http://sandradodd.com/connections/jokes
To Get More Jokes

and

http://sandradodd.com/connections/cocktail
To be Fascinating at Cocktail Parties

(Both have photos of my kids dressed up for costume parties, and other things, because they do that a lot. So please don’t anyone assume they always look any of those ways.)

Sandra, I loved the part in your book where you talked about having been a teacher and your students would ask you “why do we have to learn this?” and you’d say, “so you get jokes.” Years ago someone asked me what my primary goals were for my children’s education, and I said, “I want them to get all the jokes in Monty Python.”

it results in a lot of embarrassing “reader’s vocabulary” where people mispronounce words they’ve read but never heard.

We have an ongoing list of those words here! Beanie (age 7) gave me a smile last week when she said “purpose” with the emphasis on POSE. I remember as a kid thinking something was monoTONEous, not moNOTonous.

Willa, I loved hearing Liam’s thoughts.

“He said that he thought that though geometry is in itself both “valuable and honorable” as it said in the Thomas Aquinas quote, the way that it is taught in schools often is not honorable. It is taught in a mechanical way, set apart from its true object.”

Great insight, that there are ways to teach ideas that don’t honor the ideas themselves, but rather diminish them or strip them of their inherent beauty or power. It’s like *choosing* to look at the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave when you have the option of looking at the real object instead.

Melissa, I talked to my oldest son Liam on the phone this afternoon and I mentioned this conversation. He brought up something that shed a bit more light on what you were saying, and I hope I can do a decent paraphrase.

He said that he thought that though geometry is in itself both “valuable and honorable” as it said in the Thomas Aquinas quote, the way that it is taught in schools often is not honorable. It is taught in a mechanical way, set apart from its true object. Circle drawing is a practical art; so is plumbing. And in that context plumbing may be a heck of a lot more “valuable” as you said than knowing how to make nice circles with a compass (though for a graphic designer I suppose it might be different : )). At least you can see its purpose whereas too often the stuff you learn at school often doesn’t have any evident purpose except to pass the test, as Sandra said. And that makes it trivial.

He went on to add, actually that this was one of the ways that he was grateful for homeschooling. He said that drawing nice little circles so you don’t get marked down in your grades and yelled at by your parents is not the way to discover the beauty and nobility of geometry. He loves geometry .

So I thought I would mention that perspective.

In production, before it was released, that show was called “Space Family Robinson.” Maybe your husband knew that, but maybe he didn’t. I was so looking forward to seeing it, when I was a kid, because I had read Swiss Family Robinson, but when it was aired, they had changed the name. The family’s name was still “Robinson,” though, and that (tadaa!) was why.

-=-There is a legitimate category of enjoyment and it shouldn’t really be wrenched into the service of utility.-=-

The ideal state of unschooling is when there are no categories, and everything is enjoyment AND learning. The difference takes place in the mom’s perception much more than in the child’s activities or thoughts.

http://sandradodd.com/seeingit

-=-I just hate to make their world/choices *smaller* by unschooling -=-

The best preparation for high school is public school 1-8, isn’t it? If I had spent those years preparing my children for the *possibility* that they might want to make a smooth transition into high school, that would have made their world very small.

This is beautiful: -=-instead of creating sterility, I created: “an atmosphere – a life” of healthy, living ideas; the open opportunity for real experiences; and a willingness to let my kids come to their own conclusions.-=-

The American Girls Catalogs used to come and Holly and I would use them to talk about how the little things were made (Josefina Montoya’s little wooden chest), and about WWII and wire-rimmed glasses…
But one very cool memory I have is of Marty making “pop out” dolls for Holly by taking pages and making perforations with an unthreaded sewing machine so Holly, who was younger, could tear out the dolls. That was when the catalogs were really big. Marty was about seven in those days.

-=-It is a shame they are reading at a level *so far below* what they actually comprehend.-=-

Everyone is, always. But there’s an opposite problem: Reading beyond what one can comprehend. It’s a waster of eye-movement, and isn’t really reading, and it results in a lot of embarrassing “reader’s vocabulary” where people mispronounce words they’ve read but never heard.

I was told, back in the day, that word processing programs would put the extra space after a period, so it would be faster if we didn’t do it.

Then word processing programs discovered they didn’t want extra spaces after elipses or titles or abbreviations, so they abandoned the plan. Bummer.

If “important” is separated from “mindless” by whether it will be on “the test,” that’s too much school.

http://sandradodd.com/triviality

a quote from that:

So what IS trivia, then? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense. If news of the existence of sachets ties in with what one learned of medieval plagues in Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, there are two pointers which tie microbiology to European cities in the Middle Ages, and lead to paradise-guaranteed pilgrimages to Rome. Nowadays sanitation and antibiotics keep the plague from “spreading like the plague.” [Note: Extraordinary Endings... and Extraordinary Beginnings... might not be suitable for young children who read well. Read-aloud can avoid some topics that might not be ideal for pre-teens.]