Unschooling NYC

I’m in California right now with my kids.  My daughter is attending the first NBTSC at Joshua Tree, and my son and I are spending 9 days on a road trip in Southern California.

It’s been great.

Every day I’ve posted a few photos on Facebook of the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen.  Today they were from the whale watching excursion we did in the morning.

But I wanted to talk about the rest of our day, because I know how it feels to listen to a parent of a homeschooled or unschooled child talk at length … Read more

Elsa Haas passed away early Sunday morning after living with cancer for 14 years.

I’m betting most of you have never heard her name before.   Even if you have, you might be unaware of the debt we as NYC unschoolers owe her (and I would say unschoolers everywhere, particularly Massachusetts and Spain – more on that in a minute).

This was at least partly intentional on her part.  She did not enjoy talking about herself, and when NYCHEA (New York City Home Educators Alliance) approached her about doing an interview for our newsletter late this past summer, she declined.  She … Read more

“Class Dismissed”, in case you’ve somehow missed hearing about it, is a new documentary film by producers Jeremy Stuart and Dustin Woodard that follows one family’s journey from schooling to homeschooling.   I was privileged to be interviewed for the film, and attended the New York premiere this past Sunday.   The film surpassed all my expectations, and since seeing it, surrounded mostly by members of the NY homeschooling community, I’ve been thinking about the prospective audience for this documentary.

In other words, who should see “Class Dismissed”?

The short answer?

Everyone.

But who is “everyone”?  After much thought I’d break … Read more

Those of you who live in New York are shaking your heads right now, aren’t you?   Yes, it’s quarterly report time!   This is when those of us living in the great state of New York are required to send in our first round of paperwork (after the letter of intent to homeschool and our IHIP = Individualized Home Instruction Plan, of course).   For each child we send in a quarterly report that outlines what they’ve been learning for the past three months.

Parents send me emails in the weeks leading up to the quarterly deadline, panicked.   How to write the … Read more

A NY Times article today, which you can read here, claims that fewer than 20% of teenagers in America get the 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep they need each night, and that two out of three teens suffer from clinical sleep deprivation.   As per the article, one reason for this is that the natural sleep cycle of a teenager keeps them awake later at night.   This would not be a problem except for the fact that the majority of teens have to get up long before their natural sleep cycle ends, in order to go to school.

Guess … Read more

Ever kid learns the golden rule.  In case you’re from a land where it’s not a staple of early learning, it basically reminds you to treat others the way you’d like to be treated.    When I was a kid we learned it in school, which is weird, since school is the last place where you are treated the way you’d like to be.

In general it seems people have a lot more trouble applying the rule to kids than they do to other adults.  For instance, no adult would reprimand another adult for not sharing their toys, but we do … Read more

The new most asked question I get when I attempt to explain unschooling is, “But how does it work?”

This question inevitably reminds me of one of the all time best episodes of “Inside the Actors Studio”, when James Lipton asked the late, great, Robin Williams how his brain works.  Lipton said something like, “Your brain – your thought process –  just doesn’t seem to work quite like the rest of us.  Can you explain to us exactly what it is you do?”   Williams then stood up and launched into about 10 minutes of improv featuring a pink pashmina shawl … Read more

School must be starting soon, because talk of the importance of Algebra is once again deemed a topic worthy of discussion.

A few days ago someone on Facebook posted a quote on their timeline that went something like “Another day over, and I didn’t use Algebra once.”   It was meant to be funny and most people took it that way.   Then someone commented and said – again I am paraphrasing – “Actually you use Algebra in life all the time.  You probably just aren’t aware of it.”

I thought about that a lot.   The more I thought about it, the … Read more

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much.

Part of the reason is that we’ve been traveling and hanging out and not thinking much about our “process” or how what we do each day does or does not contribute to our learning.

But a larger part of it has to do with the fact that more and more often I find that people who I thought were in my “camp”, aren’t.  At least when it comes to particular subjects, many of them unrelated to unschooling and life learning.   Nonetheless, I find that expressing my own opinions – even … Read more

Growing up on a farm, driving started young, on lawnmowers, small tractors and mini-bikes (the Honda Trail 70 that my brother and I both rode all over the farm some 40+ years ago still runs), eventually graduating to trucks, full sized tractors and cars.

I learned to drive on the road in my Mom’s VW Rabbit – a stick shift – when I was 14.   We went out on one of the many long straight country roads that run between the cornfields for miles on end, and I practiced.  Start from a dead stop, shift through first, second and third … Read more