Back on the bike

Well, yesterday I finally did it.  Got my rapidly expanding backside back in the bike seat and pushed off to explore the hills and dales of my new home in Newfield.  Mostly hills.  Really big, long, nasty hills.  After waking my bike computer (which has been "sleeping" for many months"), I realized that I have ridden almost 1700 miles on this bike in about three years.  Which doesn't seem like a lot for real athletes, but for slugs like me, it is quite an accomplishment.  Most of those 1700 miles were ridden with my now ex partner.  I know that not getting back on the bike sooner than now is due in some part to my inherent laziness, but mostly due to the trauma of riding without her; the inevitable memory scrolling, the pain of no longer being with someone that I once deeply loved.  But, I love riding too much to give it up, so yesterday's ride, was hopefully a rebirth of some kind, a throwing off of the gloom and sadness of the last few months, and a turn towards better things.

Temple Grandin at Cornell

I just returned from a lecture by Temple Grandin at Bailey Hall at Cornell. I've read several of her books and was really happy to get an opportunity to see her speak. Her subject was "On Autism", basically a primer on how the autistic mind works, and sometimes doesn't work, and how to intervene with autistic children in order that they have meaningful lives. Her basic metaphor was the brain as large office building, with the frontal cortex as CEO and then lots of different departments lodged in the different parts of the brain. Temple says her brain has tons of high-speed internet connections to a few departments, say graphic design, and one very slow, antiquated dial up connection to the human resources department. And recognizing that autistic brains tend to be very good at one limited area, parents and teachers need to steer children into careers and lifestyles that are consistent with what they are good at. She mentioned the importance of mentors and real life experience in those areas that a person is good at and enjoys. And she mentions her concern that with the overweening importance of testing and degrees, that many very intelligent, capable autistic people are being shut out of the careers they are suited to and shunted into meaningless jobs and unhappy existences.

She said all of this in the context of the school system, but it is easy to see that homeschooling, with its flexibility, ability to individualize a child's education and lack of worship for standardized tests can be a good option for the parent of a autistic child. When I withdrew my son from school after kindergarten, I always said it was so I could tailor his education to his abilities and not to his disabilities, which was the only thing that the school was interested in. Of course, homeschooling parents of autistic children are wise to partake of the services of professionals in the area of speech, occupational and other therapies. Also, Temple is a high functioning person with Asperger's, and not a severely disabled autistic person, who require much higher levels of intervention.

One thing that surprised me about Temple was her very sharp sense of humor - she had the audience cracking up at several points. I hadn't thought people with autism to be capable of the subtleties of humor. However, I don't know if she retains a sense of humor on the fly, or whether it is very much rehearsed and polished for lectures. But it certainly was a way for the audience to feel closer to her than I thought would be the case.

Homeschooling Article in the Ithaca Times

I was interviewed last week by a fairly disgruntled-sounding reporter for the Ithaca Times about homeschooling, (click post title for link to article) and more specifically, the Northern Light Learning Center. I guess I received the honor of being interviewed because mine is one of the only names and numbers on the website - I'm not out there lobbying to be the poster-family of homeschooling. At any rate, maybe one of the reasons the reporter is disgruntled is because she is in a career she is so completely unsuited for. I don't think I've ever read a worse sentence than the one in which I'm introduced! And I quote:

Among the largest members of organized groups of home-based educators are families who participate in the Northern Lights Learning Center. About 70 families are enrolled in the group, formed about 18 months ago, which rents space at the former Henry St. John's School Building at Court and Geneva Streets in downtown Ithaca to offer workshops and classes, as well as using the gymnasium at designated times for team sports and other activities. "If you were in a schooling environment, you'd see us as an extracurricular group," says Robin Tuttle, a member of the cooperative who currently teaches a writing class for teens. Tuttle homeschools her three children, sons ages 10-14"


I was out to dinner last night with my buds, Della and Monica, also homeschooling moms, and we were all a little put out by the end of the article which makes it sound like homeschooling is the province of only traditional middle class families with one parent at home and one parent working a traditional job. We know many families that look quite different: both parents working from home, both parents working out of the home but with staggered times so they can both spend time with the kids, single parent families, parents that look for flexible, creative income-making situations so they are not tied down to a traditional job or lifestyle. Some of the jobs held by homeschooling parents in our circle are artists, carpenters, writers, musicians, alternative health practitioners, potters, organic farmers, home-birth midwives, house cleaners, day care providers, house painters. It has been real eye opening for me to realize that the path to success is not necessarily paved with college degrees and the traditional professions.

Picture Caption: Tapping a maple tree at Sugarbush Project; a collaboration between the Cayuga Nature Center and the Northern Light Learning Center.

Ritalin? Perhaps an option I should not have overlooked!

I'm going to attempt to be really high tech and upload the video Eli took recently with my Olympus Stylus 710. Video quality is not great, but you can't beat this teeny tiny camera for portability. A kid could shoot video even while getting ready for soccer practice! I want you to realize that because Eli and Jake collectively play for 4 teams, have 4 games and 5 practices a week - this scenario plays out in this house far too often - and I really, really want you all to note how calm, cool and collected I am.

Homeschooling - Controversial?

