Raising Explorers

Last year, we challenged ourselves to go as long as we could go without the heater. We made it to Thanksgiving with no heater at all. Over the summer, we challenged ourselves to go as long as we could without the air conditioner. I admit, this is more difficult – for me- than the heater challenge. Living in Georgia, I’ve always relied heavily on my air conditioner in the summer. But, we made it until June 23, the first day of summer.. and turned it back off about halfway through August.

So, not that bad after all.

We’re back at it for the winter. I’m posting it, now, because we have a forecast of our first temperature dips into the 50s. The goal is, once again, to make it to Thanksgiving with no heat at all – and then as little as possible, from that point forward. I’d like to be able to make it to the first day of winter, but that’s really pushing it. However, I am better prepared this year – having researched, last year, ways to keep warm without the heater.

You can read some of my posts about the challenges of not turning on the heater from last year.
The No-Heat Challenge: 34 Degree Update – There are some great tips, here, for making it as long as possible without the heater. Like, taking a hot shower and jumping into clothes that are fresh from the dryer. And, waking up to bake something early in the morning, and leaving the over door open after it’s done. Wear fingerless gloves for typing and other work that requires use of your fingers. And, keeping a candle by your side to warm up your frozen fingers.

Keeping Warm in Winter with No Heat – Lots of tips I collected from various places last year, during the challenge to keep the heat off. It’s really worth the read. You can save a lot of money just by employing some of these tips and not running to the thermostat every time the temperature dips. Those of us down south, I’m sure, just aren’t as knowledgeable about keeping warm in the cold months, because it just doesn’t get that cold for that long, down here. So, our heating bill probably isn’t nearly as high as people up north. But, that’s one more reason to join the challenge. We can slice our heating bill by so much money, simply by challenging ourselves for a while.

Have fun!!!

September 26th, 2009 | Category: Life at WCR | Comments (1)

Tomorrow, my youngest will turn the big O-six. My sweet, sensitive, caring little boy with that boisterous laugh will be six.

It brings me to remember the end of summer 2007, when I was preparing to send my oldest son to his first year of school. Kindergarten. I can hardly stand the thought, now. But, at the time, I half-jokingly had stated that they were his “last few days as a free man.”

September 23rd, 2009 | Category: Daily Deschool | Leave a comment

and more on the way, today. The boys and I have been keeping track of the rain, according to our rain gauge. At one point, yesterday, we had more than three and a half inches fall in approximately 30 minutes. Normally, we would see 3.5 inches during the entire month of September.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more rain in my life! Houses are flooding, buildings are flooding. Yesterday, at work, my husband said that there came white water rapids – down the hill and in one door of the garage where he works and out the other. They’ve said this system has shattered the 100-year flood record and there is more to come? This is really incredible. Yesterday, at one point, my mind began to panic a bit. Looking out at the road, it was nothing but a river, red with georgia clay.. that seemed to get much deeper as it sloped downhill.

In our backyard, the water was rising.. I had an empty 12-inch flower pot on my deck that my son emptied three times yesterday… and the rains just kept coming, and coming… in steady sheets with an occasional burst of torrential downpours. I stepped outside to open the backyard fence, because it was holding more than a foot and half of water, and the instant I left the house I was drenched. 25 and a half inches from 4 days of rain, 14 inches fell yesterday. It’s really amazing. This is an area that has been through a drought since 2007. So, it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything even remotely like this. It was a very exciting, crazy day yesterday as all that water had no where to go but rushing along the surface of completely saturated ground. Candy Cook

September 22nd, 2009 | Category: Life at WCR, natural world, weather | Leave a comment

Most folks know what a typical, ordinary day of school looks like. Most folks have been there.

So, I’m going to post, once a week or so, an example of an ordinary day of unschool, or life without school.

September 18, 2009

I finished, reading aloud, James and the Giant Peach as the boys ate breakfast. When we have a very good book, they usually like to have me read some of it for breakfast.

DS7 wrote down the names of his team members.

DS5 read and played at Starfall.com, a reading games website with interactive books for young’ens. After starfall, he played a Sid The Sloth game on the Ice Age website and decided to write down his favorite characters from the movie, in his journal.

