Mr. Unschool

It's Official: J Lo and Marc Anthony love Dragon Tales!

2008-03-01T13:12:00.002-05:00

For those of you that don't know, Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo) and Marc Anthony (that creepy guy she's married to) had twins the other day.

For those of you that don't know, Dragon Tales is a preschool show on PBS.

J-Lo and Marc Anthony named their twins Max and Emme. Cute names, nice and modern, a little too popular for my tastes, to name my own kids, but better than a lot of the other popular names out there.

Dragon Tales is about two kids that "wish upon a dragon scale" to go have fantasy adventures in Dragon Land, where of course, they escape the confines of their playroom and learn all sorts of PBS things like work hard, play nice, and all that kind of stuff. The two kids are named Max and Emmy.

Now J-Lo doesn't have any other kids, but Marc Anthony does. Shouldn't he know about this show? Maybe he doesn't care? At the same time, Dragon Tales does have a few Spanish-speaking bilingual characters, in what seems to me to be a weak attempt at pandering to the huge Hispanic-American market. But maybe J-Lo and Marc Anthony like Quetzal and Enrique.

Anyway, this was just too funny to not share, and shed some light on this "coincidence". Thanks Aimée for pointing this out to me.

Book Review: "Tom" by Tomie dePaola

2008-02-27T11:04:00.004-05:00

Tomie dePaola makes a lot of books for kids. I must admit that we got a lot of his books coming through the house before I really started to get into him. His books are generally of high quality, but occasionally there are outstanding books that he makes. "Tom" is one of my all-time favorites!

I believe that many of Tomie dePaola's books are at least semi-autobiographical. This is one of those. Tommy is the main character in the book, a young boy. Tom is Tommy's grandfather. Since Tommy is named after Tom, they share a special bond. Tom likes to act childish and play around with Tommy. Tom is clearly a cool grandfather.

But the coolest thing is "garunge-arunge-a"! Tom is a butcher. He gets chickens whole and then has to cut them down to sellable things. He starts by cutting off the chicken's head and feet. He has Tommy plant the chicken head to try to grow a chicken bush. That was funny! But then he gives Tommy the chicken feet, and shows him that if you pull the tendons, the claws open and close.

Tommy is a bright kid, and washes the feet and brings them to school. Now I normally don't like school showing up in books, but I like it here. Tommy hides his hands, and operates the claws, using them to scare all the girls at school. As he jumps out from behind a bush, making the claws open and close, he yells "Garunge-arunge-a" at his victims. This had me rolling on the floor for days, and is a regular attack Boden pulls on me, now. Eventually Tommy garunge-arunge-a's a teacher and is sent to the principal's office, where his claws are cruelly confiscated. But the awesomeness has already been done.

That combines with dePaola's unique drawings and great story telling to make this book a keeper. We check it out over and over again from the library, and really ought to buy it! I also like the way that this book, like most of dePaola's is just the right readability - not too long, and not too short. You aren't wishing it was done halfway through, and at the same time, you're fully satisfied at the end of the book.

I rate this book "highly recommended".

Preschool TV

2008-02-18T09:09:00.004-05:00

I know I don't post here that often. I don't really seek out things to complain about if I can avoid it. But this morning watching PBS Kids, I can't help but shake my head in disbelief at some of the themes and messages they're putting out there.

First, there's the interlude sections. The preschool-like setting with a woman (Miss Laurie?) and a little rat (Hooper? - actually a hamster or something) and a bunch of little actor kids now and then. They do learning-esque things, all compressed into two minutes of in-between time. Today they filled in the blank at the end of every line of the little rhyme with the monsters jumping on the bed. You know, mama called the doctor and the doctor said no more monsters jumping on the bed. It was pointless to say the least. I would almost rather just see a lowercase and uppercase 'A' side by side for the time it took to do that.

Then the next show came on. SuperWhy. This show is pretty annoying in the first place. Most especially because the faces of the main characters are pretty much devoid of emotion, except for minor eyebrow movements. But the hollow blank stares of their computer-animated eyes leaves you feeling like they are some kind of cute kid zombies. Then they're always preaching a lot of moralistic hard working puritan stuff that I am not a big fan of. You know, like the main point of the three little pigs, that you gotta make a fortress of bricks to survive.

But the kids love the show. They do a lot of words and letters stuff, and Iris seems to actually follow along and maybe even learn a tiny bit of reading-type-stuff each show. But at the same time she learns a lot of silly worthless or even possibly damaging ideas. Boden loves the superhero theme of the show, and the super computer (which is another annoying part - this so-called supercomputer is just like the most primitive handheld device - it doesn't really do anything. Actually the handheld device does all the work and the "super computer" is just a big display monitor). Boden doesn't pay enough attention to learn anything, which is fine. And at least SuperWhy isn't a monster or mean animal or anything else that might inspire him to hit something or someone.

