Thank You and Gary Paulsen

First of all, thank you for all your kind comments both here and off-line after my post yesterday. I am going to attribute my relative melancholy and Sophie's increased seizures to solar flares and Mercury being in retrograde, because why the hell not?

I posted that photo of Oliver above because it captures perfectly what sort of boy he was and continues to be. Looking straight at you, right? He's the cleverest of children and always has been -- that's why his difficulty reading was so difficult for me to understand at first. When he came home from first grade, so many years ago, and claimed that he was a bad reader, I knew that he needed to be removed from Catholic school where rigor and conformity were prized and individual learning abilities not celebrated. He attended a wonderful constructivist public elementary school for four years where he was diagnosed with some auditory and visual learning issues and where he thrived despite an ever-growing dislike of books and reading. Middle school, though, was a disaster, much of it chronicled here, and last year about this time, Oliver's unhappiness reached its near peak, and I pulled him from school to begin our homeschooling adventure.

Last night, I downloaded the sixth or seventh Gary Paulsen book on Oliver's Kindle. Over the summer, he read four books, which I can honestly say is probably the most books he's read in his life. He read them on his own, listening to the audible version while he read and exclaiming after each one how much he loved it. It seems like a small miracle that my boy is reading and loving reading. That he reached this at the age of thirteen is perfectly fine. I shudder to imagine what might have happened had I left him at the Catholic school or even the middle school that had departed so dramatically from its original constructivist intentions. Every now and then I feel a bit of panic about what we're doing and how it's all going to shake out. We did the right thing, though. Oliver is reading with joy -- something I had imagined when he was a little guy but had thoroughly lost as he grew. And thank you, especially, to Gary Paulsen.

Mind-Blown

Thanks to a homeschooling mentor of mine, I have been reading and re-reading this incredible article about children and education. The title is A Thousand Rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning.  As I gear up to do what may be a complete "school year" at home with Oliver, I feel periodically panicked and instinctively confident. My friend sent the article more than a week ago, but I opened it tonight, during a less than instinctively confident moment. I took a deep breath as I read, not so much because it confirms what I feel, instinctively, but because it's written so beautifully and is particularly persuasive. It makes sense. It deals with the madness. As my friends send their children off to four-year colleges, after a frantic year of freaking out about the process, as my own son gets ready for another grueling year in a typical Catholic high school (that he very much wants to stay in, despite my own reservations,) as Sophie is so very much "left behind" in her local public high school, I am relieved to be following my instincts -- and, most importantly, Oliver's, for another year.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

We have radically altered our own evolved species behavior by segregating children artificially in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from text-based artificial materials instead of contextualized real-world activities, by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all of this will have complex and unpredictable results. In fact, it does. While some children seem able to function in this completely artificial environment, really significant numbers of them cannot. Around the world, every day, millions and millions and millions of normal bright healthy children are labelled as failures in ways that damage them for life. And increasingly, those who cannot adapt to the artificial environment of school are diagnosed as brain-disordered and drugged. 

Here's a clip from a documentary which is having screenings all over the world:

Schooling The World: The White Man's Last Burden trailer HD from lost people films on Vimeo.

Orange and Pink: Stirring Things Up

I wish those of you who aren't could be a part of the discussion on my Facebook page about an article I posted today called Why Do President Obama's children go to a segregated school? Here's the link, and I'd love to hear what you think. I'll start you off with the same thing that I said when I posted it. As soon as I get their permission, I might post some of the other comments because they're incredibly enlightening -- on both sides of the debate.

Elizabeth Aquino

21 hrs · 

Please read and think about it. And if you have children in a private school, let me know if your children have any classmates with disabilities.

Why do President Obama’s children go to a segregated school?

Not one of Sidwell Friends School’s more than 1,100 students has a physical disability.                                       

THEHILL|BY JENNIFER LASZLO MIZRAHI