I'm not really talking about all the religious homeschoolers who tend to practice what we call "school at home" - little desks lined up in a room of the house called a schoolroom, taking attendance, using textbooks and prepackaged curriculum, grades and testing, mom is teacher , dad is principal with ultimate authority. My experience is the opposite aparently of JJV - the media love these kinds of homeschoolers - very non-controversial, except for their propensity to use scientific texts without the benefit of the discussion of evolution, sexuality and all those topics that religious folks don't like to talk about These "homeschools" turn out basically the same product as the public schools.

What I'm talking about is unschooling, which is very controversial, being assailed by all kinds of people, from the media (check out Dr. Phil's recent show on the subject), a big series in some midwestern newspaper, maybe the Plain Dealer, I can't really remember, education experts (the Columbia professor in the recent NYT article), legislators, PTA zealots, as well as teacher's unions, professional educational bureacrats, etc. There is no doubt this kind of homeschooling is controversial - and that is because it is so far out of the box that people are used to education being packaged in.

And, btw, the religious right folks at HSLDA would like to have you believe that homeschooling is their baby alone, but the people that I credit with the concept that I'm practicing are folks writing the in the 60's and 70's like John Holt, A. S. Neill, Patrick Farenga, Ivan Ilich, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Mark and Helen Hegener, and people thinking about the ideas of free/alternative schools. Religious homeschooling actually started well after the original movement when the tax laws caused many small Christian schools to close. It is true that religious people had a lot to do with legislation making homeschooling legal, but they certainly weren't the only ones, and they tend toward overregulation which I disagree with.

I don't know what the numbers are for unschoolers - no one does, these people often don't report to the government on principal, and states don't keep track of the different kinds of homeschooling happening.

I have also tended to notice in the national media that in cases of child abuse, or a child committing crimes - if that family/child was homeschooled this fact is featured prominently. And in the majority of such cases, where they weren't homeschooled, the fact that they are public schools students is not mentioned or at least not mentioned as a reason why abuse /crime occurs.

Homeschooling Success File

I know that usually the only time you see mention of homeschooling in the mainstream media (those government school punks!) is when Ma and Pa H. Billy beat their kids and keep them in cages and feed them dog food, and guess what - they homeschool those poor kids. OMG, we need more governmental oversight into our lives - you just can't trust parents to take care of their kids like the government can! Whoops, I slipped into a rant.

This was actually supposed to be a positive post on a true homeschooling success. Of course, had young Justin been an axe murderer, the fact that he was a homeschooler would have been right there in the headline, but since it is a positive story about him, the fact that he was homeschooled is buried down in the middle of the story.

Out of rant mode now - here we have a 25 year old man who is practically a master shipbuilder - check out this quote from the story:

Home-schooled by his parents, Bob Armstrong and Betty Singer, Justin said his less-structured schedule as a young man allowed him the freedom to pursue his passion for building.

“I don't learn well from books,” he said. “If I get interested, I'll think about it and start figuring stuff out.”

His father describes Justin as a quiet young fellow who would spend hours working on projects as a boy.

“When he was 6 years old, he'd work on a project for 10 hours a day. Those practical projects were a vehicle for his learning,” Bob Armstrong said. “(He and his older brother Jeremy) had a can-do attitude. When I saw where they wanted to go, I tried to give them the tools and opportunities.”

I love it -- he doesn't learn well from books, he learns from actually doing. Well, guess what? We all learn better from doing than we do from reading about doing - but who gets a chance to do anything when we're young and our brains are just bursting with possibility? We're too busy plowing through the crap they make us do in school. Is Justin really good at something he is not interested in? No. He followed his passion and became really good at something he is really interested in. The world might be a very different place if more people were allowed to follow their interests when young.

I can hear the unschooling critics now: Well, sure he can build boats, but can he do long division in the [insert the name of whatever math "method" is currently in vogue] way? Does he know the capital of South Dakota? Did he go to the prom?

Well, for me, reading stories like this really encourages me in what we are doing with our kids. Sometimes that is difficult in the face of negative media coverage and negative feedback from general society about stepping outside the norm.

This is just a first post about unschooling - hopefully in the future I'll have time to explore more in depth the philosophy and realities of unschooling.

Holiday Madness

OK, generally speaking, I'm glad that the forces to be in the universe came together to give me three very beautiful boys. I'm not sure I would have known what to do with girls, being a tomboy from way back. I'm better with basketballs than I am with braids, I'm better with knock down drag out methods of solving disputes than I am with mind games, I'm better with sweat pants and t-shirts than I am with high fashion. Even so... It is at times like this, in the week before Christmas, when my normally very high energy boys kick it up into unimaginable levels of activity and frenzy and testerone fueled excitement, that I can see the advantage of girls. Maybe it's just a matter of the grass always being greener, but I can imagine a house full of girls helping me to clean up for the incoming relatives, rather than vandalizing my vacuum cleaner in order to use the attachments as weapons. I can see girls putting their energy towards baking cookies and designing and coloring homemade placemats for the big Christmas meal, rather than what my boys are doing right now, which is throwing all their clothes out of their drawers in a manic search for black everything for their ninja costumes so they can run around outside in the dark screaming and beating each other with the aforementioned vacuum parts. I know other mothers with all boys and with the exception of my mother-in-law, Ma Gelber, who had 9 sons, we all have that slightly panicked look in our eye that tells you we realize there is not even the illusion of control in our lives anymore. It's true what all those old ladies in the supermarket said to me when I had three boys under the age of 4 falling in and out of my grocery cart - I am a saint!

Picture Caption: A Christmas Day's Walk