We all did Weather Observations, together. Three and a half inches of rain for the day before! They were very excited about having an almost-full rain guage. We also record wind direction, wind speed, type of clouds and temperature. DS5 has been telling a perfectly hilarious joke about North and South switching places. I don’t know how funny it is to everyone else, but they sure howl whenever he tells it.

DS5 practiced double-digit addition. He’s wants to learn it, because there is a game he plays which you must do double-digit addition very quickly, in order to pass the level.

The boys decided to go outside and play with a rocket game that shoots rockets, with air, when you stomp on a platform. They were very excited that I brought their measuring tape to them, so they could accurately measure how far the rockets went. I think the winner wouldn’t be official, or something, without the precise measurement haha.

They played a math & logics games on the computer, together. They like to work as a team.

DS5 put together a puzzle map of the united states.. you place states in their correct location on a map of the usa. He loves this. He asked DS7 to point out Hawaii and Alaska on the globe, because they are not in the same position on the map. So, that had to be explained. DS7 did a great job of that.

We did some laundry together.

We made chocolate chip cookies. And we ate some of them. And we froze some of the batter to make on a different day. Cooking with fractions has given the boys a strong grasp on the concept. We also touched on how to count the amount of cookies on a sheet, quickly, using multiplication. I do this, because DS7 enjoys multiplication.  DS7 recalled that he heard characters refer to the number 12 as a dozen, on a cartoon he likes to watch.

We watched Mr. Ed with dinner, and the boys got a hilarious lesson about the story of Robin Hood.  The night before, we watched Mr. Ed and they got an introduction to The Pony Express, which I suspect will come up again, soon.

I read some of our new book, Matilda, as we listened to Daddy play guitar. DS7 loves the movie and loved James and the Giant Peach. So, he decided we’d try another book by the same author, Roald Dahl. DS7 was very intrigued by the list of books that Matilda reads in the first chapter. Some of the books are, “Great Expectations,” “Pride & Prejudice,” “The Invisible Man,” etc. I am thinking he would like me to check out The Invisible Man, considering his reaction when I read the book title.

DS5 has taken to reading stories to me, in the evening, and chose “The Pet,” and “Tiger can’t sleep.”

DS7 joined in story time, reading to me, “How I Became a Pirate.”  This brought up questions about “The Spanish Main,” and “What is Bora Bora?” Which the internet helped to answer with pictures.

Before bed, they decided to drag out the microscope and have a peek at some sand we’d collected.

That’s it. We went to bed. This is just the stuff I wrote down.

September 19th, 2009 | Category: Unschool is Cool | Comments (1)

Reading. Handwriting practice. Spelling. Parts of Speech. Context. Comprehension. Vocabulary.

What could children possibly learn from creating absurd stories?
That words are fun.  Those other things are just icing on the cake.

September 18th, 2009 | Category: Daily Deschool | Leave a comment

When I was very young, I hated to color. I hated crayons. After crayons were no longer required instruments, for school, I didn’t touch them for decades. I had been taught several things, about crayons, by schoolwork.
Crayons, with their dull tips, were very sloppy. Coloring in large portions of a page was physically painful. I equated the use of crayons to very boring busywork.  Crayons often broke, leaving me to color with something the height of a toothpick. They weren’t very efficient, either. I’d have to color over an area, at least twice, to get a decent color on the page.

Fast forward two decades. My sons are very young. They are at an age that I have equated with crayon-usage. I have purchased many packages of crayons, for them. But, I would not touch them. Crayons are not the tools that adults use. I could never remember an adult, from my childhood, using crayons for anything. Mom didn’t use crayons to write grocery lists. Dad didn’t use crayons to write checks. No adults used crayons. Why? Because they are so dull, and sloppy, and they break easily and they are inefficient. It’s no wonder why I couldn’t abandon them faster, as a child.
However, there came a cold and rainy winter day, when my boys were drawing pictures with crayons. I decided that I would join them. I picked up a crayon and began to draw and color with it. It was nothing like I remembered. I could sharpen the crayon to a relatively unsloppy point. Coloring in my drawing was not painful, as I remembered. My developed skills, at using my hands, prevented me from breaking the crayons. I experimented with them, rubbing the colors to blend them together.

