Our experience resonates with what Hailey says here. No playpens here. TBH, detachment parenting gives me the willies.

HT: Carlotta

This week is the deadline for Unschooling Voices.

Tonight I looked after a bunch of other stuff and hope to be catching up online tomorrow night. I have gotten to any of the comments left since Thursday night. Actually, this is the fiurst time (outside of work) that I’ve sat in front of a computer for more than a couple minutes since Thursday. A flu or virus is going throug hthe household. Yesterday was Meaghan’s day to feel like sleeping the entire day and it was Andrea today.

At this time 1 year ago I posted my first post to this blog. When Andrea and I had discussed (at length) doing this blog, it was always planned that it would be a shared blog. And to some degree, I suppose it is. She still posts here sometimes. But it wasn’t long before we started referring to this blog as my blog and atypicalife as her blog. This blog started out as a mambo installation which in some ways worked better for what we originally had in mind. Within a month or 2 we both realized that we wanted the flexibility of WordPress (and we didn’t really end up doing what we had originally planned).

I don’t know if it is a first in internet land or not that the chemistry between a his blog and her blog produced a whole litter of baby blogs. Perhaps that’s a research project for some other day

I appreciate everyone who reads here (even the lurkers). I’m looking forward to another interesting year.

Just in case you haven’t already read it: Pearls of wisdom from the progeny. I can almost see it.

There is not a year that goes by that Andrea and I don’t have at least one conversation which braegan has described the essence of so well.I love not going back to school days.

Some good advice on How to Make Unschooling Work.

Although we have never met, I’m sure Ramona is absolutely adorable – Logic with Ramona (I may feel this way partly because she reminds me of Emma.)

Small gets big – Been and gone again.

Updated to add: The 6th Coutry Fair (which was the original reason I was going to do a links post). Ok, off to bed.

If you are familiar with the ‘for Dummies’ series of books and the title of this post caught your attention, you may be one of the many parents who have considered homeschooling but, to date, have not. Many of the parents I have talked to about the possibility of homeschooling their own children expressed (in one form or another) the question, ‘Am I ready?’. Stephanie addresses that question with some advice. the question I ask you to consider while you are reading her post is. “When my child was born, did I leave him/her at the hospital with the experts while I got ready? Or did I take my child home with me knowing there were things I was going to have to learn, knowing that I would make mistakes, knowing that most parenting mistakes are not fatal and do not make someone a failure as a parent?”

The most common concern expressed about homeschooling is socialization. Carrie addresses that subject in some detail. The question I sometimes ask people who bring up the socialization question is, “Where in our society, beside school, do people have to get along with a whole group of people their own age?” A good companion post for this is another by Stephanie. I say this because often the concern behind the question of socialization is really one of exposure to the ‘real world’.

The second most common concern I’ve encountered is whether a parent is capable of teaching higher subjects. JoVE has written a great post on what is the subject I’ve seen parents have as a source of trepidation: math.

Finally, Kim has written a great post for parents who are homeschooling and encounter conversations which involve the above subjects.

I have, as you know, four children – three of whom have never attended school of any kind. There are sometimes things I’ve had to explain over the years about school that they don’t understand. Sometimes I have had to try and explain things even *I* don’t understand.

Like yesterday.

“Tell me again,” said Addison, Master of Logic and Sarcasm, “why suspension is a punishment? Because they say so?”

And we were both left to ponder the illogic of if you are caught skipping school (cuffing, jigging, playing hookie) then many times the punishment, as it were, is that you are actually *forbidden* to attend.

One would think students would be leaving in droves. And I wonder what would happen, for instance, if a parent tried something like that? Oh, you stayed up too late watching tv last night? Well, for the next week, I am going to force you to stay up every night and watch tv. Didn’t do your chores like I asked? Fine, next week, NO CHORES FOR YOU!

Yeah. That works.

I scored substantially higher than pwsmommy :-/

Awhile back, I had turned off new registrations on our forum. I just turned it back on with an extra activation step, instead of immediate.

Have a stop by, poke around, feel free to sign up. I had only closed it off because we were real queit and all the new member we got were spammers (and nasty ones at that).

Last week I said I was planning on writing a post tonight. A couple time in the last month I was late enough leaving home that I drove the long trip through the woods in the dark. On both trips, I saw (and had close calls with) large wildlife. Tonight it was overcast and I knew I would be driving most of that distance in the dark and decided to take an alternate route which involved less wilderness. I encountered a detour about 2 hours into that alternate route. So, the trip took nearly 4 hours. So, the short of it is that I won’t be writing that post until tomorrow night.

Also, in one of the posts below, someone asked me to participate in a getting prepared for the school year type of meme. I have to decline. So far, what we have done to prepare for the school year is nothing. Nor will we be doing anything in the next few weeks. In our jurisdiction homeschoolers are not required to observe the school year and we don’t. The closest we get to it is stocking up on “school” materials because for some of them, this is the only time of year when many stores have a good stock of that type of supplies. While I recognize that in some jurisdictions homeschoolers are obligated to observe the school year (eg. record attendance), I do not want to lend further credence to the widely held belief that homeschooling is school at home. Believ it or not, I have had some ask me if we had a room set up with desks, chairs and a chalkboard.

sam asked whether outcome base learning took into consideration what the child wanted. One of the first things that came to mind when I read his comment was that I could not recall a time when public education and consideration for what a child wanted had ever been in the same train of thought. I realized afterward that was because in my experience public education had no consideration for what I wanted. I’m not saying that I didn’t have a few teachers who bent the rules a bit to make what they were teaching more interesting.

Although I’ve never been subject to it, I’m certain that outcome based learning would have even less concern for students than the process I went through. In outcome based learning, the only thing that is clearly defined is the end result. So, I honestly expect that outcome based learning is mostly an exercise in behaviour modification. That would explain the soaring number of behaviour related prescriptions.

PS. It seems in some cases I have been calling it object based learning. I think the slip of the tongue is a result of the train of thought I was following when I was writing the original post on the subject.