| You Are a Plain Ole Cup of Joe |
| You Are a Plain Ole Cup of Joe |
 But don't think plain - instead think, uncomplicated You're a low maintenance kind of girl... who can hang with the guys Down to earth, easy going, and fun! Yup, that's you: the friend everyone invites. And your dependable too. Both for a laugh and a sympathetic ear. |
I don't think the thing for me has been civil disobedience so much as the importance not asking permission. For instance, we had kids in our public school who had trouble reading or writing. A few of us just got together and said we'd better go ahead and help out. We suspected that the principal wouldn't want us around. So we simply went into the school and scattered ourselves among the teachers and began to work with the kids. It's true that three months later we were kicked out, but we got a lot done, and methods and forms were created so parents could come back and be useful. People will say to this day, "How did you women do that? Who did you talk to?" We didn't talk to anyone. We just did it. So I can't say it was civil disobedience. It was just an effort to make change by making change. We talk a lot about living in a free and democratic country but we're always asking permission to do very simple things.and
...Which is how I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.This second quote makes me think of all of the time I wasted learning "things" that someone else thought I should "know" -- and grateful for the things I've learned that have been useful, like music and sewing and writing. The first quote reminds me to be brave, and not give away my rights, I'm thinking especially as they pertain to my children and family.
1. Age At Next Birthday: 38 – This cracks me up. She looks horrified – not how I feel about 38 – just the best picture on the first page. Upon further investigation, I found that it's page 38 of some document...phew!
4. Favorite Object(s): books, my
6. Favorite Animal: cat
7. Favorite Color(s): green – OK, this photo was at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Scary!
9. Town I Was Born In: Andrews Air Force Base,
10. Bad Habit I Have: (where do I begin…) multitasking
That was fun! Tag! You’re it!
11. We didn't go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.and
17. Stop saying, "Oh, I could never homeschool!" Even if you think it's some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you're horrified. One of these days, I won't bother disagreeing with you any more.Read and enjoy!
andWhen it comes to time, children and adults are like different species thrown together in a cruel zoological experiment: We hurry exhaustedly to and fro while our kids dawdle around with boundless energy. A child sitting on the floor with untied shoes, for example, might well exasperate his late and waiting grown-ups, but those moments unwind for him from an infinite spool. Little kids don't multitask, as you've surely noticed, and shoe-tying is rarely first on the agenda. "Children have a sort of strange, elastic relationship to time," is how Canadian journalist Carl Honoré explains it to me. "They have their own rhythm — and it's not at all like an adult rhythm. It kind of ebbs and flows. It defies the clock."
Honoré is not exactly speaking off the cuff here: In addition to being the father of two kids, 8 and 5, he's the author of In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. In that book, Honoré describes a cultural epidemic of what he calls "time-sickness," the constant pressure to move faster, to get more done. With more and more kids overscheduled and "living like high-powered grown-ups," childhood — with time for play, imagination, and carefree idleness — may be its most heartbreaking casualty.
But how does going for a swim turn into an occasion for anxiety in the first place? I think of the German word Honoré taught me: freizeitstress, which translates as "free-time stress." Hurrying your kids through the playground, the weekend, the family vacation. We know this phenomenon all too well.Rushing through things that are supposed to be fun...now when I stop and think about it...I'm guilty of this too...I think it has something to do with always wanting to be productive/active. Must...remember...to...RELAX and ENJOY!
“I think it would be a wonderful way to be schooled,” says Dr. Diane Beals, associate professor of education at the University of Tulsa. “But it takes a great deal of thought and planning. It would work for kids who are curious and highly motivated, and parents who are highly motivated and have a deep understanding of the fields of knowledge they are trying to teach their children. But, there are a lot of kids who just naturally don’t want to learn anything academic. The basic assumption is that kids do want to learn. I don’t think you can say that about all kids everywhere.”
John Holt believed that all children are hard wired to learn. “This idea that children won’t learn without outside reward or penalties…usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” wrote Holt in his book, How Children Fail. “So many people have said to me, ‘If we didn’t make children do things, they wouldn’t do anything.’ Even worse, they say, ‘If I weren’t made to do things, I wouldn’t do anything.’ It is the creed of a slave. When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, ‘You may believe that, but I don’t believe it. You didn’t feel that way about yourself when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?’ To a large degree, it was school.”
