Car Office and Futility

I dropped Oliver off at two very cool seminars for homeschooled kids the other day and decided to work in my car with my new laptop. I rolled the windows down, parked on a side street and began to work on the two presentations I'm doing this weekend at the Epilepsy Summit in Manhattan Beach. I also worked a bit on the ghostwriting project. I listened to birds in the almost piercing silence of the neighborhood (a great relief from the almost constant Mcnoise from McMansion construction in my neighborhood that includes really loud mariachi band music), put my face up to the sun and felt glad to be alive and grateful to be working.

While honored to have been asked to participate twice at this weekend's summit, I have to be honest and tell you that I sort of, kind of, hate these things now. I opened the program and saw, immediately, that the biggest sponsors are the big pharmaceutical companies. There will be some wonderful family seminars and programs and, undoubtedly, lots of information, but contemplating the big picture just makes me feel trapped and tired and alien. Just today I spoke with a friend in New York City who wants to try cannabis for her young daughter who suffers from a terrible brain disorder. Charlotte's Web Hemp Oil is available to be shipped in most of the states because of its classification as hemp, but there's still a lot of gray area, and we were going back and forth on whether it's better for me to pick it up for her here and then ship it to her in New York or whether she should drive over into New Jersey and pick it up there. Bullshit, right? On top of that is the question of her nursing staff at home who might not be able to give her daughter the oil because they can only administer meds prescribed by a doctor, and there aren't any doctors right now who can or even would do so. Ironically, while the Powers That Be futz around with their need for more research, I'm reading (for a project I'm doing) about the reams of studies and evidence of efficacy done, in some cases, scores if not hundreds of years ago. 

Sigh. I guess my ambivalence has something to do with the fact that nothing traditional has ever really helped Sophie or my family, and while I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I'm hard put to participate in anything at this point under the auspices of big pharmaceutical companies. I admit as well to backing out of doing the hard lobbying work that some of my comrades and colleagues are doing right this very moment to pass a bill in Congress that would make cannabis oil more readily available.

We're talking years and years, people, for any of this to truly happen.




Sometimes I just want to put Sophie under my arm or throw her over my shoulder and run far away. At the very least, I'd rather sit in my car typing while listening to the birds than shout into the vacuum that is the medical world.

Dispatch from the Homeschool Revolution: SUP and STEM

Oliver and I drove down to Redondo Beach this afternoon where he got in the water with a small group of people and some paddleboards to learn about the local marine life and biology.

He reported sightings of hundreds of sea lions and starfish. They also learned about tsunamis and earthquakes -- how it happens, when it happens.

I'm aware that many of you are snowed and iced in or under interminable gray skies.

I know, you would miss the seasons, if you lived out here. I understand.

It was about 68 degrees right by the ocean today and is bound to get down in the forties tonight.

I wish you were here.

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.