20/20: Stupid in America
Published by Joanne on March 2, 2010Related posts
Posted under Thoughts on Schooling
Unschooling Interview
Published by Joanne on March 1, 2010A few months ago, a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism contacted me and asked if they could interview me about unschooling for research they were doing. Here are her questions, and my answers.
1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting?
For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning that truly means something to an individual. Learning has nothing to do with passing or failing, dividing the world up into subjects or taking a standardized test. That’s not learning.
Education is not telling students that it’s June 1 and today is the day you need to learn about dolphins. Also, when you’re done “learning”, you’re going to be tested to see if you can regurgitate all the facts back. And if you do, bingo!…you’ve learned!
For me, seeing the learning in everything and not dividing the world up into educational and not educational has been very helpful. In Guerrilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn she says;
“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again. School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”
2) And what are the unexpected benefits you find along the way?
For my children, one of the unexpected benefits is how they (especially my youngest) are starting to question things more. They’re interested in knowing things. They’re curious. They’re starting to see that learning is not something you do just to pass a test. For me, an unexpected benefit was how much I would change through this journey.
3) How has homeschooling helped your children blossom?
Unschooling is allowing them to be free and they’re blossoming in that freedom. They’re starting to become more sure of themselves, which isn’t hard to do when you’re not in school. There’s nobody telling them that they’re failures so their confidence in themselves is soaring. They are starting to see that life is not sectioned into educational and not educational and that they’re interests take them places that school could never dream of.
**originally posted in 2007**
Tags: Children, education, freedom, Grace Llewellyn, home education, home school families, homeschooling, learning, learning all the time, life, unschool, unschooling, unschooling encouragement, unschooling family, unschooling quotes, what is unschoolingRelated posts
Posted under Unschooling Thoughts
CNN Article On Homeschooling
Published by Joanne on February 19, 2010March 2, 2006:
Homeschooling grows quickly in United States
COLUMBIA, Maryland (Reuters)
Elizabeth and Teddy Dean are learning about the Italian scientist Galileo, so they troop into the kitchen, where their mother Lisa starts by reviewing some facts about the Renaissance. Elizabeth, 11, and Teddy, 8, have never gone to school.
Their teachers are primarily their parents, which puts them into what is believed to be the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. education system — the homeschool movement.
For their science lesson, Teddy and Elizabeth are joined by three other homeschooled children and their mother, who live down the street in their suburb midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Before the lesson starts, all five kids change into Renaissance costumes — long dresses and bonnets for the girls, tunics and swords for the boys. “We definitely have a lot more fun than kids who go to school,” Elizabeth said.
Nobody is quite sure exactly how many American children are being taught at home. The National Center for Education Statistics, in a 2003 survey, put the number that year at 1.1 million. The Home School Legal Defense Association, which represents some 80,000 member families, says the figure now is quite a bit higher — between 1.7 and 2.1 million.
But there is no disagreement about the explosive growth of the movement — 29 percent from 1999 to 2003 according to the NCES study, or 7 to 15 percent a year according to HSLDA.
This growth has spawned an estimated $750 million a year market supplying parents with teaching aids and lesson plans to fit every religious and political philosophy. Homeschooled children regularly show up in the finals of national spelling competitions, generating publicity for the movement.
Parents cite many reasons for deciding to opt out of formal education and teach their children at home. In the NCES study, 31 percent said they were concerned about drugs, safety or negative peer pressure in schools; 30 percent wanted to provide religious or moral instruction while 16 percent said they were dissatisfied with academic standards in their local schools.
“I wasn’t sold on the idea of institutionalized education. It’s a factory approach — one size fits all,” said Isabel Lyman, author of “The Homeschooling Revolution,” who taught both of her now-grown sons at home.
“The schools take all the joy out of learning. They don’t take account of a particular child’s interests, needs and development. The whole system is anti-child,” she said.
Regulation, instruction varyDifferent states take widely varying approaches to homeschooling. Some, like New York and Pennsylvania, require that the parents submit lesson plans four times a year and regularly test the children.
Others, like Texas, basically leave them alone. So there is little reliable data on how they are doing, said University of Colorado education professor Kevin Welner.
“There are popular myths that homeschooled children are socially inept, cloistered kids and that they are either illiterate or academic wunderkinds. Anecdotes aside, we simply don’t have the data to make such generalizations,” he said.
“Some children will get top-notch instruction. Others will get poor or minimal instruction. Obviously it will vary by parent,” he said.
Even the cliche that the majority of homeschooled children are evangelical Christians is outdated, if it was ever true.
The movement remains overwhelmingly white and middle class but it is growing fast among black and Hispanic families and becoming more politically and religiously diverse as well.
Some parents follow an educational philosophy known as “unschooling,” where the children are encouraged to follow their own interests rather than adhering to a fixed curriculum.
Laura Derrick, president of the National Home Education Network, has followed this philosophy with her 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. “My son learned to read before he was 3 and I realized then we were working better than any school program ever designed,” she said. “Children are born wanting to learn.”
Lisa Dean, who was a lawyer before she became a mother, said homeschooling her children was tremendously rewarding but also very exhausting. “It’s a long day with the kids. I look forward to when my husband comes home,” she said.
She also has backup from a local group of 70 homeschooling families who organize group field trips and extracurricular activities. Her children both take lessons in Celtic music on the fiddle, play soccer and basketball and have tried classes in art, hip-hop dancing and kick boxing.
Tags: Children, education, home education, homeschooling, joy, learning, music, parents, science, unschool, unschoolingRelated posts
Posted under Unschooling in the Media
Homemade Tattoo Paint
Published by Joanne on February 15, 2010*originally posted 6/07*
We bought a really fun book that my eight year old found during one of our (many) visits to the library book store (my favorite place to buy and donate pre-loved books) called The Ultimate Book of Kids Concoctions.
The first thing she wanted to make was tattoo paint (page 23).
Here’s how to do it:
1 TBS Cold Cream
2 TBS Cornstarch
1 TBS Water
Food Coloring
Mix cold cream and cornstarch together in a small bowl. Stir in water and mix until smooth.
Divide into 3-4 small bowls.
Mix 3-4 drops of food coloring into each.
Apply with a small brush.
Remove with soap and water
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Taking Children Seriously
Published by Joanne on February 14, 2010THE DAILY GROOVE ~ by Scott Noelle
:: Taking Children Seriously ::
We live in a society that doesn’t take children seriously. Sure, we care deeply about children’s welfare; we do our best to help them to grow into healthy, successful adults.
But we, as a society, rarely take children seriously the way they take *themselves* seriously. To children, *play* is serious business — channeling enormous creative energies and making huge discoveries. But to adult society, it’s “just” play, so interrupting or limiting it is not a big deal.
To children, *feelings* are extremely important, not “just” feelings.
If you want to take your child more seriously, don’t do it the conventional adult way, which is to assign *weight* to the child’s concerns. That only teaches heaviness.
Children take *lightness* seriously. And when you take their lightness seriously, *you* benefit by learning to take yourself *less* seriously! 
http://dailygroove.net/seriously Feel free to forward this message to your friends!
(Please include this paragraph and everything above.)
Copyright (c) 2007 by Scott Noelle
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Posted under Mindful Parenting