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

Dave, this one is for you...

I've been reading the blog of my Washingtonian friends, Dave and JJV, and have been struck by just how many references the lowly rutabaga has garnered in this blog of sophisticated political commentary. So, Dave, I thought you might be interested in this event, as reported by the Ithaca Journal. Apparently, playing with rutabagas has a long and glorious history in these here parts of upstate New York. As you so aptly noted in one of your comments, there is not a whole lot to do up here. You should know, oh man from Lyons. Perhaps Bryan has a future here.

Christians Beware! You are being conspired against!

Gotta love the comments expressed at the end of this article in the Ithaca Journal.

My number 1 worry at this time of the year is being greeted with Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Jayzus. Don't these right wing nut jobs have anything better to do than make up delusional conspiracies against Christians? The poor Christians. Isn't being able to go to any country and declare war and remove leaders and kill thousands of innocent civilians in the name of Jesus good enough for them? I love the reference to the left wing media. The Ithaca Journal is such a poor excuse for journalism that I don't think they could put together a consistent bias if they tried - they're too busy trying to figure out how to use the spell checker.

What the Hell is this Blog About?

I was talking to friends today at the skating rink and told them I had worked all weekend on making a blog. After explaining what a blog was, C. asked me what my blog was about. Good damn question. I don't know the answer - but I think I better develop an answer or this will be the most boring blog in the universe. I've had some ideas - concentrate on detailing the life of unschoolers (but what if the ICSD bureaucrats get a hold of it - my reports will be shown to be the exercise in creative writing that they are). I could write down the political rants that I bore my children with almost every day. I could take pictures of my knitting projects, but everyone does that! I could just post pictures of my gorgeous children.

The tricky thing about blogs is that they are public - although the chances of someone winding up on my blog are miniscule, it is theoretically possible. So one has to censor oneself. I really should cut down on my swearing, as my children read it. As if they don't hear enough foulness coming out of me when I'm driving.

Well, I'll ponder this question a while longer.

Being Productive for a Change!

Yesterday was a most productive day - I got to cross a lot of things off my holiday to-do list. I had a problem keeping track of my list though - I lost it at least 3 times. I spent the most time and energy on our holiday letter. I've never written one before. I got this brilliant idea to make it look like the thing that I've been slightly obsessed over the past few days - a blog! Very smart, no? I'm going to try and take a picture of it and put it here. OK I'm going to do that now. Well, that didn't work. I was going to rant about how much I hate my new camera (Olympus Stylus 710) but then I tried my old camera (Olympus C4040) and it didn't work either. So I'll get to that rant some other time. Now that I've made the letter I actually have to send it out, which means looking up addresses and buying stamps and making return address labels with a Christmas theme and figuring out who should get the letter and who should just get a card and who gets the holiday cards and who gets the Christmas cards. No wonder I passed on this whole activity for the past two years. Unfortunately, I do enjoy receiving cards and I'm learning this year that if you do not send out cards you do not get cards. I did other things too, like make some phone calls, tie up some loose present ends, get the presents for church, etc etc. I felt so good about being productive that I thought I would try to do it two days in a row - but alas, I pretty much failed. Today was definitely a low energy day.

UPDATE (12/15): In the middle of the night I got this brilliant flash of how I could get my holiday letter onto the blog. I scanned it and uploaded it as a jpeg. Now that I write about it, somehow it doesn't seem so brilliant anymore. Just stunningly obvious.

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Widgets?

Last night while I tried to sleep I was plagued by thoughts of widgets. What are they? Do I need them on my blog? I think a week or so ago I heard a show on NPR about some woman who had got an award for her widgets. Or maybe it was an article in the NYT. At any rate, I heard (or possibly read) the whole piece and still didn't know what a widget was in the end. And then yesterday, as I'm looking through various Blogs for Dummies type sites trying to figure out how to do pictures (get them, put them where I want them, make them the right size - really none of which I was able to figure out), I saw more about widgets. And I still don't know what the little f'ers are.

I thought this was supposed to be easy!

Oh my god, I'm thinking I'm gonna stick a picture of good old Forest Home up in the title of my blog, and I have just spent the last half hour trying to figure out how to do it, and I think I have to do something drastic to my template. I thought this was a wysiwyg editor - whatta I look like, a genius? You're just going to have to enjoy my blog sin fotos for now!

I'm back and ready to blog!

I started blogging last winter and I think perhaps my first blog was started the winter before that. Something about the onset of winter here in upstate New York that makes you want to huddle around that warm glowing monitor. Previous blogs lasted a few weeks and died out, generally due to my inability to keep at anything for any real period of time. This time I've been guilted into again trying to blog - this time by my children. If they can blog, so can I! J. the elder has been blogging for about a year now and E. just started his blog. They are advanced and skilled - they know how to move things around and add videos and audio and such. I'll get there! I'm sponsoring/facilitating a teen writing club at our homeschool organization this winter (Northern Light Learning Center). I'm hoping the kids will want to write and publish in the variety of ways that are available to them now - blogging, podcasting, making videos and uploading them to a video hosting site or to their own blogs. So I'm thinking I better get on the ball so I don't have a blank stupid look on my face if they ask for help. (Fat chance, they are all so ahead of me in this game it's not even possible to catch up!)