Top Five Things We Have Learned This Year: #3

The Magic School Bus appeals to the kid in us all...

From winter 08 09

Especially when it takes you on a Virtual Field Trip.

From winter 08 09

Top Five Things We Have Learned This Year: #4

Chickens are fun, and not scary.

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

Top Five Things We Have Learned This Year: #5

Oregon ROCKS!

From Oregon for blog

From Oregon for blog

From Oregon for blog

From Oregon for blog

From Oregon for blog

Campfire

We have had, since the first week of June, exactly two days without rain. It is getting a little old, to say the least. So today, we decided to bring a little summer cheer inside:

From summer 09

From summer 09

Here it is - our indoor campfire! Made from wooden utensils, an orange silk, and my favorite little touch, Luke's rock collection to complete the fire pit. Owen placed pillows around the edge for the three of us, and then we got down to the real business that takes place around the campfire...

From summer 09

S'mores.

From summer 09

It is amazing how a mix of graham crackers, chocolate, and melty marshmallows can make the rain retreat, at least a little.

No campfire is complete without spooky stories:

From summer 09

I was treated to two of the best; Owen told a spooky story he called Henry and the Vampire Goblins, and then Luke's was a scary one about a basilisk who gets strangled by a sea monster.

And a good time was had by all!

What Happens When You Plan Haircuts After a Park Day?

You end up with one kid thinking of himself as Spock:

From Spring 09

And the other with a Mohawk!

From Spring 09

Lots of Star Trek play, and other kids with Mohawks, at park day yesterday I guess.

And, how do you say no to your five-year-old who wants a Mohawk? I decided that I couldn't do it, because if you cannot choose your hairstyle when you are five, it's going to come back to bite your parents when you are sixteen.

In the Chicken Palace

From Spring 09

Well, there it is! Truly armor-plated, sprouting locks from every possible vantage, it is a feat of Ben-gineering.

Want to see some pics of the girls?

From Spring 09

This is Saphira, always ready for her close-up.

From Spring 09

And here, on the left, we have Duchess (because of the golden ruff around her neck), Andy in the front center (yes, Owen named her after the boy from Toy Story), Hermione in the back, and Pippi, the leader of the pack, on the right.

From Spring 09

I just love the perch that Ben made them, and they do too:

From Spring 09

Not only does it provide them a place to sleep and hang in their cozy hen-house, when the windows are open (which is most of the time) they have a great view of the world.

From Spring 09

Tomorrow, once they have had four days to learn that the hen-house is their 'real' home, and they head back there each night, we can let them out into the bigger coop area. Judging by their attempts to jump out of the hen-house when we open the big door to give them food and water, they are really excited to explore their new home!

Au Contraire, Mon Frere

I ask you, how are these two children from the same parents?

From Spring 09

Owen, in all red with his red ball cap backwards. Luke, in blue, with his blue ball cap facing front. Continuing with clothing for a moment, we can share exactly none of Luke's old pants or shorts with Owen, because Luke wears only sweatpants or cotton shorts - and Owen only wears jeans. I save the jeans he grows out of and use them as cutoffs for the following summer because he'd rather go naked than put on a pair of cotton shorts.

Owen would be a fruitarian if only we gave him half a chance (as long as 'fruitarian' includes all his favorite vegetables). Luke's food group of choice? ...carbohydrates, especially of the cracker/bread/bagel/pasta variety.

Owen = Tigger:

From Fall Blog

Luke = Eeyore, minus the angst:

From The Stone Age Techie

And finally, exhibit E, All-Consuming Passions:

From Spring 09

From The Stone Age Techie

Luke's are dinosaurs, science of pretty well any kind, and reading - although in the year since this picture was taken, the books have evolved into chapter books, especially those that are about dragons, heroes, or quests.

For Owen, life is all about playing a part:

From Summer 2008

From winter 08 09

From The Stone Age Techie

Thank goodness they are good to each other (most of the time, anyway), coming as they do from totally different attitudes, choices, completely different spheres of the brain.

From Oregon for blog

Field Guide to Homeschoolers: 180th Carnival of Homeschooling

Whatever you are doing right now, you must drop it and visit this carnival. It is awesome!

From Crackbook

Best quote: Should you come across a homeschooler in the wild, DO NOT APPROACH WITH CAUTION. Such cautiousness can easily be misinterpreted and you may find yourself the subject of a blog post. Remain calm, strike up a conversation like you would with any other stranger you meet in an elevator and indulge your curiosity.

There are few things homeschoolers enjoy more than telling you how much they love homeschooling.

Here are some of the posts I had the chance to check out today (I'll go back after the darlings are in bed - they are home, prompting me to wonder, what Mommy Break?): Jennifer at Life is Not a Cereal talks about why her homeschoolers sometimes want to go to school, and Shauna at Treasure Seekers is heading outside, and gives some great suggestions for outdoor play. Also, my Interview with Daniel Wolff is there, under "Homeschoolers are inherently inquisitive."

These are just a few of dozens of posts in this carnival, and they are organized in such a clever way that browsing is really a pleasure. Seriously, whatever you were doing, drop it and go read!

Mommy Break

From Spring 09

Luke and Owen are off visiting their Grandma for the week. That picture up there is of their napkin rings; Ben put them up on the windowsill, so that they could keep a lookout for when their owners come home. Think maybe he is missing the kids, just a little? I know I am... while I appreciate the quiet, and the chance to think entire thoughts without interruption, I definitely miss the boys.

That said, I've had more time to peruse the blogosphere, during daylight hours at least, than I ever have before! It is fun, and I thought I would share some of what I've been reading.

First, Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and the great blog that goes with it, has this great post up about kids, books, and the lead law. Try not to shake your fist too hard at the stupidity of this law while you read...

Then, by way of Principled Discovery, one of my new favorite blogs, comes this: an arrogant, I'm guessing fairly young, teacher opening up a can o' whup-ass on homeschoolers! Even I, with all my copious current spare time, could not read all 625 comments, in which he is lambasted thoroughly by probably more homeschoolers than he even thought knew how to read, or access the internet.

I did, however, read this Dude's next post, Homeschoolers: Do They Care Too Much?, along with most of the 142 comments - I even threw in a few myself, because it was either that or my head might explode from the sheer arrogance and ignorance of this blogger. I must caution you: if you read these, make sure that you've already been to the bathroom or you might just have an accident from laughing too hard! We homeschoolers can be pretty darned funny while we're putting pompous ignoramouses in their place.

And now, on to more positive posts! This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Why Homeschool, with lots of great posts to read. Some of my favorites: if you enjoyed The Princess Bride, you'll love Home Spun Juggling's take on the Fire Swamp (note: scroll down, for some reason the post itself isn't hypertexting). Also, Homeschool Bytes has a review of a fun, free math game that my guys love in Timez Attack!. Finally, some food for thought - my friend Susan writes about rethinking higher education here.

