October 31, 2009 at 6:50 pm (Creativity, education)
Tags: education, living, love, they blew my mind, Tom Milsom
Jesus, Mary, Mohammad and Vishnu.
You’ll have to watch Tom Milsom’s video first (the one down below), but then scroll down a little and watch all the responses.
Science, religion, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology….
Utterly, wickedly cool.
October 23, 2009 at 4:43 pm (education)
Tags: children, Khalil Gibran, new planets, Radio Free School
October 19, 2009 at 6:32 pm (Creativity)
Tags: Benny and Joon, out of your tree, Sam, Walaikum, words of wisdom
In the movie Benny and Joon, the mentally ill Joon looks at Sam and says, “You’re out of your tree.” Sam replies, “It’s not my tree.” (Try around 7:30 if you don’t want to watch the whole clip.)
These are some of the wisest words I’ve ever heard.
Yesterday, Walaikum asked me if I thought he was different than other students his age. Short answer: yes. The long one involves his thought processes and his personal views and his experiences (and the fact that no one is the same as anyone else). Walaikum said he doesn’t want to be different, he wants to be “normal”.
I didn’t know what to say.
When I posted it on Facebook, one of my sisters made it a whole 9 minutes before not-so-subtly implying that perhaps he was talking to the wrong person if he’s looking for someone to put him on the path of conformity.
I’ve been thinking about it for 19 hours now; still can’t think of how to support Walaikum in his decision to be “normal”. Think I’m going to have to be a terrible mentor and have at him about individuality. Think I might have to find a way to demonstrate that his tree is the best tree for him. Although, maybe it won’t be so terrible; while Walaikum doesn’t know me the way my sisters do, it must be pretty obvious that I don’t fit neatly into normal society. Perhaps he knew what I would do.
Time to go plant a new tree.
October 16, 2009 at 1:31 am (education)
Tags: Blake Boles, College Without High School, Macleans, unschooling
University Without High School
The article ain’t much; the book is better.
October 14, 2009 at 6:09 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: Homme de Sept-Iles, I'll never like sports, Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Mystique, Skydome
My exposure to sports has been rather limited. I used to watch hockey with my dad, cheering whenever the Montreal Canadiens got a goal… and then I learned to get out of my infant seat and I didn’t have to watch anymore. My best friend and her son are into sports, so I’ll sometimes bring my knitting and sit on the sidelines to watch my pseudo-nephew run up and down a soccer field like a crazed bug; I like to make mental images of my friend clinging to the edge of her seat and muttering scatological obscenities when a bunch of pre-adolescent boys miss a chance at a goal, and then I describe the images to her later over a large glass of wine. Other than that, I try to avoid sports. They smell bad.
If I must do sports, I’ve found a way to enjoy them. Montreal Mystique has this great little page called “Musings“. Read at first out of obligation but now voluntarily, the sports parts are okay (really like the one-liners) but I live for the “intermissions”. Being a good mother, I once took my kids to a baseball game at the Skydome (yes, it was still “the Skydome”) and we all agreed that intermission was the most entertaining part. If Homme de Sept-Iles would just write about intermission all the time, I could honestly say “I like sports”.
October 13, 2009 at 4:52 pm (education)
A friend of mine just put her son back into the school system. He had been homeschooled for Grades 7 and 8, but wanted to try high school. The decision was rather last-minute and my friend didn’t have a portfolio put together (not that she could have done much anyway, as a good deal of her son’s learning was unschooling). Their local school had insisted the boy sign up for Grade 9 applied levels for everything, because he would have to “catch up” to everyone else.
Homeschooling does not mean not learning.
The boy was transferred to academic levels this week because he was getting 100% in everything. His mother is leaving him in applied English for next semester because he has no interest in English and doesn’t really care about literature; her son is not likely to go to university but if he does it certainly won’t be for English. Seems reasonable to me.
While I will gladly tear strips off the stupid guidance counselor who guided this family so very badly, I suppose I must consider the chicken-or-egg theory. Who taught this guidance counselor to be a guidance counselor? There are many homeschoolers in that area, so it can’t be the only exposure the guy had to alternative education. Are the school boards doing anything to ensure their employees are able to do their jobs? I realise funds are tight but it wouldn’t cost them anything to have a couple of homeschoolers come in to talk with a new guidance counselor.