Today the princess character was nervous because she had to pass a test before she could become a junior princess. This makes me sick in several ways.

First of all, tests are the worst. They don't prove anything. They mainly just make most test-takers unduly nervous and stressed out. Scoring well on a test doesn't indicate actual learning of the subject matter, and choking on a test doesn't mean you didn't learn anything. Tests are an artifice made by teachers to "objectively" measure the progress of their students.

Second, what is a junior princess anyway? It is like a meaningless step towards true princess-hood that must be achieved for some reason right at the specific ascribed time. Sort of like a test for a belt upgrade in martial arts. It is just a symbol of progress, but not really indicative of real progress necessarily.

Third, the princess character is nervous. Being nervous for a test doesn't help anything. She was all "what if I fail?" That's the worst type of thinking to have around anything, especially something like a test. This goes deeper. The reason they portray it this way is to make kids that feel nervous about tests feel like they're not alone. That seems like a noble goal, but it really says that its acceptable, or even normal to be afraid of tests; afraid to try new things or step up to challenges. Furthermore, it can also make kids that aren't scared of tests feel like they should be scared of them. Even if you don't detest tests, it still isn't that great to make harmful behavior like fear of failure seem normal.

Fourth, the test she's scared of is trivial. It is a six-piece puzzle. This character can read and spell and things, and she's scared of a six-piece puzzle? Maybe she isn't ready to be a junior princess, after all.

Since I was writing this, I missed the end of the show. They come up with a super duper computer secret word or phrase that solves the problem. Iris said that this word was "Smart" so I can only assume that they told the princess she was smart enough to solve the problem, so she gained confidence to try the trivial puzzle, then achieved her junior princess milestone goal.

This leads me to another issue. The underlying theme of the show is that nobody can solve their own problems. While there's a benefit to asking for help when you're stuck, constantly leaning on others for confidence and answers to some of the extremely simple problems they highlight on the show is no good. The takeaway that I get from today's show is that you should be unsure of your own abilities, especially when the stakes are high and you really want something. Then you need to get confidence from others in order to even try to achieve your goals. This is not a belief that I want my kids to have in any way.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I think that these messages are part of what our public schools are all about. They have to make every kid feel welcome, and can't make anyone seem less smart than the others. But at the same time they push a uniform cirriculum on the kids every day, enforcing the message that you have to be like everyone else, and you have to learn all at the same time. When they force knowledge at an unenthusiastic crowd, the learners need to be extrinisically motivated by fear, e.g. fear of bad grades. The whole preschool TV agenda is aimes to teach kids that you have to learn what they're being told when its being told, on a schedule out of the kids' control. It's self-un-confidence and lack of control messages like this that are one of the big parts we're keeping our kids away from publicly funded child prisons known as schools. We want our kids to believe thay can achieve whatever they want to, and that they don't have to endure any forced learning just for the sake of compliance.

I just hope that the small doses they're getting on TV is not too much already. I better go turn off the TV. Because now Dragon Tales is on, and don't get me started on that show...

"Gifted"

2007-12-26T20:58:00.000-05:00

My wife got a post/email on the local homeschool board about a lady that thinks her kid is "gifted". I just happened to sit down in front of her computer and see this silly post sitting there. My number one response: this lady needs a blog... that's the perfect platform for bragging about this sort of thing. Come to find out that it is a piece for a newspaper column she writes. So the somewhat pointlessness of the article is forgiven to a certain extent, viewing it as an article, and not a message board post.

But the whole thing is still silly. Her fundamental question is this: "Is my son gifted or just really smart?" He's reading at this grade level, and mathing at whatever grade level, and so on, but is he "gifted"? To me the whole concept of "gifted" is just stupid. It serves no real purpose, except perhaps to single out the "gifted" one. I mean everyone has some sort of "gift", right? Besides, there's a lot more to success than merely high academic performance.

It might be relevant to say here that I was labelled gifted in elementary school, and it is a hard label to shake. We even had a gifted program, called SWEPT, where all the gifted kids could get together and have learning about stuff that presumably the masses were not capable of understanding. From what I can remember, we did a lot of dinosaurs and stuff, or maybe it was more independent study - where the kid picked the topic, and I just chose dinosaurs...er, rather paleontology. I do remember even in first grade being carted off to this special class with two other kids, both from second grade, where we did mathy and sciency things, like using litmus paper. Sadly, I struggle with litmus paper to this day. Though I think I did get a fair sense of scientific method along the way - maybe it started in this pre-SWEPT.

