Unschooling NYC

Today Joshua and I were at a doctor’s office, and got to chatting with one of the physicians there.  I cannot reveal his name, as I didn’t get his permission to do so.  Suffice it to say that if you Googled him, you’d be impressed.  The talk turned to business, and this physician told us that his son, now in his mid-20’s, works for a very successful internet marketing company.  (He is good friends with the other 2 twenty somethings who are the co-founders of this company.)

Completely unprompted, and without knowing anything about us or our children, he said:… Read more

We don’t have a ton of structured stuff going on in our lives.   And it’s not by accident.

“Kids need structure” is a phrase that is used in defense of all sorts of heinous behavior and I have come to loathe it.   Kids need only freedom to roam, think, play and pursue their interests.   Parents are the ones who usually need the structure.  It makes them feel they are in control.  Control is a big deal in our society.  Adults are supposed to have it all the time.   It’s what compulsory schooling is all about, i.e. keeping control out of … Read more

…it’s not so easy to just NOT post.   Turns out I really enjoy writing this blog, and the act of writing it gets my creative juices flowing.   Which they were not doing earlier, as I sat in my living room writing in stream of consciousness fashion about “What is Unschooling”.   It got so bad that I finally tossed it aside with a sound that may have strongly resembled a snort.

The thing is that a lot of people have written thoughtfully and  eloquently about unschooling and what it is and isn’t.   John Holt, Pat Farenga, Sandra Dodd, Dayna Martin and … Read more

Now that we are back from our mid-winter Bahamas break, I need to get to work on the text for my new website, coming to the internet sometime in March.   The url (which isn’t functioning yet in case you decide to search) will be unschoolingnyc.com .   I’m working with a fantastic designer named Alison Leipzig and am very excited about where we are headed with the site.

What this means is I will be taking a break from this blog for a few days in order to get some stuff to Alison.    And I may take weekends off until the … Read more

I blame the New York Giants (sorry Eli).  If there hadn’t been a story on the front page of USAToday about the upcoming game between the Giants and the 49-ers I never would have picked up the paper.   Which means I never would have seen the article on new plans to curb cheating on standardized tests.

Oh, and I blame access to email, which is how I found out about this Huffington Post article which deals with the uproar over 5th graders at one school in Brooklyn who are rewarded for not going to the bathroom and who are only … Read more

Right now, outside my window the surf has picked up and you can hear the wind in the palm trees.  Off in the distance, a Carnival cruise ship steams away from port (we met some people at the water park today who are on that ship) and a mere 2 hours and 26 north of here, by plane, it is a fairly frigid 30 degrees.

Right now I am enjoying the mild air blowing in from our balcony as I write this, having returned to our room a bit earlier than normal, wind and sun blown from our day in … Read more

It is so easy for us to forget that we are but one small part of something much larger.   We live our lives, do our work, and much of the time our days are spent with many of the same people in many of the same places.  We view our problems as life or death, whether they be about work or home or family.    Everything in our lives becomes THE thing, and the rest of the world fades away.

When you travel, the luxury of believing that your problems are the most important, biggest, most complicated problems in the world … Read more

What is the most important thing for kids to learn?   After today, sitting next to two very nice but completely clueless college students, I’ve decided the answer to that question is: As much as possible about the world they live in.

The two college students next to me on the flight to the Bahamas this morning were on their way here to begin a “Semester at Sea”.  This is a program run by the University of Virginia  (and when I said, ‘Oh, University of Virginia Arlington?’ they said, ‘We don’t know – it’s UVA’.   Right.  As in University of Virginia, … Read more

We leave for the Bahamas tomorrow.  As if that wasn’t reason enough to be excited, Maya’s best friend Greta is going with us.   This is made even more unique by the fact that Greta is not a homeschooler, and has been granted 4 days off of school for the trip.

Those 4 days of school, according to certain high schools in the city, could be the deciding factor two years from now in whether or not Greta will be admitted to the school of her choice.  Yes, that’s right, it might all hinge on 7th grade attendance.   Because as everyone … Read more

Tuesday we leave for the Bahamas.   It’s a five day trip with no real educational or cultural value.   We are going to Paradise Island’s Atlantis Resort.   The same place we went last year – in fact it will be exactly one year to the day that we leave.

Atlantis is one of those places where you spend your day in the resort waterpark, on the resort beach, in the resort restaurants.  (There is a Starbucks in the hotel.  Need I say more?)  You don’t venture into town, you don’t absorb local customs or culture and you don’t really learn much … Read more