C Johnson

The link would not work for me. Would you mind sending the article? I would love to read it.

Chrissie

Deanne Brown <deanne.brown@...> wrote:

Hi all,

Check out today's issue of the Chicago Tribune. There is an article
about unschooling in which our family is highlighted.

Deanne


http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-0603120371m
ar12,1,1721193.story?coll=chi-news-hed





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Sandra Dodd

On Mar 12, 2006, at 3:59 PM, C Johnson wrote:

> The link would not work for me. Would you mind sending the
> article? I would love to read it.
>
> Chrissie


*http://tinyurl.com/qtp3l

Someone on another list made a shorter link to that.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Sandra Dodd

The article came up with my yahoo alert (which looks for
"unschooling") and was on the Monterey Herald website.

I love this part:

---"I think the one reason that stands out from the rest is that I
felt that my kids were losing that incredible spark they had before
they entered school," Deanne Brown said.

---"As young children they were curious, imaginative and full of
spunk. Learning was natural and fun," she said. "After being in
school for a few years I saw their natural curiosity, imagination and
love for learning being crushed by rules and conditioning. Learning
became a task."



I'm so glad they quoted that! Too often, the good parts people say
are left out.



And as usual, they think any old "expert" has had half a chance to be
"convinced" just on some passing reference to unschooling:



---"I think the downsides would be related to teachers who don't
understand putting parameters around children's decision making,"
said Jill Fox, an associate professor of education at the University
of Texas at Arlington.

---"It's one thing to allow children to choose to study Amelia
Earhart before studying Harriet Tubman, with the clear understanding
that both will be studied thoroughly during the school year. It is
another thing to allow children to study Muhammad Ali and completely
skip over what the state standards or district curriculum require,"
Fox said.



Yeah. I'm sorry, but a big "WHATever" is welling up in me. There is
just nothing that makes the stories of Amelia Earhart or Harriet
Tubman more important than any other single American with a biography
worth knowing. Neither was the only one in her field. They've just
been tagged as icons, and the school system wants to touch all the
icons. And "during THE year"? as though they're both "studied
thoroughly" every year (or ANY year).

And this is just the chit-chat of nonsense:

-=-"Teachers -- and parents -- have to keep in mind that children's
decision-making skills are not yet fully developed. They don't quite
understand cause-and-effect and often don't realize the consequences
they may face as a result of their decisions."-=



WHAT decision!? The "decision" not to "study thoroughly" Amelia
Earhart? It's not too late! If they hear her name and know who
she is, fine. If they hear her name and don't have any idea, maybe
they'll wonder, and in finding out who she is, they will learn about
her. Sheeesh... My kids might know about her because of the ballad
which they probably heard me sing with my friend Dave a time or three
when they were little, and if they don't, that's fine. If they asked
me who she was I'd sing some or all of that four verse song, and tell
them to google for photos.

It's a great article. If only they had let one of us do a final pass
before the published! I could have said "ARE, not 'could be,' is
what he said" about this:

-=-Most trace the origins of unschooling to an approach devised by
educator John Holt in the 1970s. He believed that children could be
natural learners, instead of requiring formal schooling.-=-



Good article!



Sandra







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Pamela Sorooshian

> ---"I think the downsides would be related to teachers who don't
> understand putting parameters around children's decision making,"
> said Jill Fox, an associate professor of education at the University
> of Texas at Arlington.
>
> ---"It's one thing to allow children to choose to study Amelia
> Earhart before studying Harriet Tubman, with the clear understanding
> that both will be studied thoroughly during the school year. It is
> another thing to allow children to study Muhammad Ali and completely
> skip over what the state standards or district curriculum require,"
> Fox said.


LOL -- what a bunch of gobbledygook.

These people couldn't think themselves out of a paper bag! <G>

Both "studied thoroughly?"

I'm going to play a little fun trivia game with my college students -
find out what they know about Harriet Tubman and Amelia Earhart. And
Mohammad Ali, too.

-pam

Unschooling shirts, cups, bumper stickers, bags...
Live Love Learn
UNSCHOOL!
<http://www.cafepress.com/livelovelearn>





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Sandra Dodd

On Mar 12, 2006, at 11:33 PM, Pamela Sorooshian wrote:

> I'm going to play a little fun trivia game with my college students -
> find out what they know about Harriet Tubman and Amelia Earhart. And
> Mohammad Ali, too.

Prior to having read this, at 10:50 p.m. this evening near the dairy
section of the grocery store this evening, I asked Holly if she knew
who Harriet Tubman and Amelia Earhart were. She said no, not
really. I gave her a light gloss, and by the time we got to the
checkout stand we had decided Amelia Earhart had something in common
with Elvis—both were reportedly seen alive or dead in various places
over a couple of decades.

The song about Amelia Earhart wouldn't have lasted so long, either,
if it didn't include the great line "in shark-infested waters her
plane went down that night / in the blue Pacific to her watery
grave." Any excuse to sing "shark infested waters." And the harmony
is good on the chorus too.

Maybe I'll sing it at the conference in Albuquerque this fall, and
for those in whom any part of the song sticks, there's an Amelia
Earhart hook to hang things on for all time (or a while, anyway).

The song about The Titanic is better.

Sandra

Angela S.

I went to public school and I most likely "studied" Amelia Earhart and
Harriet Tubman. Without cheating with google lol, I'll tell you what I
think I know about each one.

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic ocean solo,
but I think she died in a consecutive trip. Now that I think about it, I
may have only just deduced that from Sandra's song so that part may not
count. Not sure if that was already in my brain or not.

Harriet Tubman ~ well, I know she was a black woman. I'll guess that she
helped with the underground railroad or wrote a book. For some reason I am
placing her after the civil war now that I think about it. Not sure why
though.

OK, now I'll go google them and see what I should have known. Btw, I got
very good grades in school despite my poor ability to retreive information
about these people now. I was a great test taker but I mostly only used my
short term memory.




Angela
game-enthusiast@...

Nancy Wooton

On Mar 12, 2006, at 10:51 PM, Sandra Dodd wrote:

> The song about The Titanic is better.

Is it as good as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (since I don't
know the one about Titanic)?

(Playing Six Degrees of Separation from the Subject Heading)


Nancy, who still hasn't read the article that started the thread...

Sandra Dodd

On Mar 13, 2006, at 4:38 AM, Angela S. wrote:

> I went to public school and I most likely "studied" Amelia Earhart and
> Harriet Tubman.


I went to public school and didn't study either one of them. I
studied Jane Addams, but not much. Read a bio in 4th grade, and
later she was mentioned in a history class. That has to do with
social services, and the improvements in lives of children and women
(in that order, as I understood it at the time) in the late 19th
century.

Had I gone to public school in the 1970's or later, Amelia Earhart
and Harriet Tubman would've been in there more prominently, because
the educational reform movement of the early 70's pressed schools to
stop ignoring women and minorities so much. And I guess it has gone
so far the other direction now that some professional is all a-swoon
at the idea that a year could pass without an in-depth study of
Amelia Earhart and Harriet Tubman.

I did read about both of them in school, but it wasn't "study," it
was the SRA reading lab cards. That's where I learned about Vesuvius
covering Pompeii, too, and the wreck of the Titanic (because I didn't
know the ballad yet in those days <g>). Those cards weren't for
studying, though, they were for quickie reading comprehension. No
problem! I learned more from those than from textbooks, I think,
when I was 11 years old. That kind of info has come to my kids from
TV, magazines, trivia books and the internet. I read to one of them,
Holly I think, from "Eyewitness to History," Pliny's account of the
eruption, and told her how they destroyed some of the "mysterious
bubbles" that turned out to be people, before figuring out what they
were. After that, when the excavation teams came to a bubble in the
strata, they filled it with plaster or concrete or something, and
that's how they got all those forms of people fallen, or huddled.
But they did miss a few before they solved their mystery.

Sandra

Sandra Dodd

On Mar 13, 2006, at 9:13 AM, Nancy Wooton wrote:

> Is it as good as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (since I don't
> know the one about Titanic)?

Way better, because it's Happy! <g>
It's an old-timey-toward-blue-grass kind of tune (the version I know,
anyway), and has harmonies like gospel music/revival-hymn stuff.

And the chorus is very sing-alongish, but can use people who can
harmonize in thirds, on both the main line and the counter thing:

It was sad-------------- it was sad--------------------
(it was sad) (it was sad)

It was sad when that great ship went down--------------------------
Husbands and wives, little bitty children lost their lives

(to the bottom of the sea)

It was sad when that great ship went down.


I did it at a folk club meeting at an upstairs room in a pub in a
little town near Cambridge England in the late 70's. Great singers,
very enthusiastic, could harmonize, but when they got to the bottom
of the sea (the line, I mean), they pronounced "bottom" with SUCH a
hard "t" that I laughed and could hardly continue. I had to breath
carefully to build up to that part, which came four more times so
that I didn't laugh anymore. In American English and in the
southern dialect that song's from, bottom is "bahdum" but they had a
very "bouhgTTTomb" kind of thing going that I could hardly sing
over. Fun memory.

Sandra

vicki a. dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Sandra Dodd
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 10:50 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AlwaysLearning] FW: Chicago Tribune Article on Unschooling in
Today's Issue


I did read about both of them in school, but it wasn't "study," it 
was the SRA reading lab cards.  That's where I learned about Vesuvius 
covering Pompeii, too, and the wreck of the Titanic (because I didn't 
know the ballad yet in those days <g>).  Those cards weren't for 
studying, though, they were for quickie reading comprehension.  No 
problem!  I learned more from those than from textbooks, I think, 
when I was 11 years old.  

[Vicki Dennis] I remember the SRA reading "lab". I absolutely loved it.
Can't remember if it was sixth or seventh grade but do remember that my only
complaint was that we could not have class "discussions" about the
different cards. Those discussions were the boring texts. But, not to
worry.........we passed information about the more interesting cards
(forming unofficial "waitlists" for particular ones!) at recess. You
can tell how old I am................we still had "free play" recess at
least twice a day!

C Johnson

Thank you.

Chrissie

Sandra Dodd <Sandra@...> wrote:

On Mar 12, 2006, at 3:59 PM, C Johnson wrote:

> The link would not work for me. Would you mind sending the
> article? I would love to read it.
>
> Chrissie


*http://tinyurl.com/qtp3l

Someone on another list made a shorter link to that.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



SPONSORED LINKS
Unschooling Attachment parenting John holt Parenting magazine Single parenting

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Visit your group "AlwaysLearning" on the web.

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"All you have to decide is what to do with the time you have been given." Gandalf

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nellebelle

Good Point! I'm reading Walden and came across a reference to "Wilberforce". I know there is a comic character with that name (from Blondie and Dagwood?), but wasn't sure. Guess what? I LOOKED IT UP!!!

Mary Ellen - Always Learning <g>
----- Original Message ----- The "decision" not to "study thoroughly" Amelia
Earhart? It's not too late! If they hear her name and know who
she is, fine. If they hear her name and don't have any idea, maybe
they'll wonder, and in finding out who she is, they will learn about
her.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]