gleefully killing each other for centuries, but we have never yet been wholly capable of wiping out existence as we know it. Therefore, it seems eminently logical to find alternatives to doing things at this point, and to raise children who will not only break the bonds of ineptitude with original new solutions, but who will also have the courage to see those innovations through and follow them to their logical conclusions despite ridicule and opposition.
This blog is going to be covering countless issues relating to children, homeschooling, and general educational theory, but it will also be about the lighter side of raising and working with kids, because without the joy of discovery, learning, and growth in a free environment, the challenges that ‘educating differently’ present on a daily basis would hardly be worth the effort for most of us, and would certainly never benefit the children we love so dearly.
The fact is, experience in life forces us to realize that experts are few and far between if they exist at all, and the only way to educate children is to develop new ideas and place ourselves squarely in the path of that which we do not understand, until we understand it. We cannot ask children to undertake tasks that we are not willing to try ourselves, so if nothing I ever write here is of significance to anyone else, at least it is reinforcement for the road I have chosen and the means of pushing my own parameters in order to raise healthier children.
So, shall we begin? I look forward to blazing new paths and challenging conventional stereotypes whatever they may be. Anything and everything is possible on the subject of children.
Anonymom:)