One thing I really remember from the gifted program was in middle school, the gifted room was this little room off the cafeteria, and one day we all found access to the IQ scores of all the kids in the gifted group. That was fun - I was one of the highest IQ. But the funniest thing is that the kid with the lowest IQ of all of us ended up at Harvard, and works for like Warrenn Buffett or something now.

Forget about Harvard, the kid that was a drug dealer (not in the gifted program) in high school is part owner of a restaurant now. Some of the smartest kids in my class now are stuck in uninteresting jobs for big companies. Some have found peace serving God. Some just get by doing art. Some of the rest are making their mark. I haven't seen a high correlation between "gifted" status and life happiness.

Labelling doesn't do anybody any good. It is a convenient tool to make it easier for schools to determine how an individual should be treated, based on the labels that are applied.

So in the end, this reads more like a rant, but I think I'll let it fly. The point is that it doesn't matter if a kid is gifted or just really smart or whatever any of that is supposed to mean. What matters is a person finding a thing to do that they love, and making the most of it. What matters most above all is a person being happy.

School Marketing

2007-12-26T20:49:00.000-05:00

I admit, posting here isn't happening all that often.

But I got a post via my feeds that I had to post about here. Seth is a marketing guy, and posts about marketing stuff, often with an internet slant. Today's post is about how all the front line employees need to be cognitive of their roles in marketing.

The part that fits in here is:

When you yell at a classroom full of kids because one kid misbehaved,
that's a marketing decision.

So perhaps in an inadvertent manner, Seth is against school. Or at least he feels that their front line marketers are not really doing a great job.

Just an interesting perspective on schools as business, including front line marketing employees.

Pushing Charities on Kids

2007-12-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

The Mystic River Press (story is on B2) has what is meant to be a feel-good story about a teacher spreading moral responsibility by teaching her middle school class about a charity she likes, Heifer International.

Before you get too angry with me, I need to set a few things straight. Of all the charities out there, I really believe in what Heifer is doing. I love the idea of "passing on the gift", and it seems like a really well-assembled program without a lot of political ideology tainting it. Furthermore, giving to charity is one of the most important things that any person of privelege can do (and let's face it - if you can read this, then you have a computer and are thus a person of privelege).

The thing that really bugs me about this is that promotion of a specific charity has no place whatsoever in public school. Giving to charity, and specific choice of a charity to give to is a personal choice that should be reserved for the individuals doing the giving. A teacher telling her students that they should give to Heifer makes the children feel compelled to believe that she is right. She is in the position of power. But a child should give to a charity in which he or she believes very deeply. Middle school kids have a pretty well developed sense of values, and are quite capable of making a decision about who to give money to.

Fortunately, in this case, it is a good neutral charity with a mission just about anyone can appreciate. But what if a teacher did this for some charity with a deep social or political agenda? Would you want your child subjected to this type of captive marketing for MoveOn.org? How about if Focus on the Family came into your school to preach to your kids? What about the ACLU? Or GreenPeace? Maybe Michael Moore as a guest speaker? Or Bill O'Reilly? Once you have school officials condoning specific charities, it is a slippery slope towards political influence coming into your classrooms.

I also don't like the idea of some guy coming into the class with a handful of rice to show the kids how most of the world lives. This is a blatant attempt to make the kids feel guilty for their abundance of food choices. Their response to the guilt will be the programmed response by their teacher to give to Heifer. It is a dirty sales tactic that is being used here. And it is being used on your children.

Now let me say again, that I like Heifer. We have given money to them. My young children love the idea of giving real animals to kids in some other part of the world. But the thing is that we chose this ourselves. Nobody that we put into a position of power came onto us in a situation we could not escape from to tell us to give to Heifer.

This is just another example of the absence of personal freedom and choice that is the hallmark of public school.

Preschool Mental Health Screening

2007-12-05T08:24:00.001-05:00

This came across my inbox a few weeks ago (thanks Aimée), and as I was cleaning out, I found it again, and realized I hadn't drawn any attention to it.

Let me start by saying that I can indeed see some benefit to the concept of preschool mental health screening. I could see the idea that since the child is going to be in a forced social situation with many other children and little direct supervision (what's that student:teacher ratio again?), that some parents might want to know the mental health state of the other kids in the class.

