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WFH-Schooling is not Real Homeschooling

In Field Notes on 10 April 2020 at 12:28 am

Attention kids! To live the homeschooling life under quarantine, frolic from home.

So just as the Harvard students sent home to quarantine were advised to make clear that their online classes were not the same as others’ online classes, I find myself silently clearing my throat when I hear people speak about homeschooling now that everyone sent home thinks they’re suddenly doing it.  Work-from-home schooling, I am here to say, is not real homeschooling.

As everyone should already know, we true homeschoolers (unschoolers, if you care to be specific), hardly at home and never at school, treat the whole world as our learning environment.  We frolic about like deer, soaking up insights from the birds and the trees. We radiate joy and intellectual adventure.  We seek not to answer the questions but to question the answers.  Mistakes are but stepping stones on our journey.  Apples regularly fall upon our heads.  Like Newton in quarantine, we seek not only to interpret the world but, indeed to change it.  We commune with ideas with the energy and innocence of our unvarnished, unfettered minds.

Assignments?  Deadlines?  Rubrics?  What to the deer frolicking in the woodlands, are these?

Attention kids! To live the homeschooling life under quarantine, frolic from home.

So just as the Harvard students sent home to quarantine were advised to make clear that their online classes were not the same as others’ online classes, I find myself silently clearing my throat when I hear people speak about homeschooling now that everyone sent home thinks they’re suddenly doing it.  Work-from-home schooling, I am here to say, is not real homeschooling.

As everyone should already know, we true homeschoolers (unschoolers, if you care to be specific), hardly at home and never at school, treat the whole world as our learning environment.  We frolic about like deer, soaking up insights from the birds and the trees. We radiate joy and intellectual adventure.  We seek not to answer the questions but to question the answers.  Mistakes are but stepping stones on our journey.  Apples regularly fall upon our heads.  Like Newton in quarantine, we seek not only to interpret the world but, indeed to change it.  We commune with ideas with the energy and innocence of our unvarnished, unfettered minds.

Assignments?  Deadlines?  Rubrics?  What to the deer frolicking in the woodlands, are these?

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My Old Bra is My New Mask

In What on 5 April 2020 at 8:15 pm

Stuff I should have thrown out long ago that now is proving useful includes … lonely socks, broken hairbands, torn clothes that I knew I couldn’t wear, but couldn’t admit that I’d never mend or make into a quilt (!)… and a bra whose hooks I knew I’d never replace and hence was sitting in limbo in a box along with junk mail that I need to go through and recycle.

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Slow Learning

In How on 22 March 2020 at 2:05 pm

Dear readers, With schools around the world closing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, many are seeking to understand the dynamics of learning at home.  Here is an article I wrote when my daughter was 9, years before her first day of school.  Were we homeschooling?  Unschooling?  I liked to call it slow learning.

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We often ask, what is learning? Now let us ask, what is slow learning?

1. Slow

In Space and Time in Classical Mechanics, Einstein asks to imagine that he has dropped a stone while in a moving train.  As it happens he asks us to imagine that he has dropped it outside the train, from the window, as the train movedi.

Inside a moving train, if we drop a stone we will see it fall down in a straight, vertical line.  If we are inside the moving train but drop the stone outside the train, we will see the same thing.  To the falling stone, once released from Einstein’s (or anyone’s) hand, it makes no difference whether it is inside or outside the train.

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