Crayons were not the instruments of torture that I remembered from elementary school. My crayon-colored portraits of people received compliments from folks that visited and saw them.
I had spent two decades thinking that crayons were the be all, end all of complete and utter time-consuming, unproductive boredom. Yet, here I have rediscovered crayons and they are not a thing like boring or unproductive or sloppy.

I can understand why other people spend 20 years thinking that book reading is the epitome of time-wasting boredom. Or that math is synonymous with stress – basing that on the feeling they had as they sat staring at a sheet with 100 problems and their teacher watching the stopwatch.  Or that history is the dullest subject, on which, to base a conversation.

But, these things are not at all the thing that was time-consuming, or unproductive or wasteful or boring or sloppy and dull. School was the culprit behind those conclusions. The lesson plans that called on us to use crayons more often than we, ourselves, wished to use them and in ways that we never wished to use them – that is what sapped the fun out of using crayons. The assigned books, in which we had little interest, and being forced to read aloud in front of a group, just itching for something to laugh about, that is what makes us avoid reading. Being lectured about a past that we could not possibly comprehend yet and having to memorize men and wars and maps and timelines – that is what makes history such a dull, uninteresting topic of discussion.

All that time, I thought crayons sucked and it was actually school.

September 17th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

I read Obama’s speech to the schoolchildren – and this line caught my immediate attention.

“It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation.”

I thought, “Really? The founding fathers sit where our schoolchildren sit today? I highly doubt it.” So, I researched some biographies of the men, considered to be the founders of the United States.  I thought I’d share my information – gathered mostly from government resources, such as library of congress and such.

Benjamin Franklin attended school for a whole 2 years. That’s it.

George Washington’s education was rudimentary, probably being obtained from tutors.

Patrick Henry’s father, John Henry, educated young Patrick at home, Including teaching him to read Latin, but Patrick studied law on his own.

Thomas Jefferson began school at age 9, graduated 10 years later and studied law under a mentor, George Wythe until he began practicing himself.

John Adams, In his autobiography, wrote that he cared little for school, putting only minor effort into schoolwork and enjoyed all types of outdoor activities. He attended Harvard to later become a lawyer.

James Madison did not attend school, there were no public schools in Virginia at the time. Instead, his father secured the services of a Scottish tutor. Attended later, College of New Jersey.

Alexander Hamilton was denied education in the church school, because his parents were not legally married. he had self-educated himself. However, in 1772, Hamilton received education from a grammar school at the age of 12-14 yrs old. 1773, He decided to attend King’s College.

John Hancock received a privileged childhood education and was admitted to Harvard, graduating in 1754 (which would indicate that he was 17 yrs old at graduation from Harvard.)

So, with that in mind, the children of today do not sit anywhere NEAR the founding fathers of USA, when it comes to education. They start younger, they end later and most of them are lost faces in a crowd – not individually tutored or mentored – and rarely left with enough time to “self educate,” or find lasting mentors for lasting interests.

Why do people need to lie to kids? Do they think kids are so stupid or so lazy that they can’t go on the internet or into their school libraries and read about the childhood these men led, to discover that the President just made that up… re-wrote history so his speech would make sense?

Wonder about the other folks he mentions? The founders of Google? Did school inspire them? Did school provide the foundation for this great success?

Larry Page & Sergey Brin. “Page said that “their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place.” His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to “play with the stuff lying around.” He became the “first kid in his *(private)* elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor.” [5] His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked.” He said,”From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology…and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School *(Private)* in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills.

Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. **I am only 4 yrs older than Zuckerberg, and my brother is exactly his age.. there were no “Computer Programming Classes” for us, not in middle school or high school, so I must assume this was extra-curricular, most likely not school related at all.. THEN, While attending Phillips Exeter Academy.. which is a private school…. he did awesome things and then decided to attend Harvard.

So, where does public schooling fit into this picture and how do these success stories of people who are mentored, tutored individually, privately educated, or self educated folks relate to the children he is addressing? As usual, they don’t relate. Irrelevancy seems to be the primary focus of anything about public school, or taught by public school.