Over at Topsy-Techie, volunteering is happening this summer; read about it in this funny, inspiring post. And finally, Susan of In The Kitchen is waxing philosophical about Thomas Jefferson's desk. I'm still trying to figure out how she's even finding time to post as they continue on their away-from-the-kitchen adventure!

So, get yourself a frosty beverage - or, a cup of tea - and settle in to enjoy these. I'm off to read some more, or maybe I'll go talk to the chickens for a while... when are the kids coming home again?

Interview with Daniel Wolff, Author of How Lincoln Learned to Read

A few weeks back, I fell in love with How Lincoln Learned to Read, which tells the story of America and American education, from the time of Ben Franklin on up to modernity, by diving into the young lives of twelve well-known people. It is a fascinating read, well-written and with a great story to tell (to read my rave review, go here - and, to read Daniel Wolff's blog about the book at Amazon, go here, where he shares about some of the talks and readings he's done since How Lincoln Learned to Read was published in March. I loved the perspective it gives from people around the country who've read the book).

Anyway, Mr. Wolff agreed to an interview with me, and I'm happy to be able to present it here today. I think his take on education is conducive to homeschooling; in fact, many of the Americans he writes about were homeschooled themselves, and their educations helped shape them into the influential people they eventually became. The book poses questions about what education is for, and how people learn what they need to know. Here's the interview:

Stone Age Techie: 1. While I have not yet read them, this book seems like a departure from the books you've written before; how did this idea occur to you, and how did you develop the idea into How Lincoln Learned to Read?

Daniel Wolff: It was a less an idea than feeling. You know that sensation when your kid – of, for that matter, when you – went off for the first day of kindergarten? Both the excitement of facing a new world and the sinking sensation of entering a large and largely faceless institution. I think that was the start of How Lincoln Learned to Read: all the questions that follow from that moment.

One of the main ones that I’ve always had is: what’s this for? Why do we take our children to one part of town and put them in those buildings with the playgrounds out back? What are we trying to accomplish?

In my experience, these are hard questions just to ask, never mind answer. Before my kids entered public school, and for about a decade afterwards, I was involved in a group of people who tried to discuss what education was for and how we might make it better. We called ourselves Partners in Education and created a little stir in our hometown and, to some degree, nationally.

We were parents and guardians, teachers and community members, from various races and economic groups. We discovered, early on, that to ask what education is for is to ask for trouble. Our “opponents” (and it soon became that polarized) saw our actions as the equivalent of disrespecting the flag. Or questioning the military draft. Parents were supposed to support public education, not ask what it was about. People were entitled to differences of opinion, of course, about testing and merit pay and playground safety, but asking how our children might learn to think was crossing the line.

Looking back, I’m not sure we ever really got the question out in the open. I’m lucky enough to live in a town where the schools are multi-racial: by high school, about 60% of the students are labeled “white” and 40% “other:” African American, Haitian American, Hispanic, Asian. Almost immediately, our discussion turned to whether or not “minority” kids were getting as good an education as “white majority” students. As I discuss in How Lincoln Learned to Read, one of the central beliefs behind American public education is that it gives everyone an equal chance. That it’s based on merit, not skin color or money. But we kept finding that the schools mostly ranked kids like they’d already been ranked in society. White kids from educated, better-off families tended to be in the honors programs; black kids from less well-off families tended to be in the “slow” groups or in special ed. There were exceptions, of course, but that was the pattern. And the longer kids were in the system, the stronger those divisions became.

So, instead of getting to ask why our kids went to those buildings with the playgrounds, we ended up spending our time asking if all kids were getting an equal chance once they entered. It was hard and fascinating and well worth it. But in a sense, it wasn’t what we’d set out to do.

So when our coalition finally ceased to be, I still had these issues I wanted to deal with. And I thought I might be able to write about them.

Oh, and I’m not sure how much this book is a departure. I wanted to understand how Sam Cooke learned from gospel music how to make great soul music, so I wrote his biography. It’s about learning (and a bunch of other things). And the story of American democracy that is one of the narratives through How Lincoln Learned to Read is central to the history of Asbury Park I wrote. I hope there’s a thread through all my stuff about where we’re headed and why. And about people who don’t normally get a voice having a chance to speak out.

SAT: I love your discussion of Partners in Education - "People were entitled to differences of opinion, of course, about testing and merit pay and playground safety, but asking how our children might learn to think was crossing the line."... this is something that many homeschoolers care deeply about, and I think part of why we are seen by our non-homeschooling neighbors as eccentric, even radical. I can see them thinking sometimes, 'don't we send them to school so we don't have to think about education?'

Also, I can see that I am going to have to read your other books, it was very presumptious of me to dismiss them as not about education, just by their titles :-)

SAT: 2. As you researched and wrote How Lincoln Learned to Read, did any of your subjects especially appeal to you? Did you identify with any of them more than the others, and, if so, why?

DW: Once I set out to deal with education and learning, I was determined to avoid the “education debate” that, it seems to me, circles and circles itself. If you go back, you can find people a hundred years ago arguing about how best to test students, teach reading, maintain classroom discipline. I didn’t want to get drawn into that whirlpool; I wanted to talk about how and why people learned. It seemed to me that the best way to do that was to side-step theory and “ask” the people themselves.

I thought I’d start before this was a nation and bring us up to the present – both to see how our thinking abut learning had changed and to trace how we got to this point. So I started looking for people who seemed to stand out as American types: folks we might or might not admire but who seemed key to our idea of ourselves as a people and a nation.

I began with Benjamin Franklin whose autobiography is about what he called his “self-education.” Then I jumped a couple of decades and chose Abigail Adams. And I went on like that right through American history! I didn’t necessarily “like” all they people I chose, but they all seemed important to the story. Through their own writings or talks, they’d each commented on how they learned the things they needed to know.

So I got to ask this question about learning sequentially, from Franklin through Elvis Presley. And it ended up producing a kind of narrative about the country: how we arrived at this point, what our goals have been, what factors came in and out of play as we kept adjusting the idea of getting a “good education.”

Did I identify more with one or another? I don’t think so. I identified with them all. I was amazed and impressed by how hard people work to learn – inside and outside the classroom.

SAT: 3. I love How Lincoln Learned to Read for both its history and the important questions it poses for individual people and our society as a whole. I wonder, what sort of feedback are you getting about the book, and also, is there any way to tell who's reading it? (College students, President Obama, parents of school-aged children...)

DW: Well, I was lucky enough to get an endorsement from Arne Duncan, current Secretary of Education. So I assume How Lincoln Learned to Read is way up on President Obama’s reading list! I’ll let you know when I get his review. But I also received kind words from Deborah Meier, one of the leaders of the alternative school movement. I’ve heard from teachers and parents, students and “general readers.” And I’ve heard a lot from home-schoolers or un-schoolers.

