Hi Sandra,
I have to apologize and then profusely thank you for being so awesome. When I first started my (and now my family's) Unschooling journey, I zipped from page to page, and into books, and gravitated more to the theory, and some nicely formatted blogs and pages.
That's where I have to apologize. I didn't like the formatting, and to an extent judged a book by its cover. And I also felt a bit defensive at just how plainly you challenge assumptions and ideas that I was still deschooling. I read a few of your pages, but the collective stream of consciousness from chat sessions and e-mail exchanges didn't connect to me right away. A few of your letters or more how-to pages did have some impact, and some recordings of you speaking at different conferences were cool.
But now that I've been through Holt and others extensively, and read a ton of blogs, and now have a 2.5 year old guy who is loving this journey with us, with another one due in 3 months... I'm back to your page again and again via the AlwaysUnschooled Yahoogroup. And your collective wisdom is so awesome. It's perfectly set up for this purpose—practical reinforcement of particular aspects, or helping us deschool ourselves by really challenging the why behind everything embedded in our subconscious about these school and control related topics.
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, and the student will actually listen. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!
Cheers,
Jamie, Monica, Alex and baby-to-come Maltman
There was a long other exchange between us, but I'm sharing this little bit from August 26, 2011:Sandra:
Thanks for the note. I want to stick it in a collection of letters, but I'll take your name off of it unless you let me know you would rather have it on (or a short version of it) and if I don't lose the note saying to put it on. :-)Jamie:
Feel free to use my letter any way you see fit!