September 8th, 2009 | Tags: address, deschool, educate, education, home education, learn, obama, president, school, schoolchildren, speech, teach | Category: Daily Deschool, Unschool is Cool | Comments (5)

Last night, I was one of several women who came to a free rock climbing class at a local rock climbing gym. The class is taught by a homeschool mom that wants to make rock climbing instruction her career! She has started to realize her dream by exposing women over 45, or women who’ve given birth or are overweight to the rock climbing sport through free classes.

I’m a very cautious person. I follow my instincts closely. Climbing that high off the ground is DEFINITELY anti-instinctual, even if you are wearing a harness and a rope that could hold a ton or more. But, I had a thrilling experience as I defied those instincts and I learned other things, as well. I was probably half way up the wall and terrified. I told the woman, I have climbed high enough, I’m happy and satisfied. But, she kept suggesting hand holds.. “oh, there’s one more handhold you can reach, or just move your foot up one more step”.. and she coaxed me to the top of the wall. Everyone burst out in a cheer, but that was less important than the awesome feeling I had inside myself.

I had forgotten what it was like to challenge myself in the face of danger. It is something we did as children almost daily, simply for the fun or excitement of it. All of those warnings to be careful, seemed to not apply to the thrilling activities. They only applied to watching for cars as we biked, or keeping on the look out for strangers acting nervously. Surely, “Be Careful,” didn’t apply to climbing trees in the woods, or building rafts to ’sail’ down the stream, or swinging on jungle vines into the lake, catching snakes, jumping from high places or any other number of things that inspired us to take risks and challenge ourselves and test the limits of our bodies.

I stopped telling my boys to “be careful,” after last Halloween. I realized that it was a stupid thing to say, as if children were purposely being reckless and just itching to injure themselves or get into precarious situations. Sure, those words slip out occasionally, but it’s still a really DUH! statement to make to another person.

Last Halloween, I walked around with my boys.. they were 5 & 6, and I would mostly stand by the road while they trick or treated. But, I started noticing a pattern among the adults. Everyone hollered after my boys, as they left for the next house, “BE CAREFUL!” Be careful? I thought it was “Happy Halloween.” I began to follow a bit closer so that I could hear the conversations between my boys and the candy-givers. “Be careful,” continued to ring out. But, no Happy Halloweens. In fact, not one adult said Happy Halloween and not one adult forgot to remind my boys to be careful. At that moment, I realized how ridiculous it is to remind my boys to be careful. Their instincts, like mine, naturally remind them to be careful.

The difference between an adult’s careful and their careful is that they have not yet forgotten how it feels to challenge caution. They haven’t forgotten what it’s like to experience overcoming a fear, because they are still actively testing their limits. I am older, and I think I know my limits, but I’m wrong. Your limits change, constantly, and the only way to know their full extent is to continuously challenge them.

I was rock climbing last night… we started out on a wall low enough that we needed no harness and it was to practice using the holds and finding a “route” among them. It was challenging, physically and mentally. We moved on to using a harness and rope system, and climbed straight up to the roof.. and it’s a long way down.

It was exhilarating, and reaching the top is celebratory. It was so demanding of all of my mental facilities.. to find the holds, to fight the instinct to get off that wall and come back to the ground where it is perfectly safe. And that part there, overcoming your instinct to avoid risk, and stop testing, and quit this challenge.. that is what is exhilarating, thrilling. To children, it is a way of life to demand the most of their mental facilities and challenge themselves physically and charge toward that exhilarating force of achievement over limits. It is something they live for.. and they don’t need any push or any motivators.. all they need is to forget about being careful and just be themselves.

In fact, I realized that “careful” is not the correct term that the adults wish to use… Instincts almost ensure that a person is careful in almost everything they do, as careful as they can be.. or as careful as they believe a situation requires. The word “careful” that adults wish to impose on children is different, or they wouldn’t feel the need to remind children, who are instinctively careful, to be careful.

What the adults really mean, when they say “be careful,” is “BE FEARFUL!” Because, children are not naturally fearful.. they must learn to be afraid, unlike careful – with which they are born. Be fearful, like me.. I have outgrown testing my limts, and I have outgrown challenging my physical body, but – I remember that only by being taught and reminded to be FEARFUL did I stop testing and challenging and daring. So, here I am… reminding you, BE FEARFUL!!

Next week, I’ll have some photos of me climbing.