I think what that indicates is that the book doesn’t have a particular ax to grind. I certainly tried to research as thoroughly as I could and to report accurately how folks learned – whether it was at home or in school, from books or machines, with help from teachers or alone. And readers of all kinds seem to have responded to that. I’ve been very pleased with the conversations I’ve had at readings and other events and hope folks will feel free not only to contact me but to push the conversation forward among friends and colleagues.

Part of what I hope to do with How Lincoln Learned to Read is simply to broaden the questions we ask about learning. To acknowledge that some people learn best in the backyard with a tin can and an irrigation ditch, and some people learn best with a text book and a clock ticking. I think we all know that; we just don’t say it very often.

And if we can say it more often and more clearly, I think it might take some of the pressure off of teachers, schools, parents, and kids. The way we talk about learning now, if your child does badly on the 4th grade reading test … well, it’s curtains. He or she is a failure, is in trouble. There’s this enormous pressure on teachers and schools to educate everyone along strict standards, leave no child behind, and, so, solve the problems of the world.

I hope How Lincoln Learned to Read suggests that’s too simplistic. Just as we keep learning as long as we’re alive, we keep finding other ways to learn and situations to learn in. Shouldn’t they all be respected? The guy who fixes my car knows a lot more about that that I do. He learned some of it formally, a lot of it on the job. He has an amazing bank of knowledge he relies on – and I, in turn, rely on him. Did he do well on his SAT’s? I don’t know or particularly care.

SAT: 4. We pulled our son out of second grade and began homeschooling him because not only was he not learning what he needed to know, he was being taught to mistrust his own instincts, which destroyed any confidence he'd once had in his ability to learn. Homeschooling has restored his confidence and his joy in learning, because he decides what it's important to learn about. Do you think that your book could influence the course of our nation's education system, perhaps making it easier for schoolchildren to learn what they need to know in school?

DW: The destruction of confidence often goes back to that first day walking into kindergarten. Sometimes people call that “adjusting to society” -- which it is, in part. But one of the results of that adjustment can be a kid who enjoys life, feels good about him or herself, and is suddenly made to think that he or she isn’t good enough, can’t be good enough. In How Lincoln Learned to Read I write about the history of schools as a way to “Americanize” kids – so that we’re all on the same page and society as a whole can function – but part of that Americanization includes this sense that we’re all in competition. Some get A’s; some get F’s; and that is what matters.

I don’t begin to say that homeschooling is the answer for all kids. I know families, for example, where one kid learned at home, another went off to school. But I do think we can learn some things from the principles underlying homeschooling – or, for that matter, from the dynamics of learning in a family whether the kids are homeschooled or not.

There are a couple of reoccurring themes in How Lincoln Learned to Read. One of them is that people seem to learn when they care: whether it’s the young Andy Jackson learning to fight for his survival during the Revolutionary War, or the young Elvis Presley learning that he can let out his frustration and hope in a Pentecostal service. Learning is connected to passion. And meaning.

That’s often clearer at home, I think, then it is in a classroom where the management of 25 or 30 kids tends to dominate. How do we get some of that passion into the educations of the majority of our kids? I won’t pretend to have the answer to that. But I do think the question has to be asked, and asked over and over again. And I sure hope How Lincoln Learned to Read will contribute to that happening.

Oh, and I should add that I hope the spirit of the book not only restores the confidence of someone like your son but of you, as a parent, trying to decide what learning is. I hope it broadens your choices and helps you recognize that it isn’t school or not school: it’s the unbelievable range of learning possibilities that all of us have.

SAT: Your response to this question gave me goosebumps; you can't fit all kids into one academic box and expect to turn out successful, creative graduates. Kind of along these same lines, a friend just passed on this link to me, it's a group of educators including two of my absolute heroes, David Elkind and Vivian Gussin Paley, discussing the disappearance of unstructured play in Kindergarten and the problems this is causing: Alliance for Childhood in case anyone's interested.

SAT: 5. Two-part question: first, in your opinion what changes might educators make to schools nationwide, to teach children more of what they'll need to know – and second, are any of these changes evident, or even discussed to your knowledge, in school systems today?

DW: How Lincoln Learned to Read deliberately begins and ends in the present. My hope was to help formulate what you’re asking here – how children can learn more of what they need to know -- in a larger, more inclusive way. But the same way I believe good classrooms don’t provide answers but let kids think, I believe good books give readers the information to wrestle with issues.

The job of answering the first part of your question – changes that might be made to education – is up to each of us, I think. And the answers are going to vary per town, per school, often per kid. I’m not at all convinced that nationwide change would be helpful – unless it’s the sort of nationwide change that allows for this kind of one-on-one decision making. A nationwide policy, that is, that allows us to act locally.

As to whether these kinds of educational questions are currently being discussed, I have two reactions. The first is that with No Child Left Behind and the current emphasis on testing and on product, nothing much is being discussed. Part of why our group of activists faded out, I believe, is because the current slant of education doesn’t leave room for this kind of debate. I believe in measuring how we’re doing, but too often “outcome driven” schools seem to me to be driving out all discussion and questioning. Everybody ends up handcuffed: teacher, student, administrator, parent.

My second reaction is that education as a field is full of serious, passionate, well-meaning people – who get involved because they care a lot about exactly these kinds of questions. I know many who are extremely frustrated by the system as is and are still trying to do the best they can under the circumstances. If I had to guess, I’d guess that folks are indeed having the discussion about “how we learn what we need to know” – but it’s more likely to be on vacation, or in the supermarket line, or over a beer, than in school.

SAT: 6. Do you have an opinion on how television and other screen-time influences children's learning?

DW: I think it’s astonishing how the human species learns from all sorts of sources, for better or for worse. We don’t stop! Abraham Lincoln studied newspapers; Sojourner Truth had to study slavery; John Kennedy tried not to study anything too hard – and learned from that. Bruce Springsteen famously said he learned more from a three minute record than he ever learned in school. None of these strike me as bad influences per se. It’s how they’re used. It’s the context they grow in.

Limitations on TV or computer time make some sense to me, just so they don’t take over the whole day. But I don’t think those screens are the bad guys or the good guys. I think it’s the people and the values behind them. And if those are going to be changed, don’t kids need to know how the screens work?

SAT: 7. Is there anything you'd like to add about education in general, or How Lincoln Learned to Read in particular?

DW: Ah, no! Your kind questions have already made me go on too long.

Except, I want to thank you.

SAT: I really want to thank you for taking so much time over this, and for putting so much thought into your responses!

You mentioned your hope that people would contact you, and I'm wondering if there is an email or website that we could direct people to?

DW: Sure, ziwolff@optonline.net

6/9/09 Update: Daniel Wolff was recently interviewed on NPR! If you'd like to listen, click here.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

For about a month now, we've gotten together with ten or so homeschool families to play pick-up baseball once a week. It's been awesome.