Walaikum recently had to write an essay about whether Canadians view post-secondary education as credential or educational. He did a great job on it. However, we spent about an hour and a half talking about the differences between the two adjectives. The concept of education purely for the sake of knowledge is a difficult thing for Walaikum to handle yet he deliberately asked questions until he understood. If a high school student is able to do that, why can’t a guidance counselor?
October 5, 2009 at 3:11 pm (Reading, education)
Tags: mixing elements, rant, testing, who do they think they are?
A cousin of mine is a Reading Recovery specialist in the US. Apparently, they have standardised testing – just as we do in Ontario – and she is having to prepare first-grade students for a written test in their second week of school, and give them weekly spelling tests of nonsense words. She wrote a letter to my mother in which she complained about having to give up 20% of her teaching time to prepare the kids for these ridiculous tests. My mother forwarded the letter to me. I think my mother likes my rants. 
Business dudes who are very good at business may be quite useful when one is organising a school; most educators are not likely to be very good at the business side of things because they’re too busy concentrating on the students. If I ever get to open a school, I’ll definitely hire some business dude. But the business dude will never be allowed in my school when the students are there.
It’s like the elements: air and fire are both perfect elements but if there is too much air either the fire gets blown out or it rages out of control. Add the wrong kind of air and you get a pretty nifty explosion which is fun to watch until all the particles fall back to earth and make a royal mess.
Do you have any suggestions for the improvement of education? Great! Write them down on a piece of paper and we’ll circulate it amongst the students (’cause they’re the ones who are doing the learning… and even paying us to teach them), and we’ll see what they think. If any of the Grade 1 students want to write essays and spell nonsense words, we’ll give you a call. In the meantime, here are some nonsense words for you to study for next week: freedom, democracy, reason.
October 4, 2009 at 6:13 pm (education)
I remember the day I fell in love with Berthe Morisot. It was in Grade 10. We had a new art teacher because the old one (one of my favourite people, who later became my mentor) had gone off the deep end and had to take a little break from teaching. I was mightily ticked off by the whole situation; even if the new art teacher had been a good one, I wouldn’t have admitted it. (The next art teacher was a good one, but I pretended I didn’t like him either.)
The new art teacher even had us use a text book. A text book. For art? Yep. E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The new teacher even had us start at the beginning of the text book and work our way through it in chronological order.
On page 407 of The Story of Art is an image of Manet’s The Balcony. Berthe Morisot is the seated woman. When I discovered she was a real person – Manet’s sister-in-law – I started researching. Not only was she astoundingly beautiful, she was an Impressionist; I loved her for her audacity to stand up to art snobs and sexists, alike. I loved her paintings. I loved the group of people she hung out with. I wanted to be Berthe Morisot.
Morisot is still one of my ideals. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf. Woolf provides me with a mirror for the dichotomy of my life, and Morisot brings light to the dark places.
My favourite Morisot painting is The Butterfly Hunt. The tree in the top right-hand corner is the best thing ever painted. 
October 1, 2009 at 2:55 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: Canada Day, National Day, People's Republic of China, racism
Today is National Day in China. It’s the 60th anniversary of the PRC. Naturally, I’ve been talking about it with the students who live in China (none of the students who live in Canada have brought it up). In the discussions, we’ve mostly been working on vocabulary: The People’s Republic of China, fireworks, parade, and the mangled English pronunciation of Chairman Mao.
I was not inclined to ask how anyone felt about National Day.
No one insisted on telling me how they felt about National Day.
We talked about the things that happened today. We talked about some of the history. We talked about the fireworks that were so loud we had a hard time talking over Skype. To my students, it was just another holiday to be celebrated. There was no more patriotic pride than usual. No one lorded their culture over mine.
CBC had the guts to put up this site for/about Chinese Canadians on National Day. I like the guy with the French name who talks about the food, and I like the anonymous poster who points out that no one government is perfect. There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing over this year’s National Day celebration (but no other year; is a country only bad on its 60th anniversary?) and discussion about the various things the Chinese government is doing.
So, does that mean Canada Day is all about our government? Nothing about the people, the land, the culture? Statistics Canada estimates the Canadian population to be 33 796 948 people. Take out the million people or so who constitute our various governments, and that leaves about 32 796 948 people who do not deserve to be celebrated on July 1st?
Oh.
And how is this any different than any other form of racism?
