Unschooling NYC

Last week while we were living pool and lakeside with my family in southern Indiana, my friend Lisa Nielsen posted this comment on her Facebook page:

All my cheating in school leads to my success in life. I talked, discussed, compared, questioned, shared, asked, looked up, and shared my best possible answer.

So sad that students that get caught are punished for the very skills they will need to do well in work.

My lack of compliance was NOT immoral; to follow rules in the least efficient or effective way was not immoral. What was immoral was their request that

… Read more

We got the results back from the standardized test Maya took last month in order to be in compliance with the DOE.

Guess what?   She did better than we expected.

In fact, the results were astounding and I felt a physical thrill run through my body, followed almost immediately by embarrassment.   Seriously?  I’m going to go all gooey over good test scores?  Me, the standard bearer against standardized testing?

Have I no shame?

When I told Maya the numbers, she basically just shrugged.  And why not?  She hasn’t been subjected to years of school where test results are THE indicator … Read more

Today has been the first day in well over a week that a discussion of education, schooling & unschooling has entered my thoughts in anything more than a passing way.

We are out of town, on vacation visiting my family in Indiana.  When we are here in the summer we do two things; hang out on the farm and go to the pool or pond to swim.  I take a lot of photos, have fun and relax.  The kids are learning a lot here, of course.  Mostly about the farm and nature and country life.   I’ll probably write about that … Read more

Two really great recent Op-Ed pieces in the Times this last week have led me to the conclusion that most of us are in need of a major attitude adjustment when it comes to relaxing and being ordinary.  We need to accept that being ordinary does not mean being sub-par, and that relaxing is not the same as being lazy.

The first Times piece, titled The ‘Busy’ Trap, talks about how being ‘busy’ is sort of a sign of status; if you’re productive and successful you are ‘busy’.  Says the author:

If you live in America in the 21st

… Read more

School’s out.

Know how I can tell?

1.  Parents in the line at Starbucks wringing their hands & moaning about the trials of keeping their kids “occupied” during the week or so they’ll spend at home before heading off to six weeks of sleep away summer camp.

2. Parents leading a group of at least 4 kids on the way to an activity, looking nervous and harried and constantly interrupting the kids’ fun by explaining to them how they are going to have fun.

The last official day of school in NYC was Wednesday. (Although for some reason most schools … Read more

For all of us here in NYC, it’s 4th Quarter paperwork time.   And since it’s the end of the year, it’s also Annual Assessment time, followed closely by Letter of Intent & IHIP (Individualized Home Instruction Plan) time.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

Maybe, but there is something I have learned about filing paperwork as an unschooler.   It’s the best thing you can do for yourself.

You see, if anyone questions why your kids are out enjoying themselves in the middle of the day and why they seem to have so much free time on their hands; if anyone … Read more

For many of us, the name John Taylor Gatto is synonymous with self-directed learning and unschooling.   One of the first books I read when I decided to homeschool was “Dumbing Us Down” .   For those of us in NYC, the fact that John was a public school teacher here in the city , knows the turf on which we spend our days and still lives here makes him even more a part of our lives as unschoolers, but his influence is undisputed & worldwide.

We are his community, and now he needs our help.

When it comes down to it, … Read more

Yesterday at about 11pm Ben walked out of his room and said, “I achieved my goal today.”   “Really?” I said.  “Yep.  I didn’t watch any YouTube videos all day.”

This may not seem like much, but for weeks and weeks Ben has been somewhat obsessed with Lego Star Wars videos, Mario Kart videos and videos on a couple of YouTube channels to which he subscribes.  We’re talking hours of videos, almost every day.   I never felt like it was a problem but apparently he did, so he cut himself off without any prompting from me or Joshua.

Rather than watch … Read more

Summer is officially here, though not quite yet for schooled children (at least in New York).  Even without a calendar, however, you’d know the season was approaching by the sudden influx of articles on how to prevent “summer learning loss”, that dreaded syndrome whereby children ‘forget’ a certain percentage of what they ‘learned’ in school.

Rather than go into all the reasons that summer learning loss is more an indicator that what happens in school does not equal learning and therefore what happens in the summer is not ‘learning loss’, I’m going to suggest some other things we might do … Read more

As a general rule, I avoid the “Comments” section of most articles and blog posts.  (Notable exceptions are Lisa Nielsen’s Facebook group to which I belong, where the comments are almost always thoughtful, and disagreements are respectful and informative.)  However, I did comment on a HuffPost article about NYC bans on cellphones in schools and the consequences.  Or rather, I responded to a comment by someone who was critical of Lisa Nielsen’s comment about the article.   You can see the comment thread here, if you are interested.

Basically the commenter was all for a cell phone ban and very … Read more