One major problem is the way that our system handles these labelled "mentally ill" children. The main and often only real course of treatment is medication. I have written about this before, but we have the most incidence of "mental illness" and the most medications given for this problem. In other words, the medication isn't working. People are taking medication but not getting better. Kids are known to have increased suicide risk with the stuff, and here goes the government trying to put more kids on the medicine. How corrupt is the influence of the big drug companies in Washington?

As if the poor treatment options aren't bad enough, the government wants to make these diagnoses and treatments without parental consent. So if you have your kid in preschool, they may try to label the child with a mental illness and then give dangerous and ineffective treatments to your child - without your consent. I feel sick thinking about this - I need to stop. But I am thankful that my kids aren't in any sort of compulsory public education system! I can sense the return of the commune - off the grid living in the US!

Unschool Humor

2007-11-09T21:42:00.000-05:00

OK, I try to avoid spreading negativity, but I just found this cynical joke link to be too good to not send to anyone who stops by.

It pretty much sums up what I perceive as the perceptions against homeschooling. Not that I get a lot of these questions yet, since my kids are still in that "preschool" age. But I expect to get a lot more of them, as my sprouts work their way up the chronological ladder towards adulthood. I can only hope that I have the courage to make the assertions that this joke makes. I hope to one day quiz a publick (sic) schooled (sic) kid to judge the quality of their educators.

NEA Hates Homeschooling

2007-10-31T19:33:00.000-04:00

I wonder how they like Unschooling! I was alerted to this excerpt from a recent convention.

The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs
based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive
education experience.

When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state
curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to
ensure adequate academic progress.

Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate
family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians.

Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate
state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state
department of education should be used.

The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not
participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.

The Association further believes that local public school systems
should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned
toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting
from a home school setting.

Wow. Quite a statement. Or a set of statements. I’ll sort of move line by line through the words they use.

Isn’t one of the signs of a “good school” one where the student-teacher ratio is low? Well for us, our ratio is 2:1 right now, soon to be 3:1, but not likely to reach 20:1. I may not have the child psychology background a general teacher gets, but I do have a college degree and I know how to guide my children so that they can learn for themselves.
Taking tests is fundamentally against our purpose as unschooling homeschoolers. Tests don’t prove anything except a person knows how to take a test. I got great grades in school, and don’t remember anything I haven’t used.
So we must bear all expenses of homeschooling, even though half our local taxes go to schools, which we don’t even use. Great.
Again, the licensing and curriculum are totally irrelevant. We are teaching our children how to learn, not teaching them specific information. This is clearly the union trying to maintain control over their domain.
Now why should the teachers care if homeschool kids participate in public school activities? Do they prohibit private school kids from participating? And even with our kids young ages, it seems that school makes kids mean, and I don’t necessarily want my kids participating in those events. However, should they choose to be involved, they should be allowed to do so. We pay our taxes like anyone else, yet do not use the majority of the school services. We should at least be allowed to do drama club or sports or whatever other activities they’re talking about if we want.
Hey, I found a point I agree with. Sure, if we were to send our children back to school for some reason, it is reasonable to allow them to run their diagnoses and put our children in whatever grade they feel is best. We’d be handing back responsibility for the majority of raising our children back to them.

Just the whole premise of this statement from the NEA is kind of silly. I guess it is what we should expect. It’s not like they’d say “yeah, keep your kids home, we don’t want ‘em here anyway!” But they could have just said nothing. I’ve probably written this here before, and I’ll say it again. If you want your children to grow up to work for a good company, send them to school. If you want them to create a good company, homeschool them. School creates worker bees. Homeschool, and in particular unschool fosters an enduring love of learning.

My Daughter is a Math Wizard

2007-10-23T19:48:00.000-04:00

So my daughter just turned four two weeks ago. We let her choose her own learning. When she wants to learn about letters, we encourage her and let her go as far as she wants that day. When she wants to learn about numbers, same thing. Same thing for every "subject".

She is really into letters, writing and reading individual letters frequently. That's cool. She gets excited about it, and watches shows like "SuperWhy" and is really into it (even though my wife and I hate that show, since the characters have absolutely no facial expressions, especially the fairy princess character).

The funny thing is that she is somehow secretly into numbers. A few weeks ago, she suddenly asked us "two and two is four, right?", "three and three is six, right?", all the way up to like "nine and nine is what?". We never told her that, never even really taught her there was such a thing as addition as far as I can remember. But when she asked us that first 2+2=4, we were like "uh, yeah, you're right!" And we answered her questions about the higher numbers, and didn't push her to be like "and 20 + 20 is 40". We let it go as far as she wanted to take it, which was still a few sums beyond numbers she really understands.