September 4th, 2009 | Tags: careful, caution, daring, education, fear, kids, learning, overcoming fear, rock climbing | Category: DUH Moment, Daily Deschool, Free Range Kids, Life at WCR, Unschool is Cool | Leave a comment

I subscribe to several groups related to unschooling. Someone who is considering unschool, posted some questions and I answered them. I thought maybe others who are considering unschool could benefit from these.

Hey!
I can tell that you are quite anxious about unschooling, but on the other hand
- maybe quite anxious to get started with it! A real push-me-pull-you kind of
feeling going on, right? Well, that’s ok, I think a lot of folks start out that
way – because they’ve been fooled into thinking they can’t do this and they
can’t do that, and that kids aren’t really capable of doing things themselves,
and that everyone needs some kind of outside motivation (such as nagging moms
and teachers) to do just about anything.. and that the only accomplishments are
ones that are “nationally-recognized” or “standardized”…

But, you said yourself.. “I unschooled without really knowing it for several
years (birth-kindergarten)..” What is it that you “weren’t getting around to”
from birth-kindergarten? And could you have imagined telling your children, “OK,
it’s time to begin practice walking…” and then if your parenting book said,
only practice walking for an hour everyday, you would say “Oh, walking practice
is over… get back down on all fours and lets learn something else listed in
this book of stuff you should know how to do before you turn 3.”

You seem to be very caught up in worry and fears and the standardized “Should do
this and should do that by age #.” But, let me say.. you can lead a horse to
water, but you can’t make him drink. And it’s entirely true.. and you can sit
for hours, and hours *teaching* the kids what they *should* know and they can
take it or leave it, but they’re missing out on what they “COULD” know if it
weren’t for the shoulds getting in the way all the time.

A good example came this year, our first year home and unschooling. My son would
have been in first grade and according to them, by the end of the year, “he
SHOULD be able to add & subtract at least 50 problems in under 5 minutes.” In
other words, he should have spent much of his year memorizing addition and
subtraction. But, instead of memorizing, he preferred to ask me “What is
multiplication?” And if I follow the books, he shouldn’t worry about
multiplication until his add/subtracts are memorized. But, I don’t follow them,
I follow my son.. and he has nothing memorized and works each problem out every
time he sees it. He *should* have add/subtracts memorized, but he *could* grasp
the concept of add/subtract and he could grasp the concept of multiplication. It
was not difficult to see that grasping the concept and practicing the
manipulation of the numbers was much more important to him than memorizing. And,
that makes sense. What are you going to do? Memorize all add/subtracts from 0 to
9,000,000,000? No? Then memorizing any of them is pointless and why should they,
if they are allowed to spend time grasping the concept and learning to
successfully manipulate the numbers? He can answer the questions.. it might take
longer than 5 minutes, but who cares? When was the last time a 7 yr old (or
anyone really) were in a math emergency and his life depended on how fast he
could multiply or subtract numbers and without a modern household miracle of a
calculator to help?

As for your other questions….

I worry will I do a good job equipping them for the world so that when they
reach an age that they want to venture off into the world they’ll be able to
function and know what they “need” or “should”? What does a person really
actually need, to function in this world? Seriously.. because, it’s obvious that
they don’t need to spell words correctly (spell check), they don’t need to
memorize math (calculators and computers to do the really big problems), they
don’t need to know word families, heck – my husband’s nephew *graduated* high
school without being able to read. And he functioned, had a job, made money, had
a home and a car and no one even knew that he couldn’t read.

Will the law take away my rights to homeschool if my kids aren’t at their
age-given grade level in the core subjects? I don’t believe this would happen,
or schools would have had their rights revoked decades ago… because many of
those kids are surely not at grade level. I was in high school with 21 yr olds
who had not graduated yet. Every state’s laws differ, but I don’t believe any of
them require children to be on grade level in order to continue homeschooling.
In my state, they don’t even require me to report their grade level. Sure, I’m
required to write up an annual report and even submit to annual testing after
third grade, but I get to keep the information all to myself – unless by some
unfortunate event, I am investigated for neglect or something.