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

The kids range in age from four to fifteen, and I'm continually amazed at the patience and kindness of the older ones to the younger ones, and the capacity for understanding the game and tenacity of the younger ones.

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

They don't know all the rules (or, sometimes, practically any), but they take coaching very well, and their joy at just being on the field is palpable.

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

From pick up baseball

We started pick-up baseball because we wanted an inexpensive, low-key way for the kids to play ball, but it's become something more, now, at least for me.

It's the embodiment of good socialization; when the kids get frustrated, friends help them out. When the facilitator (me) gets a back injury, other parents take over. When the town in which the field is located tells us they need money (oddly, for reasons of 'liability'), participants step up in such numbers that it ends up only costing $10 per family for two months of baseball. When these kids' parents who work outside the home want a day off, several of them choose pick-up baseball day.

It's not just baseball anymore. It's a community.

Artist at Work

It doesn't take much to make Owen happy right now:

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

The keys seem to be paint suitable for windows - in our case, tempera mixed equally with dish soap (I was skeptical about getting it off the windows, but surprisingly it comes off quite easily even after hanging around for several weeks) - in at least two colors, newspaper for the floor, a nice tall window, and, most importantly, the step stool. Because, what fun it it painting only to your own height?

I love four, the age at which yellow + blue = green is pure magic... especially when you add in the step stool.

Cheeky Chicken

So, I went downstairs to check on the girls, and snapped this cute pic of them all:

From Spring 09

Then, I turned away and heard a distinctly odd sound, something scraping on hard plastic. I looked back at the girls, and found this:

From Spring 09

Pippi, so named because of her flair for adventure, had hopped up on top of their waterer!

From Spring 09

One more hop, and she'd be out of the brooder - so, now the whole thing is covered in netting with no way for her to escape. Cheeky girl.

Chicken Progress

From Spring 09

They're growing...

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

As is their coop! Ben has worked unceasingly on this all weekend, and so now the henhouse (where the boys are) is taking shape, as is the roof, and the door.

I love seeing the coop out there, and I think it won't be ready a moment too soon; our girls are growing bigger and more active by the minute.

Higher-Level Mathematics

I nearly spluttered tea all over the place while reading this article in The Boston Globe today.

The gist: because lots of teachers-to-be didn't pass the new math section of their teacher-certification exam here in Massachusetts, the children they will go on to teach will suffer an inability to grasp the concepts taught in their eventual classes. Now, I can see that if you are going to teach higher-level math, or specialized math like trigonometry or calculus, you'd better know what you are doing. But somehow, I managed to be a pretty damn good early childhood teacher without extensive knowledge of calculus, trigonometry, or statistics and probability. In fact, I've managed to live a pretty damn full life without extensive knowledge in these subjects! (Recently, though, statistics and probability have piqued my interest, and so now I do know quite a bit about them - read about that here.)

My gut reaction upon reading this was outrage, and since I finished the article I've been trying to figure out why.

Partly, it's because of the attitude here in Massachusetts that testing is the key to all learning, and if we can only get everyone to pass the extensive testing required to graduate, they will miraculously be prepared for Life. So untrue! And thousands upon thousands of children who don't test well, or would rather be learning in their own way, or what they want to learn about, suffer for it. In fact, I think that they suffer for the rest of their lives - the lesson that they learned in school is to put away their interests and curiosity, to shut up and study for the test.

But also, there is the issue of educators' bragging rights. In this day and age, our young people graduate without the knowledge to compare credit card offers (it's true! read about it here), yet educators want them all to know high-level, theoretical math. From the Globe article: State education leaders enacted the new certification requirement so Bay State students can better compete internationally. Massachusetts lags behind parts of China and other Asian countries on international measures, even though the state routinely tops national standardized tests. Just last week, the American Institutes for Research released a report entitled "Why Massachusetts Students, the Best in the US, Lag Behind Best-in-the-World Students of Hong Kong."

I wondered, why do we care so much about our global standing in mathematics? More to the point - why does this standing matter to Massaschusetts' students? Chances are good that not many of them aspire to be mathematicians, and even if they did, how many actuaries or trigonometry professors could one state really employ?

But here is what got me maddest about this article: the assumption that because of the ignorance of the teachers-in-training in higher-level mathematics, their future students are doomed to ignorance, too. All the blame for the children's (percieved)shortcomings is put on their teachers, as if the children cannot learn without somebody force-feeding them the standard curriculum!

Here is a short-list of Things My 8-Year-Old Knows More About Than Me: How to do preferred searches on our library web site. Comets, the solar system, and space in general. Dinosaurs. Dragons. Greek and Egyptian mythology. Volcanoes, fossils, and rocks. There's more too, but the point is, Luke knows about all these subjects because he desired, very much, to learn about them.

I know with certainty that, should he want to learn about trigonometry, algebra, organic chemistry, or countless other high-level subjects that I, his teacher, know little or nothing about, he will learn about them.

I'll help by guiding him to the books and/or people who'll help him learn - not by becoming an expert in the chosen subjects. I mean, whose learning is it, anyway, his or mine?

A Sure Sign of Spring

Just a little pet peeve of mine: the salespeople who swarm our neighborhood each spring, selling magazine subscriptions. Does this happen in anyone else's neighborhood? For every kid selling candy bars (which we might buy), or lawn specialist hawking chemicals (ain't gonna happen), we get at least ten magazine sellers (stodgy people that we are, we're pre-paid by several years for the only three magazine subscriptions we get: Newsweek, The Funny Times, and Consumer Reports.).

So, the kids and I came up with a little poem, which we posted very conspicuously out front:

Please do not ring, or knock on the door/

You will surely find, as your colleagues before/

That we will not buy, causing you to sadly sigh/

And leave our front door, no richer than before.

It was up there for most of April, and we took it down last Saturday, thinking that maybe the annual onslaught was done... but no! Today they started up again. Any guesses what they were selling?

Good Eats, Cheap!

Anyone else out there experiencing a certain lightness in the pocketbook? For Parents and Kids this month, my Food and Family column addresses eating well, without spending the big bucks.

Do you have any tips for eating well on a budget? If so, please share!

Inertia

I miss winter's quiet, cozy, by-the-fire feeling, recently replaced with the constant need to be in motion. Around me, everything is singing the songs of spring - the garden! The chicks! The porch that needs refinishing! - and I'm still stuck in the Land of Wintertime Inertia.

Talking to a friend back in February, I referred to blogging as a winter luxury - come spring, I said, I'd be too busy to spend time writing long posts about education. While I don't think that will turn out to be true, I do think that more of the posts will be action-oriented, reflecting what's going on around here. (Until next winter, when I can go back to ranting about phonics, testing, and the lead law :-)

So, here are a few pics of what homeschooling looks like for us right now:

From Spring 09

The girls, in their brooder. They'll stay in here for three or four more weeks, where we can watch them grow and change.