Then today, she was making muffins with my wife, and suddenly asked my wife "what's three fours?". Our muffin pan, like most, holds twelve muffins, in three rows of four (or vice versa if you like). She was doing multiplication! My wife called me while I was working to tell me about it, and it is quite remarkable. I was on accelerated math in elementary school, number one or two in the class, going to the next grade up for math class, and I remember doing multiplication in like third or fourth grade. Or was that fractions? But anyway, definitely not in kindergarten, which would be one grade level up for her right now. In kindergarten, I remember things like Mr. M Munchy Mouth - the letter people. She would be totally bored with that after like ten seconds right now in her life.

I think this is a perfect example of how schools work. They have to teach to the lowest common denominator (not to overdo the math thing), or at least to the median (OK I will stop I promise) level of the class. In some cases, even working at a grade ahead, this is way too slow. This to me supports our decision to let our children learn what they want when they want when it comes to traditional school subjects.

On a side note, our almost-two-year-old son is really into counting and letters thanks to our older daughter's interest in it. He shouts letters at SuperWhy and "writes letters" - albeit far less accurately or proficiently than the older one. Even if he thinks every number is "one" or every letter is "eight", he really gets a kick out of it. After all, that's what it's all about - getting a kick out of life, at every age.

"School is not a happy place"

2007-10-17T13:35:00.000-04:00

To quote the great Dave Barry, "I am not making this up."

I heard a 14-year old kid from Texas say this on the radio herself. The context was a story on NPR about school shootings, and basically asking "why?" The girl said that basically unless you are among the top 10% "cool" people, school is not a happy place.

Well, yeah - duh! That was my experience. As an outsider that never could figure out how to be a part of the cool kids, school was not a very fun or happy place. Add on to the popular issue the fact that you have to go to a different class every 40 minutes or so, and have to do stupid homework that you don't care about, and have to get good grades so you can get into a good college and get a good job, and school is not a fun place. And it turns out I didn't even want their "good job".

Fun was skipping first period to just go get breakfast or do nothing. Fun was getting out at noon because you crafted your schedule so that you had no afternoon classes. Fun was hanging out in the graphics and photography area of the building, where everyone was just hanging out doing graphics and photography.

Not Fun was wondering why Justin and Matt were laughing, seemingly at you. Not Fun was having to read Shakespeare or Wuthering Heights (although I now might read Shakespeare) and take tests on it. Not Fun was carrying a ton of heavy books all the time.

Now I am not in the homeschool department to protect my kids from the possibility that they may not be popular in school. My wife was socially successful in school, and I'm pretty sure my kids already have the social savvy to be able to make it very well in large groups of people (e.g. at school). For me, it is more the forced learning angle that I am against, and the strict scheduling and intense pressure and testing (even though I was awesome at taking tests). These are all the things that make school an unhappy place.

Colin Farrell

2007-10-16T07:29:00.000-04:00

Well last time I thought about Colin Farrell, I pictured him drunk snorting a line of coke at a bar, then punching a guy in the face. Not that I didn't think that he was cool and tough, but maybe not quite what I was. Now my perspective on him has changed. He has a 4-year old son with Angelman Syndrome, which apparently is a developmental disorder with symptoms such as the kid just learned how to walk. Colin is clearly very proud and dedicated, and this quote stood out to me:

Farrell, who has reportedly introduced James to his current girlfriend, Dublin college student Muireann McDonnell, believes his job is to help his son achieve his "individual potential" and be "as happy as he can be." (full article here)

Helping our children reach their individual potential and be as happy as they can be should be all of our mission. It should not be reserved for children with special needs, nor for rich celebrities. As a parent, this is perhaps our one job - to maximize the enjoyment our children get out of life and enforce their ability to set and meet goals that are right for them. Whether that is to be President of the US, win a Nobel prize, or just be able to cook a meal for themselves.

Unschooling Intro

2007-10-15T14:13:00.001-04:00

For those of you that don't know, unschooling is a branch of homeschooling where the learning is student-driven. So rather than putting kids through cirriculum and testing and things, forcing them to learn what I want them to when I want them to, I am letting my kids tell me what they want to learn about and when. Whatever it may be, and only when they are interested in working on it. The underlying theory is that you learn much better when you are engaged. The goal is to create people who love to learn, and seek out the knowledge that they need to conquer daily issues in their lives. This translates to a self-motivated person in the workforce, who know what they want and how to make it happen. Join me as I talk about homeschooling and specifically unschooling news, techniques, and stories (and whatever else I think of).