Will we sit around all day being unproductive, not learning anything?
Did you sit around all day being unproductive, not learning anything during the
birth-kindergarten years? Was learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to
manipulate objects, eat with a spoon, playing and bonding and things.. was that
unproductive nothing? It depends, I guess, on your definition of unproductive.
If productive = accomplishing tasks according to outside sources (the shoulds),
then yes.. you will.. because many of those tasks are tedious, and boring and
really irrelevant to life, and it’s simply busy work to imprison their brains
rather than encourage free thinking. And children don’t normally have a taste
for wasting their time, being unproductive and not learning anything – as is the
case when they are assigned to tedious, boring, irrelevant busy work. If
productive = accomplishing things that interest you (the coulds), and
discovering new interests, and playing, and enjoying life, and learning about
things that are relevant to you as an individual, and setting goals for yourself
and achieving them, then no, your days will not be unproductive and you will
never have a day of learning nothing.

Will people call me crazy because all the schooled children know (fill in the
blank) but mine doesn’t? Yes. They will. So, what? Will you call them crazy
because all the unschool children know unlimited joy, and freedom, and passion
but theirs do not?

How do you ensure they’ll learn basics when you’re not following a structured
program? You don’t. *THEY* do. The children ensure that they learn the things
necessary to live the life that they are creating for themselves. How do you
ensure they’ll learn basics when you do follow a structured program? You can’t..
memorizing is not the same as learning, they are different. Skimming through
books to find answers is not the same as learning the material. Completing
worksheets, and bubbling in forms are not the same as learning things.
Being forced to hear lectures or excerpts is not the same as learning.
True learning requires that there be a curious party who is seeking knowledge..
not trying to escape, or wishing to be elsewhere, or secretly dreaming of what
they actually want to be learning.. what they could be doing, while they are
stuck doing what they “should.” What are these basics, anyways? Reading?
Writing? 1+1? The statement that occurred to me that finally pushed me over the
edge into taking my son out of school was, that I couldn’t do worse than school
without locking them in a closet for the next 12 years. Because that’s where
their brains will be if they are doped up on curricula, and busy work, and
tedium, and boredom.. locked up in a closet.. away from TRUE curiosity, away
from free thinking, away from me, away from what they LOVE, away.. locked away
in a closet where nothing makes sense because it is all really quite irrelevant
to life at the moment outside that closet. The real life that is happening, now.

I don’t know if it’s me who needs to be deschooled or deprogrammed, but I think
maybe I don’t trust myself or my kids enough..I don’t know what it is. It is
brainwashing.. and I think you should definitely take a bit of time to deschool
yourself. deprogram yourself. Take some time.. could it be terrible to put down
your curriculum for a little while? Or drop some of it? Or simply just NOT
interrupt them when they finally find a piece that they are enjoying? The tricks
of the trade, “everyone must stay together,” “everyone must do this for a
certain period of time, and then do something else,” “everyone should know this
and that,” they are not designed for your children who are at home with a loving
family that wants to be together and learn together..

I don’t know what your experience was in school… but, I spent most of my
school years HIDING, concealing the fact that I was learning… because I was
off-topic. I could read, and I loved to do it.. and I would read.. and read..
and learn about all the things I desired to know, be damned with all of their
hogwash. It is ridiculous to think that only a teacher, or a teacher’s guide
holds the answers ,,, They don’t even hold the QUESTIONS!!!!! The Wild Questions
of each individual child, so precious.. and so miraculous, so endangered are the
questions that they ask of themselves and so is finding their answers. One of my
favorite things to think about, is the tell tale sign of learning. Questions..
are that tell tale sign. For as long as you can think of more question to ask,
you will be learning. But, school and curriculum work don’t encourage asking..
they encourage answering.. answering other folks’ questions, questions that the
child did not ask themselves and may not care to ever know. In one ear and out
the other, because it didn’t matter to them.. it wasn’t what they were asking. I
say, if all you have are answers.. what are you learning? But, that is what
school and curricula deem to be important… answers. dead ends. Finding more
questions to ask, not memorizing correct answers, is the only way to learn and
broaden horizons and grow and become a functional, free thinking person who
loves to learn new things for the rest of their lives.

September 3rd, 2009 | Tags: children, education, home school, home study, homeschool, learning, methods, teaching, unschool | Category: Daily Deschool, Unschool is Cool | Comments (2)