From Spring 09

Here they are! Hermione, named after Hermione Granger from Harry Potter, is on the far left, soon to join her snuggling buddies and take a nap. Baby chicks, it turns out, do a lot of napping.

From Spring 09

Because of her curious, gotta-get-there-first-and-find-out-what's-going-on nature, Luke named this chick Pippi, after Pippi Longstocking. She was the first to eat out of our hands, the first to climb up onto our fingers, and frequently streaks around the brooder to find out what's going on over in that corner. She makes even me, who is chicken about chickens, smile.

From Spring 09

Here is the frame of their coop, which I've been calling the Chicken Palace. Ben will completely enclose this frame with 1/2-inch chicken wire, so no predators can get to our girls. Their actual coop - the small, wooden, locked-at-night part - will be on the upper left, giving them room to hang out under the coop and in the whole rest of the structure during the day, even when we can't let them out into the yard. In a word, it will be awesome.

From Spring 09

Our front garden. Remember when it looked like this? Here are a few more photos of the front:

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

I'm sure that the enthusiasm of all that is going on around me, from plants, humans, and chickens alike, will help me shake off the inertia, and boost me into spring. Looking at these pictures gives me hope that this will be true!

An Inborn Sense of Wonder

Rachel Carson is my hero.

I'm reading about her life in a completely awesome book, How Lincoln Learned to Read by Daniel Wolff, which I can't put down. Wolff's book delves into the early lives of twelve famous Americans, starting with Ben Franklin and moving chronologically forward to Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, and all the way to Elvis Presley. We consider what they learned, what was going on around them, and how it shaped them into the adults they would become. This book weaves the lives of these twelve into one beautiful, unconventional quilt of American history - specifically, the history of how young Americans get educated. It is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read, and I have read a LOT of books.

One of these Americans is Rachel Carson, pioneer of the modern environmental movement, biologist, author of Silent Spring. Rachel grew up on a ridge in the Allegheny region of Pennsylvania, and spent much of her childhood wandering the woods around her home. The town in which she lived, Springdale, became a manufacturing Mecca during her childhood. Home to glue and glass factories that spewed out horrific pollution, perhaps it was this early exposure that gave Rachel her first sense of the destruction that can accompany modernity. In any case, she grew up a passionate nature lover, and I think it came easily to her, years later, to speak out and try to help stop the destruction of her - and our - beloved outdoors.

According to Wolff, Rachel hardly attended the public elementary school in her town, preferring instead to be out in nature, or reading and writing books and articles of her own choosing. Her writing was published in a national magazine for children, St. Nicholas, starting from the time she was eleven (if you want to read more about the magazine, go here). One, "My Favorite Recreation," written by fifteen year-old Rachel, chronicles a day in May spent out in the woods, among the pines and birds - "a hymn to nature," Wolff calls it in How Lincoln Learned to Read.

As an adult, Rachel published a magazine article (later turned into a book) called "The Sense of Wonder," in which she writes about the preservation of a child's "inborn sense of wonder." This phrase, which I recall hearing during my teacher training (but never knew that it originated with Rachel), resonated within me - I wanted to be the teacher who could encourage this in my students.

It is Wolff's description of her 'Wonder' article that, for me, elevates Rachel from merely a great American woman to my hero: "The Sense of Wonder" places other forms of learning above school-type learning. Wolff quotes Rachel: "I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel." He then continues: "What [Rachel] calls "a diet of facts" is more hindrance than help."

And that, dear reader, is why we homeschool; to foster this inborn sense of wonder. Learning is so much more than just vocabulary or math facts, and if we make it too much about these things, the spark goes out of our kids. The beauty of all styles of homeschooling, from school-at-home to interest-led, is that the acquisition of facts really doesn't take all that long, certainly not seven hours a day, five days a week, for twelve precious years of a child's life.

I haven't finished it yet, but I suspect that the conclusion of How Lincoln Learned to Read will discuss the need for modern education to include more of the unconventional, and far, far less of the standardized. In nearly every chapter so far, the early education (of these shapers of America) that mattered most didn't take place inside a school. Instead, it was out in the world - in a print shop, in the Civil War, or out in the woods - that these Americans learned their most important lessons.

They're Here...

... and they are the cutest little things you ever saw!

Here are some pictures of our latest additions, five day-old chicks that we purchased from MyPetChicken.com:

From Spring 09

Luke is holding an Australorp chick; we found them - and their sisters, Easter Eggers, using the My Pet Chicken breed selector tool. The breeds we chose are winter-hardy, lay 5 or more eggs a week (in pretty colors!), and most importantly are known to be gentle breeds. Cute, too!

Here they are, in the cardboard brooder made by Ben:

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

They are under a special light that puts out lots of heat - new babies need it to be around 95 degrees - and it looks like a darkroom even when I used the flash; they are getting daylight, although the pictures don't show it.

When we first got them, all of two hours ago, they huddled together and didn't explore much. But then Luke trained them to go to the waterer and feeder by getting them to follow his fingers! A born animal lover, that kid.

I have held them a few times, and I'm happy to say that I've not been attacked, even once! ...Did I mention my extreme fear of chickens? Luke, of course, picks them up and snuggles them into his palms, as if he's done this every day of his life so far.

Stay tuned, I somehow think that I'll be blogging about the chicks often...

Spring Projects

Taking on insane projects seems to be in our blood in Springtime - to see last year's, go ahead and click here, here, here, and here.

And, this year is no exception! In addition to gardening, Earth Scouts, Pick-Up Baseball, and just regular life, here are some other doozies we've got going on around here:

From Spring 09

We're continuing with the Why Do You Homeschool? study, with surveys coming in from all over the country, and world! In studying that map up there, you may notice that most of the responses come from Massachusetts and New Jersey. Many of these respondents didn't hear about the study from my blog, or even the blogosphere - they read about it in their homeschooling email newsgroups. So, I'd like to ask you, if you haven't already, to consider posting the link to my survey (this is the link), or the survey email address - whywehs@yahoo.com - into your email newsgroup. The more surveys, the better, and I'll be working on this for at least the summer.

Here's another new, log-term project we've got going this spring:

From Spring 09

No, not a new sleeping-place for Owen - we are getting baby chicks this week! They will live in this brooder for the first month or so of their lives (in the basement, not the living room), and then they will move to the coop that Ben's building out back. This is exciting, and a little scary, and sure to be a big blog topic in the future... especially as I have a fear of chickens that I'm obviously going to have to overcome!

And this last one is not a long-term project, but I wanted to share a pic of this great creation the boys and I made today... think of it as part of our interest-led curriculum:

From Spring 09

A geodesic dome, made of newspaper. Unlike the brooder, this structure will remain in our living room... and may very well become Owen's new sleeping-place!

Dreaming Big

I have been reading Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, a book that rapidly rose to 'favorite' status for me. Which is weird, because I'm generally not a fan of books about Life's Little Lessons, or Lofty Reflections On Life - usually, I go all morbid when I am even in the same room with them.

