The wonderful Keller family runs a used-and-new online bookstore, and they kindly hosted my booksigning at the Virginia Home Education Association conference a few years back. They had me sign some extra books for their inventory, and they still have a few of these in stock if you’re looking for the unabridged editions of my Little House novels.
The new edition of Unschooling Voices, a collection of posts by unschooling parents, is up. Enjoy!
The theme for this edition is "How has unschooling changed you?" And I think that’s fascinating to contemplate: how has homeschooling your children affected you?
Scott told me once about how Eric Clapton learned to play guitar. He wanted to learn, and so he sat down with a guitar and just played and played and played, to the exclusion of all else. It’s called "woodshedding," as in you go out to the woodshed and practice for hours.
What was funny about Scott telling me this (it was before we were married, I think) was that it sounded so much like HIM to me, the total immersion in an interest. It sounded like me, too: I have always been one-track that way, wanting to throw myself intensely into a new subject or interest.
The first Christmas we were married, I gave Scott a guitar of his own, and he hunkered down and taught himself to play.
A year later, when we had a six-month-old and I was reading about homeschooling and thinking this was the path we should take, I remembered about woodshedding. When I talked about home education in those terms, it made total sense to him. From initial skepticism he shifted to receptiveness and eventually to an enthusiasm for homeschooling that was (is) as vocal and wholehearted as mine. All this was before the baby’s first birthday.
Deciding to homeschool changed us both in granting us a sense of freedom about learning—how naturally it happens when there is an interest in a subject or skill. The change was in regard to how people work, how people learn. In school, I was always so good at seeing just what I needed to do to get the grade. I was more focused on the benchmarks than on the knowledge itself. Through the decision to homeschool, I pulled back from that very narrow focus and saw how there were times I had woodshedded to learn something I really wanted to know. I learned to weave that way, autodidacticly, immersing myself in weaving books and warp and weft until one day there was a towel in my hand, and I’d made it all by myself.
I’m seeing that happen with the kids now: the origami animals everywhere, everywhere; and the Sculpey creations, and the stories, and Jane’s pretty book she is filling with algebraic equations she wants to remember.
Was mesmerized by this at my hubby’s blog. He got it from Charlottesville Words. I imagine it’ll be making the rounds, because it’s fascinating.
One thing that struck me was how you get to the twentieth century and the dehumanizing begins. It was strange to feel so repelled by that, because I have always found cubism and abstract art to be interesting and often quite beautiful or striking. Something about seeing the fracturing happen in this progression, after so many lovely images celebrating the female face and form, is a shock to the sensibilities—perhaps a taste of what a shock those styles of painting were to the audiences who first viewed them.
Sorry about the stray test posts popping up in Bloglines. I’ve been working on a template overhaul, and I seem to have hit a snag. Argh. I followed Jimmy the Geek‘s instructions for creating a top menu bar, and it worked—or so I thought—and then the error messages started coming fast and thick. Argh.
To make the top menu, you have to convert to Advanced Templates. For some reason, when I apply my spiffed-up advanced template, I can’t get new posts to, well, post. I have to switch back to an earlier design (not an advanced template) in order to put a post through. This involves republishing the whole darn blog. Did I mention argh?
I could just let it go, I suppose…
But now there’s a puzzle to solve. I’m hooked.
Another glitch is that the menu bar doesn’t appear on the main page. It’s only present on individual posts, and on the "About My Books" and "Best of Bonny Glen" pages. Weird.
(If you don’t see it at all, anywhere, that means I’ve reverted to the old template.)
Maybe I need to go pester Jimmy the Geek.
(Is that the best internet handle, or what?)
AHA! Problem solved! Typepad answered my help ticket with a simple explanation.
Build error in template ‘sidebar1’ : Error in <MTListInclude> tag: No list in context This means that the MTListInclude tag is referencing a< TypeList that does not exist. The name of the list referenced in the MTListInclude tag should match the name of the list exactly as it appears on the TypeLists tab, including capitalization and spacing. If you’ve recently deleted or renamed a TypeList, this would be the first thing to check.
