Tag: community
-
Making kids welcome in the world
The other night I went to a fantastic concert by a jazz orchestra and an Ethiopian vocalist. I, along with hundreds of audience members, enjoyed every moment of it. As I looked around the mass of concertgoers I noticed, as I often do, the dearth of children in attendance. I counted at least three under…
-
Why I’m giving up on ‘self-directed’
self-directed: making your own decisions and organizing your own work rather than being told what to do by managers, teachers, etc. — Cambridge Dictionary Language is like a living organism, growing, changing, and evolving over time. Sometimes I feel like these days, that process of language shifting happens all the more rapidly, reflecting the ultra-fast…
-
The semantic bleaching of ‘unschooling’
Even though semantic bleaching, the evolution of a word’s meaning over time, is a natural process in language, it can sometimes create confusion, annoyance, and even protest (think of the ongoing media lament over the word “literally”). In homeschooling circles, the current buzz is all about the word “unschooling.” Weeks ago I wrote about it…
-
A commercial-free childhood
A friend of mine volunteers for an organization called Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. In a time when marketers have unprecedented access to children, I think it’s a worthy cause. I had occasion to think about this last night after running into a fellow homeschooling mom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Our kids…
-
The misguided goal of trying to get kids to pay attention
Less than two weeks after NPR’s How to Raise a Human series addressed the issue of chores, they focused on the same Maya children to talk about paying attention, and once again they contradicted many of the messages of their piece with the headline: A Lost Secret: How to Get Kids To Pay Attention. First…
-
Homeschooling in community
Recently I spent some time going through copies of my old Growing Without Schooling magazines, and rediscovered this article I wrote for Issue #141, in which I describe one of my favorite things about homeschooling. Four years ago, when my third child was born, our family was given a great gift from our homeschooling community.…
-
Talking about ‘The Gift of Time’ with Pam Laricchia
Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with Pam Laricchia on her Living Joyfully With Unschooling podcast. Pam is a longtime unschooler who’s written a few excellent books on the topic herself. As you can guess from the title of the podcast episode, we talked about time as a major benefit of unschooling, along with…
A Potluck Life 