But Pausch's book has kind of a back door in: the lecture he gave at Carnegie-Mellon University just after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Feel the morbidity creeping? ... you are free to ignore it, Randy Pausch's 'engineering problem,' as he referred to his cancer, was not really the subject of his last lecture. Instead, it was about the dreams of childhood, and how they made him into the man he became. (I tried to find this on YouTube, but it wouldn't play :-(

Reading the book got my friend Shannon thinking about her childhood dreams, which got me thinking about mine - and Luke's and Owen's, too.

When I asked Owen about his dreams, he gave them to me right away: to be a Dad, cook breakfasts, and "sleep without pajamas." At four, I'm not sure he can really give voice to some of his other dreams, which, judging by his play and the conversations he has with his stuffed buddies, include journeying as a knight and joining the Star Wars universe.

Luke dreams bigger: he wants to be an inventor of time machines and other "trans-dimensional" modes of transport, and he wants to live with the dragons in the woods behind our house.

Here are my childhood dreams:

To do a split all the way to the ground.

To play ice hockey.

To be in Narnia.

To run away and live in the woods, like the boy in My Side of the Mountain.

To be an Olympic skier or ice skater (as a transplanted Canadian, winter sports were BIG, and still are).

I look at my list now, and wonder if it can be said that I've achieved any of my childhood dreams? I am a Yoga instructor and, while I can't do a split all the way to the ground, for me Yoga is a direct result of that first childhood dream.

Ice hockey was out for me (because of my gender - no daughter of my Dad's was going to sit in stinky locker rooms with sweaty boys), but I played field hockey for five years, LOVED it and have several lifelong friends because of it.

I go to Narnia still, every time I read the series - also, I am able to escape reality with great literature all the time, and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was the original doorway into that world.

While I do not technically live in the woods like the kid in My Side of the Mountain, the appreciation for nature that this book instilled in me continues to be a part of my life, every day.

And, while I'm certainly not an Olympic skier, I love winter sports and want Luke and Owen to love them too.

I look at my list, and realize that there is a direct connection between these childhood dreams, and the grown-up I have become. It makes me wonder about Luke and Owen: will their dreams come true? And if not, will the fact that they dreamed them at all help contribute to the kind of adulthood they have? I sure hope so.

Well, those are our childhood dreams... what are yours?

Negativity

A few weeks ago, the homeschool group to which we belong held a meeting about dealing with negativity from relatives or friends who don't homeschool. Interestingly, the fifteen or so parents at the meeting made a discovery: we are pretty well our own worst critics. We dread even thinking about what other people are thinking, it seems.

In this group, I opened up about my secret fear that Luke and Owen will grow up Math Illiterates, without even basic concepts to help them get through life. My really secret fear about this secret fear is that somewhere down the line, when this gross oversight in their education finally comes to light, everyone will point to me - and then the torches and pickaxes, a la Frankenstein, will inevitably follow. "Look at those two boys! They could have been accepted into Harvard... but their mother refused to teach them any math!" Much head-shaking will ensue, and my boys will move out into life unable to recite their times tables or figure out how much to tip the wait staff in restaurants. They will die, friendless and alone, because their mother didn't do her job.

At the meeting, we all reassured each other about our fears of criticism, and remarked upon how we all expect the negativity to come from the outside - but how in fact we are really our own worst critics.

The parents, especially those of older children, made me feel so much better about the lack of math in the lives of my two interest-led learners! They pointed out that, when math becomes interesting to Luke and Owen, it will take precedence. Also, they reminded me that just because a kid sits in class while math is being taught, doesn't mean the child actually learns any math. And, they helped me remember that math comes in different forms, several of which the boys love - logic is Luke's specialty, while Owen adores geometry and patterns.

It turns out, what I've really been worrying about is arithmetic - and that is why God invented calculators, which nowadays are acceptable at high levels anyway.

I went home feeling better, realizing that much of the negativity comes from my own mind, and not the outside world at all. What does come from the outside world can be addressed and dealt with so much more easily, when I set out with the positive notion that the boys are learning in the best style for them, and also that their timetables (oh, ha ha) for learning are the most important ones.

The funniest thing was that the morning after this meeting, Luke came to me asking to play Mythmatical Battles, a great card game that utilizes the multiplication tables up to nine in Yu-Gi-Oh-esque battles. We've since played Mythmatical Battles several times, and gotten a link to an awesome video game that teaches the multiplication tables, Timez Attack (with a great free download for stingy folks like me!)

Suddenly, arithmetic is in, leaving me laughing at my biggest critic - myself.

One Day

Yesterday marks the first time I've ever done something on purpose to celebrate Earth Day. I used to think that, while good in theory, the idea of 'doing' something, on one chosen day, to support the earth really could not help all that much.

But, with the kids both of an age to appreciate the problems caused by humans - and able to see the damage to their favorite wild places with their own eyes - it seemed like a good time to put this day to good use.

So, we got some friends, went out to our absolute favorite swimming hole, and picked up some litter!

From Spring 09

See that empty trash can, over on the right?

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

It is amazing what thirty or so people can do in an hour.

From Spring 09

Giving us the rest of the afternoon for lunch, and play.

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

Yes, half-naked children... on April 22nd.

I couldn't only choose one of these parachute pictures to post, so here they all are:

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

From Spring 09

They were having SO much fun!

And then to top it all off, two swans came to visit:

From Spring 09

I got home and heard on the radio about all sorts of 'green' living products and advertisements that apparently surface each April, to take advantage of Earth Day. I wanted to shout at the radio that all you have to do to celebrate Earth Day is, go outside! Go pick up litter in the park!

I won't miss this opportunity again; one day can really do a whole lot for our earth.

Soccer

From the time that he was very little:

From Spring 09

Owen was always going to play soccer. He used to run out onto the field during Luke's games, and has been counting the days until he was finally, finally old enough to be on the team himself.

Well, last Saturday, he was, making the cutoff by one week:

From Spring 09

He has not taken off the shirt in four days. Every person he makes eye contact with gets the full monty about soccer. All that's sustaining him is the thought of the coming Saturday, when he can be back on the "Burgundy team."

I look at that top picture and wonder where my baby went - in just a few years, he's become a soccer-playin' Big Boy!

A Year in the Life

Incredibly, I am thirty-eight years old today. Part of me cannot even hear the number without cringing ("ewww, that's so old"!), but another, fortunately bigger part of me wouldn't trade this age for any other. My outlook, my perspective, my lifestyle feels just about perfect right now. And, as my Dad says: getting old sure beats the alternative!

Probably the main reason I'm so contented is homeschooling; because we do this, our kids are happy, healthy, and thriving - and I get to watch their growth and development happen.

Also, homeschooling led me to blogging (isn't that funny? I would never have had time to blog with two kids in school, I'd be too busy being the Enforcer :-), and blogging has been SUCH a great outlet and place of connection.