That totally makes sense to you, right? Right?
But it really was an easy fix. See, I did "recently rename a Typelist." I changed "Our Rule og Six" to "Our Rule of Six." Because that’s just the wild and crazy kind of girl I am. But my template doesn’t care about spelling. It grabs fast to the first name you save, typo-infested or not.
Isn’t this just the most interesting post I’ve ever written? Heh.
Joyful news from Helena‘s mother:
PRAISE GOD!!!! OUR DAUGHTER IS HOME SAFE AND SOUND!!!!!
If you are in the area and available for flyer recovery, I will joyfully be at the park from 9-5 Saturday only to coordinate flyer retrieval instead of dispersal!!!
Thank you all for all your help, prayers and support. This is an awesome community of homeschoolers and friends—I could not have made it through this without your prayers and support.
Please do not forget all the missing & runaway children out there—they need our help too.
Thank you so very very very very much – words can not express my gratitude.
Susan Nowicke
I can only imagine the depths of the family’s relief. As the days wore on after Helene’s disappearance, Susan’s emails to our city homeschooling list were a sobering reminder of how little support ‘the system’ has for parents seeking beloved runaway children. Because of Helena’s phone call to a friend a few days after her disappearance, she was classified as a runaway—and runaway numbers are so high that law enforcement agencies do not take on these cases and make any attempt to locate the children.
The family’s attempts to raise media interest—for TV news coverage would surely have been the fastest way to get Helena’s picture before a wide audience, thus greatly increasing the chances of locating her—were uniformly rebuffed because, they were told, this was "just another runaway."
"Just another runaway"—whose parents love her dearly and were desperate for her safe return. "Just another runaway"—who, although she may have left home voluntarily, certainly did so under puzzling circumstances, leaving behind all personal belongings including money, her phone, her jacket and clothing, and her iPod.
That phrase, just another runaway, as if "runaway" equals "throwaway," turns my stomach.
Helena’s family intends to keep the Find Helena website active as a resource for other families of missing children:
Please, in the coming days—continue to check back at this site. It is our hope to use this site to help others that are facing the same fearful situation that we did. They are still waiting for their joyful reunions. I pray that you will extend to them the kindness & support you have shown to our family.
(coming soon)
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Karen is talking about plans. Karen and I, we like to plan. I enjoy planning so much I could easily spend all my time making the plans and never get around to carrying them out. Actually, that was a little battle I had to fight with myself in the early days of this home education adventure, and the "do-er" just barely managed to squeak out a victory—but the "planner" makes a vicious sally now and then and has to be thrust firmly back in her place.
I like planning so much I could give it up for Lent. That’d be a sacrifice with a real sting, let me tell you.
The perpetual joke on me, of course, is that the surefirest way to bring about a major family upheaval is for me to make some nice, neat, printed-out-on-grids plans. I am still laughing over the September I made a bee-yoo-tiful color-coded schedule for our days, a gorgeously detailed plan including everything from piano practice to nature walks, and so proud of this masterpiece was I that I brought it to our mothers’ meeting to show off—and the very next day I sprained my ankle quite badly at the park, and I spent the next six weeks mostly on the couch with my leg propped up. Ha. I believe my pretty schedule made a very fine coaster for my iced tea.
Undeterred, I am still writing out plans. This summer, I plan to:
• figure out how to navigate the beach with five fair-skinned children, one of whom won’t be able to hear me since his hearing aids aren’t going within five miles of the water, and another of whom thinks sand is for eating.
• finish our read-aloud of Swallows and Amazons, finally—this has been one of Jane’s favorite books for years, and I don’t know why it is taking me so long to read it to the other girls. It’s so deliciously good, but we’ve been reading it for months.
• have the girls continue to practice their burgeoning cookie-making skills
• learn the names of the trees in our neighborhood
• try to catch up to Jane in Latin
• see a bit of California
• make more plans for fall.