Ren

"***I love Maiasaura. The name means "good mother".***

Maiasaura is the Montana State Dinosaur!"

Aaaah, but did you know there is an unschoolish sort of twist to the whole Maiasaura thing? The Paleontologist that discovered Maiasaura, Jack Horner, famous for the whole "egg mountain" thing, never got his degree. Well, that's not entirely true.
He struggled in school, tried college but found it was NOT a good fit and dropped out after like one semester or something. He was passionate about paleontology and simply pursued his interest. Self taught.
After he became famous for the whole Maiasaura/egg mountain thing, he was awarded an honorary degree from a University. Can't remember if it was the one he dropped out of, or another...anyway, cool unschoolish twist to the whole thing. :)
I love reading about Jack Horner, and I'm fascinated with Paleontology!

Ren

glad2bmadly

I just finished reading a book to Jesse from the library called _In Search of the Maiasaurs_ that talks a lot about Horner. I love having you wise mentors out there who have gone down this path, be it the emotional or political or family or dinosaur path! I am going to have so much fun tommorow with Jesse exploring the links you all posted about state dinosaurs and Jack Horner, etc. Jesse says he wants to be a paleontologist. He creates digs for himself at the farm and has me read him every book on dinosaurs we can find at the library. He carries around a small but very thick dinosaur encyclopedia and talks about all of their traits and who they lived with in which periods and has us tell him about any he doesn't know, again and again. He creates long stories about them with a felt board and plays with his dino figures for hours. I will miss this passion of his for dinosaurs. Maybe I'll get lucky and it will last another few years.

We were at our Atlanta science museum (Fernbank) last week and there was a kid there volunteering whom I had noticed there a month earlier. He was about 11 yrs. old. Jesse asked him all kinds of questions about the T.Rex tooth he had in his display. I asked him about the volunteer position, thinking he might be a home schooler. He said he was doing the volunteering in order to have it on his record so he could get in a good school. My heart sank. I asked if he had any interest in dinosaurs and he said, "Well, I like animals and dinosaurs are O.K." It's not as if he isn't going to learn a lot from this volunteering but i just felt sad that what motivates so many kids (or kids' parents) once they are in the system of "education" is getting further in the system, not learning for the sake of learning but getting further. Didn't mean to go off about that.

Madeline




**Aaaah, but did you know there is an unschoolish sort of twist to the whole Maiasaura thing? The Paleontologist that discovered Maiasaura, Jack Horner, famous for the whole "egg mountain" thing, never got his degree. Well, that's not entirely true.
He struggled in school, tried college but found it was NOT a good fit and dropped out after like one semester or something. He was passionate about paleontology and simply pursued his interest. Self taught.
After he became famous for the whole Maiasaura/egg mountain thing, ...***

Ren



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