For my birthday, I decided to post some pictures from the last year. It's been such a good one, there's lots worth remembering!

From The Stone Age Techie

The curve of Owen's cheek - that is why I love this picture. That and his determination to feed the birds at his Grandma's Colorado home!

From Oregon for blog

Luke, the proud Oregon fisherman.

From Oregon for blog

My husband's whole family, on that same visit to Oregon.

From Summer 2008

One of Luke's first jumps off the side of the pool - doesn't this picture just say "ahhhhh"?

From Fall Blog

My favorite stuffed animal from childhood is now Owen's.

From The Stone Age Techie

I took this picture on a field trip last May, and it represents Spring in a way that not much else does.

Thanks for sharing in my birthday! Here's hoping the coming year will be a good one - for all of us, and for you, too.

Why Do You Homeschool?

About a year ago, I started wondering why other people homeschool. We began because the academic pressure at Luke's primary school made him sick - but I thought it unlikely that everyone, or even most homeschoolers, had the same awful impetus that we did.

In the non-homeschooling world, the conventional wisdom is that people teach their children at home because A) they belong to a freaky religious sect, or B) because they desire total isolation from their fellow humans. Certainly around where we live, homeschoolers are seen as radically separate from their communities. In that world, before we made the switch to homeschooling, it was hard to imagine that the conventional wisdom could be wrong.

Once we started, and I learned how truly awesome homeschooling is, and how very un-radical homeschoolers are, I began to wonder: where are all these weird, unsocialized people I'd heard so much about? The homeschooling families we meet seemed so well-adjusted, involved in their communities, and generally very together that it's hard to imagine their children having the same kinds of problems Luke did when we started. With this in mind, I wondered, what made them decide to homeschool?

To find out, I conducted a survey of homeschoolers in our local email newsgroup, asking why parents removed their children from public schools to homeschool and how they feel their children fare now, socially and academically. I found out that Luke's experience was far more common than the conventional wisdom holds: all 24 parents who answered my survey, from dozens of school districts in 3 states, withdrew their kids from public schools because of problems with academics, such as the curriculum or teaching methods. Their children were bored to tears - either that or driven to aggressiveness, impassivity, or illness by school teaching methods, rules, and regulations. Many were also labeled, punished, and/or bullied, as often as not by the adults in schools to help develop a 'thick skin.'

A few parents cited religion, a few cited social/peer issues, but all placed blame squarely at the foot of the institution itself, both for what was being taught and how it was being taught.

And now, a year has gone by and I'm wondering, not just about the northeast, but about why we homeschool nationwide.

So, I have a question for you: why do you homeschool? Whether you have always homeschooled, or pulled your kids out of school to start, I'd love your input. The survey itself is seven questions long and I am happy to get responses of any length, from the brief answer to pages about each question. My plan is to spend several months getting as many families, from as many states as possible, to respond. Then I will review the responses and write a paper about the results.

To take the survey, please email me at whywehs@yahoo.com; you will remain anonymous, in case you worry about that kind of thing, and your responses are very valuable, whether you have one child or a dozen, whether some are in school, or some were in school, or none have ever been in school... you get the idea.

I hope you respond to my survey. I believe that schooled children will benefit from our stories, because we homeschoolers show every day that education must be shaped to fit the child, and not the other way around. If we can be open about why and how we educate our children, then we give hope and strength to non-homeschooling families everywhere. We are saying, loud and clear, that there's more to life than school, and many ways to become educated.

Thanks!

P.S. - If you have a blog or website, and would like to link to my "Why Do You Homeschool" button, just copy the text in this box below and paste it into your website. Thanks soooo much to Jena at Yarns of the Heart for teaching me about buttons, and for making the box o' text itself... they don't call me the Stone Age Techie for nothing, and I would not have even known where to start without her!

<a href="http://stoneagetechie.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-do-you-homeschool.html" target="blank"><img width="200" alt="Survey at StoneAgeTechie.blogspot.com" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kzNmdPQk1DU/SeJdLo4001I/AAAAAAAACK8/6UKlT0Lo2cU/S240/study+button+v+5.jpg" height="148"/></a>

Saint-Emilion 1976

When Ben and I were first married - no. I must go back further.

The weekend Ben and I met, when I was twenty-five and as-yet-unbetrothed, a huge concern of my eldest relatives, I completely pissed off my Mom and extended family by opting to go to a friend's weekend-long graduation party instead of my Grandpa's 80th birthday celebration taking place in Montreal, Canada, a very long way off from where the friend's party was held.

Now if I hadn't gone to the party - Ben's best friend from life was the graduate in question - than I would not have met him. I would not have felt the earth move when we shook hands, or called my Mom after the weekend ended to say "I just met the man I'm gonna marry; how was your weekend?"

Fortunately, we held our wedding two years later to the day, and so we got to celebrate my Grandpa's 82nd birthday with all of my family together.

Then, as newlyweds, we drove up to Montreal, along with my brother Rob and his new wife, Suzanne, to visit our grandparents. It was a fun trip at the time, and now looking back more than twelve years later, it is even sweeter because it turned out to be our last visit with my grandparents that was not tainted by illness or loss. Also the visit was before babies, so we were still footloose and fancy free.

I don't know if you have a special relationship with any of your extended family, but I have special relationships with nearly all my Mom's family - and my Grandpa was the special-est of all. Going to visit with him and my Grandma, taking time out of our busy twenty-something lives, was a real treat, not the chore that you might imagine; the number of years between our ages meant only that my grandparents had lots more good stories to share than we young people did, and more gardening and cooking experience that we could learn from as well.

When we awoke on the Saturday morning of our visit, Grandpa was mortified to tell us that during the night, something had gone wrong with the pipes, and a plumber was on his way over to fix it. My grandparents were so upset, their weekend with the grandchildren interrupted by bad plumbing!

To get to the pipes, many closets were emptied; clothing and canned goods that had gone years without seeing the light of day were pulled out and dusted off. And that's when we found out that the pipe problem had a silver lining: a bottle of red wine from 1976. An absolutely superb bottle of red wine, as it turned out, from the year that I was five and my brother was three.

We said, "Wow - you guys should save this for a special occasion!" My grandparents smiled, wondering, what could be more special than this? So we shared the wine that night along with my Grandma's fantastic spaghetti and meatballs.

In the intervening decade-plus, both grandparents grew ill, and passed away, and we have had our children and watched them grow; in truth, the boys remind me very much of my Grandpa. Ben and I, and Rob and Suzanne, reminisce about them often, occasionally remembering sharing that great bottle of wine - still, I had almost forgotten about it when we helped Rob and Sue move into their new house last weekend, and found the empty bottle sitting on top of their dining room table.

