Sandra Dodd

Katie Oxford send this and I told her I would send it to a good place.  This is a great place!  She called it "An unschooling revelation from Ken Jennings"

Katie wrote:

I was just going through some bookmarked pages in Ken Jenning’s book Braniac, and I found this one set of paragraphs I set aside as something special. He was the guy who won Jeopardy! 74 times in a row, but he wrote this when he was about half-way through his journey and he suddenly realizes, much like we have, that learning can be found all around us. I really enjoyed it, and hoped you would too. I’m not sure if there’s really a place for it on your pages, but now that I’ve typed it all out to save it, I thought it a shame to waste it just keeping it to myself.
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"Forty-odd games of Jeopardy! have taught me something else about knowledge - namely, that it's everywhere. I had always assumed that the brains lined up behind the Jeopardy! podiums got all their knowledge from books, from a lifetime of voracious reading. Their sensitive, pallid complexions certainly support that theory. But in my case - and other contestants I talk to have backed me up - reading is secondary (don't tell your kids). Sure, I like to read. I recognize many answers from things I read in books. But many, many more clues I just remember from a lifetime of general curiosity, of keeping an eye open for what's going on in the world around me.
 
"It's almost embarrassing how many Jeopardy! answers I give that come not from some highbrow leather-bound reference book but from somewhere a little more plebeian. Should I admit how many mythology questions I knew only because of the Thor comic books I read as a kid, or how many geography questions from globe-trotting reality shows? Almost all my knowledge of stars and constellations comes from bad sci-fi movies. All my national flags come from NBC Olympic coverage. All my aquatic birds come from crossword puzzle clues.
 
"It's encouraging, I guess, to realize how much information we wade through every day, stuff we could absorb if we were engaged enough to notice it. Back at home between tapings, I'm aware for the first time of just how easy it is to learn something new every hour of every day. If I'm watching a few minutes of an old war movie on late-night TV, I'm probably learning something about World War II that I didn't know before - the only D-Day beach that shares its name with a chemical element (Gold), for example. If I'm flipping through a magazine at the dentist's office, I might be learning about something new on every page: global warming, or the NBA play-offs, or health-care reform. If I'm cooking dinner with Mindy, I might learn some new word of French or Italian that shows up in the recipe, since those are the languages that I don't speak - the kind of pasta whose name means "little turnips," for example. (Ravioli) Even the mindless Thomas the Tank Engine videos that Dylan makes me watch with him, when I pay attention to them, turn out to be a treasure trove of information on trains and railroads. Dozens of times every day, the "Hey, that could come up on Jeopardy!" alarm will go off in my head. It's not a panicky feeling anymore. Now I sort of enjoy it."
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