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I'm often heard to mutter "These people learned to drive playing Nintendo and haven't figured out that this freeway doesn't HAVE a Restart button."


We expected Marty to be in the hospital a time or two in his youth.   He was a brave baby.  But he's a cautious and skillful older kid.  He stepped on a nail and got a tetanus shot.  In all his skating (roller blade and icerink) and bike and skateboard stuff, he's never been hurt. He gives good advice to other kids too.  So because he's not reckless, I'm not worried.

When I learned to drive I didn't even know how to start the car, an automatic, the first day of driving.  My three car-mates had already driven some with their parents.  I was clue-free and not great at spatial reasoning, and I've never had worse than dents in the driveway and fenderbenders.  I would have done better with some Nintendo practice in my own youth.  Bummer not even Pong was invented yet.

Sandra

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In a message dated 11/27/2001 6:49:44 PM Pacific Standard Time,
ecsamhill@... writes:


> There's something about testing, and grades and answers marked wrong in red
> that contributes to building perfectionism. I especially don't like the
> idea that you are tested at one point in time, and if you don't know the
> answer at that moment, then you are wrong forever. That seems to imply
> that you might as well not bother knowing it later. Because you don't know
>

Ah yes. And to carry that thought a little further - it also implies that it
only MATTERS if you know something for a moment - there is no point to
deeper, richer learning --- and that there is no point to "wallowing in it"
-- much less any point to just enjoying it. This results in parents asking,
with concern, about their kids wanting to read books that are too "low" for
them. Or always reading one kind of book - "He just won't read fiction," for
example.

Ah - and it ties back in with those obsessive qualities and how parents worry
about that in their kids --- we're TRAINED, most of us, to value learning
that is a mile wide and an inch deep and doesn't "stick" anyway. So it looks
weird and like, at best, a waste of time, for kids to want to stick with one
thing too much. We have many years of "school schedules," too, that we've
incorporated into our beings. So we might feel discomfort when our kids don't
do a little of everything on a regular basis - a little reading, a little
science, a little math, a little history, and so on. I know that it
encouraged me to keep a journal when we first started homeschooling - because
I observed the kids and noted what they did (on their own) that was related
to all these different subject areas. It comforted me. Nowadays, I wouldn't
care -- it wouldn't comfort me because it doesn't make me uncomfortable
anymore if I don't see them learning stuff in different subject areas. But
what Betsy said brought that back to me -- how relieved I was to see that
they did stuff that could count as history, science, math, etc., even when I
didn't plan it for them. And it was a good exercise for me to do - to start
to stretch my way of looking at what "counted."

-pam

Pam Sorooshian
National Home Education Network <A HREF="http://nhen.org/default.html"><http://www.nhen.org></A>



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