From Spring 09

I asked, "is this the bottle?" My brother answered enthusiastically that yes, in fact, it was - and suddenly I was sitting at my grandparents' dining table, newly married, the taste of the wine and good food in my mouth, the feeling of being together with our grandparents fresh in my mind. I am so glad that my brother kept that bottle; it brought back not just the good memory of that weekend but also a tangible feeling of joy, that I have had such people in my life, and that they live on in successive generations.

If this is a holiday weekend for you, then I hope you celebrate it with those that you love... and if it isn't a holiday weekend for you, well then I still hope you celebrate it with those you love.

Another Subject Better Played Than Taught

We are unschoolers, or as Jena says, interest-led learners. This means that our kids learn about what they want to know, and they learn with all of their senses and through lots and lots of play.

Luke bounces back and forth among a few favorite subjects, right now primarily dinosaurs and dragons. He reads almost unceasingly, non-fiction for the dinos, and stories (such as Eragon or Dragon Slayer's Academy books) for the dragons, and he visits web sites to play dinosaur trivia games, watch Walking With Dinosaurs, and find out where dragon sightings have happened all over the globe. He sketches elaborate dragons while out in the woods, 'playing' at observing dragon behavior behind our house, and even uses his math skills to figure out how many weeks he'll need to save up for new favorite books about dragons and dinosaurs.

My point is, all the work that 8 year-olds need to do - reading, writing, thinking, mathematics - happens naturally in their play. And from everything I've read about interest-led learning, this continues as kids get older; the play may change a bit, becoming more abstract and about more sophisticated topics, but it's still play at heart. After all, if you really love your job, is it work or play?

Today, I read this article from yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe, about 'teaching' emotional intelligence. A growing number of educators and psychologists, worried that schoolchildren lack this type of intelligence, are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that will overtly teach it, as the article's author writes, "just like trigonometry or French grammar."

Well, I just spluttered. And then ranted, when I read about the types of lessons planned: identifying different emotions on the faces of children in pictures, for example. Why, I wondered, don't they let the kids play a little more? Then the kids would see 'expressions' on the faces of their friends, and perhaps figure out ways to resolve conflicts - a stated goal of emotional intelligence proponents - based on their interactions during play, too.

Luke got involved in the discussion over breakfast this morning. I expressed my disdain for the idea that emotional intelligence should be taught this way - how do you grade somebody's knowledge of emotional intelligence? what would this standardized test look like? why, why do educators so like to break everything into little lessons, why do they think that's the best way to learn everything (or, for that matter, anything?) Would they use the Saturday Night Live skit about the sarcastic clapping family to teach sarcasm?...

While I ranted away, Luke wondered, why was I smiling? That question stopped me cold. I answered that it was because I was angry about the absurdity of this idea, and that combined with my anger was a feeling of (I don't know if this is a word even, but it made sense at the time) bemusedness.

I told him that my smile was a cynical one, too, because the idea of teaching all children emotional intelligence through a curriculum instead of firsthand, through interactions with others in which emotion is bound to play a part, is one that could only have been invented here - in the country that doesn't believe in down-time or recess for schoolchildren.

I thought it was so interesting that during our talk about emotional intelligence Luke wondered why the expression on my face didn't match the tone of voice coming from my mouth. And because he is attuned to emotions and a verbal kid, he's capable of forming this question and then understanding the answer. (Yes, he'd get an 'A' in Emotional Intelligence :-)

Luke's questioning, and then understanding, represented a teachable moment which any canned curriculum about emotional intelligence is bound to miss. They'll be too busy grading the children on how well they remembered the sequence of facial expressions to address questions that stray from the curriculum.

And that's a shame, because children really do need to hone their emotional intelligence; they need to cajole, question, tease, debate, laugh, and sometimes even fight.

In short, they need to play.

Media

For the first time in a long time, family-type, 'offline' stuff has gotten in the way of blogging - which stinks, because there has been so much to blog about!

For today, then, I'm going to send you around to some of the super news-worthy links I've seen but have been unable to address that I found out in the blogosphere. And I'm afraid that these next several days look to be at least as real-world busy as the last, giving me lots of time to wish I could get on the computer and rant, but precious little time to actually do so. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow...

First, by way of Alicia at Magic and Mayhem comes this great list of April Fool's jokes. April Fool's day has always been a favorite of mine, and reading about so many hoaxes cracked me up yesterday.

From The Expanding Life comes this article in Parade magazine, about a multi-age model being adopted in a school in Colorado and how much everyone loves it. Of course, we homeschoolers know about the wonders of multi-age education, for so many reasons - I'm hopeful that schools will catch on and be that much less damaging for the children in them. Hopeful... but not exactly optimistic, I guess, because in my more cynical moments I think that schools will probably find a way to mess this up, too. (Gosh, did I just say that? Out loud? How terribly brash...)

This next one should really be the focus of one whole post: Lenore Skenazy over at Free-Range Kids wrote recently about a school in Milford, Connecticut that has banned physical contact of any kind - hugging, patting on the back, slapping five - because somebody got kicked in the groin and sent to the hospital as a result. As Lenore points out, why not just ban kicks to the groin? Why go so far as to outlaw the pinky-shake? I mean, come on, people!

And finally, and for no other reason than because this cartoon made me laugh the hardest this morning:

March Inspiration

These past few weeks, I have been a little shorter with the kids than usual, and find that I need a bit more down-time than normal, too.

Ben helps when he can, and there is always that almighty baby-sitter, screen time; in fact, as the boys get older, this is more often educational rather than true couch-potato vegging.

Even with Mommy-time and TV, though, this in-between season of too cold for fleeces, too warm for winter coats (resulting in excessive whining and less time outside)can be wearing. So, I decided to post some inspiration this week!

In no particular order, here are some quotes, websites, and silliness I've been trying to keep in mind while fighting the early-spring doldrums:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein. What cracks me up about this quote is where I read it - in Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of the Purple Potty People! Author Dav Pilkey is someone that I suspect would have made a great homeschooler, judging from the way he skewers the educational system in these awesome, funny books.

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire" - W.B. Yeats. When Luke is happily reading Calvin and Hobbes, or whistling a little tune over and over again, when he is just in 'idle' mode or wants to horse around with Owen rather than do anything (that I think of as) productive, I try to remember this one. Because those non-productive times are offset by lots of very creative, productive hours, and it's important to remember that there is an ebb and flow to interest-led learning; he goes by his own schedule. Sometime soon, I'm sure he will have more creative drive and interest, and then we'll be off on the next wild ride - the one after dragons, which was the one after Star Wars, which was the one after Pokemon...

Home Education Magazine; I've enjoyed the free online version for a year or so, and then I was lucky enough to receive a gift subscription this past Christmas. It's a great magazine, lots of interesting, timely things to do with the kids and also content intended to make us adults think about why and/or how we homeschool.

Barbara Kingsolver's great book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the book's website both get me happily thinking about the coming growing season. They are informative and a cure for cabin fever.

Because you just can't see them too many times, here are OK-Go on treadmills:

And finally, The Twiddlebugs: