Yearbook blogs- a creative journey and an assignment for me too!

  I have the privilege of teaching at a homeschooling co-op I help organize.  In addition to my art classes, I added AP Psychology and yearbook to this year's mix.  
   The yearbook staff all have to create a personal blog that will document their year; be their own personal yearbook.   We have 5 out of the 6 kids able to participate with online journals.  We got our last participant in tonight.  As I look over the kid's blogs, each one is an amazingly accurate vision of their personalities, their aesthetics and their conversational styles.  The colors, the images, the text font.... I certainly did not go into as much depth when I set this one up!  It was obvious that, while this was an assignment, each one took it to heart that it was a view of themselves.  
      I can't wait to see how this yearbook shapes up.  It was one of my favorite classes in highschool.  I look fondly back on being on the team responsible for keeping track of everyone's life for 1 year. With the addition of the personal yearbooks, I'm excited to be let into their world and read about what's important to each of them.
Here's my daughter's site.  Very Mayah-esc:)

A journey of courage- the rocky beginning

 So we're just one month into the "unschooled" sojourn.  I'm getting my sea legs, so to speak, about what my obligations are to my child, and where her freedoms extends. 
        Here's the thing- I firmly, & with about the same conviction I believe in gravity with, believe that "what you do not inspect, you can not expect".  (Thank-you Ingrid Cannon, for that irreplaceable gem.)  So my child choose several courses to cover this year in her "year off" (with math being the one exception)  Great, she took the helm.  But at what point is it the first mate's job to look at the steerage captain and say, "Ice burg"?  My daughter is behind in work that should have been turned in- 2 weeks into the offical school year.  But she says, I should not tell her what to do, when to do it, or how to do it, because this is her "year off".  This illustrates to me that the full extent of our partnership and expectations were not completely verbalized before taking this adventure on.  We did not talk about the important things to the extent that she remembers the finer details of our arrangement as I remember giving them.   I'm wondering if a written contract at this later stage can resolve the issues.  Mostly, I'm getting teenage death ray looks from my 14 yr, and monotoned, serial killer voice instructions, like, "Mom, you are breaking your promise to let me unschool. I will do it when I want to do it."
  In my mind, a year off was, "I won't give you work to do that you don't pick yourself."  It was never going to be, "You can do anything you want, including nothing."   So.  The 64 thousand dollar question is- how to fix what is broken?  Or perhaps the question is- what does unschooling look like at my house?

Teaching Information literacy

Teaching Literacy use to mean teaching someone to read well.  It later included writing and expressing yourself verbally.  Today, literacy must also include "understanding online material sources" (coupled occasionally with good ol' common sense).  I received this email this morning from a  relative I love and respect very much  (Encase someone doesn't read further than the email repost, this story is not true )-

>Not pleasant but it makes a good point and it should never be forgotten.

>This one should be give wide circulation. 

VERY IMPORTANT - ALWAYS REMEMBER      When  I was a kid, I couldn't understand why Eisenhower was so popular. Maybe  this will explain why. General  Eisenhower Warned Us.[ It  is a matter of history that  when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight  Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible  photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding  villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the  dead. He did this because he said in words to this  effect: 'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the  witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will  get up and say that this never happened' This week,  the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school  curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population which claims it  never occurred. It is not removed as yet.. However, this is a frightening  portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country  is giving into it. It is now more than 60 years after the Second  World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a  memorial chain, in memory of the, six million Jews, 20 million Russians,  10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were 'murdered,  raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated' while many  in the world looked the other way! Now, more than ever,  with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,'  it is imperative to make sure the world never  forgets. [This  e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people! Be a link in the memorial  chain and help distribute this around the world. How many years  will it be before the attack on the  World Trade Center 'NEVER  HAPPENED', because  it offends some Muslim??? Do not just delete this message; it  will take only a minute to pass this  along. FREEDOM  ISN'T FREE...SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT! Hmmm.. The United Kingdom, who got flattened like a bad souffle in WW2, not educating it's newer generations on the horrors of the holocaust and the evils of the Third Reich?  The UK, who is more anti- Muslim than we are, perhaps because, sadly, they have had more attacks (though lost fewer ppl) than we have from Islamic extremist, deciding to cave to "Muslims who are offended" by a historical event? Really?  And I should pass this on to as many ppl as I can?  Really?      I guess what gets my goat here is this is clearly an anti-Muslim email spread for the sole purpose of hating a specific religious people, of making Muslims a "them" that we can hate, take rights away from and look down on. The email didn't want a call to action to protect our freedom to a factual history.  It wasn't calling for us to honor those who died in the holocaust, or the 9/11 victims, with a moment of silence so they may never be forgotten.  It was a call to hatred. (And before anyone gets on their high horse to ride over and refute me on the evils of Islam, please be reminded that the Klu Klux Klan calls themselves a Christian group.  Jihadist are picking and choosing from their book just like the Klu klux Klan backs everything they do up with the good book, The Bible.  Extremist are called such because they sit on the fridge of their religious community and do not, by definition, define it or represent the majority of those in it.) I'm sad that a person I love was duped into passing on what they believed was "an important email" that I should know about and read.   I have a counter argument- Information Literacy.  Information literacy 101 is Snopes.com.  Use it liberally (even if you're a conservative).  It's free and a wonderful source of help in determining if an online email chain if worthy of forwarding to everyone you know.  Here 's a good list of  (what should be obvious) fake wesbites.  It includes a webpage on dehydrated water!  Here's a generally cool website I was clued into by a FB friend, Sherene, about an article describing a tree octopus and how 87% of the kids who read the article believed it, because it was online.  Let me repeat that-They believed it because it was posted online.  In fact, most of the kids who didn't believe the tree octopus existed had had prior exposure to the page by what I can only believe is an amazing, forward thinking teacher.   I had thought to be rather sly; wait a couple of days, send all the "Muslim hate history" recipients the amazing Tree Octopus site, wait 5 days and then send the information literacy page by Wolchover.  We live in a fast world and learning logic, critical thinking and relying on previous experience to help us decipher current information is not a luxury anyone can afford to live without.   We need our children- and ourselves- to be critical thinkers.  Information literacy is one step to that overall package.

A journey of courage- the "unschooled" year.

Like a voter crossing over their political affiliation to vote for the "other" guy, I'm sure a few will read this and say, "DUH! Unschooling is awesome!  Can't believe you waited until now to do it."  The truth is we started out unschooling. Not because I didn't know about the other options- Classical, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, Reggio Emilia, or Unit studies- but because I thought that is how children learn best- through spontaneous play and without effort.  But about the same time your child stops playing with blocks- about 7 or 8- it's also time to keep up with them.  In my personal theories of education, this is the time we "school". There is a set number of things they will learn through intentional exposure with directed learning;  And that's leads us through the last 6 years.
        Enter year 14 of my eldest's child's life.  This year will be her "unschooled" year.  By this I mean, she gets to pick everything she's doing.  I'm not allowed to sign her up for opportunities :)  I'm allowed to assign her papers.  And to be frank, that's hard for me!  But it's also the reason why she gets to take a year doing everything she wants.  At 14, what would be traditionally be the start of her 9th grade, she has 19 highschool credits. (You only need 26 to graduated with an advanced degree.) So she's been on a warp speed of classes- having taken her first highschool course in 6th grade- and did very well in it, which encouraged us to fill 7th grade with classes as well.  And so here we are, with this great moment to seize- take this year to do what she wants, what she loves, to seek her passions unbridled by the restrictions of the usual load of classes I give her so she'll "be on track".  
        Well, we got ahead of the track! Way ahead. And at this pace, she'll graduate when she's 15.  Part of me is all for wearing that shiny ego badge of "My kid graduated at 15". I've seen articles on many 12 year old highschool graduates.  WOW. 12. But my first thought is not, 'how did the parents do that?', it's ' what will that child do in college?' What will, what was arguably some of the most fun years of my life, going to be like for a 12 yr old in many of the same situations?' 'What are the advantages?'- because from where I stand, I can only see the downsides. So graduating my child early, super early, is not what I want to do. It's not what I want for her.
      So this year is a slight pause form the regularly scheduled events. I handed the reigns over to her and am watching where it takes her.  Now this is not to say she will be loafing around, not doing anything. Quite the opposite; She's already signed up herself up for Yearbook, AP psychology, Italian, and Pre-calculus; (the only exception to the unschooled rule was math.  You have to keep doing math, especially higher math or you lose it.) We also purchased "One year adventure novel" on her request, which is a program that guides young writers through making their own novel, hopefully, as the title says in one year.  She wants to volunteer at a marine science institute, but we're having trouble because she's only 14.  Apparently 16 is the magic insurance number and despite the numerous opportunities that lie around us- and friends who work there that said they would mentor her- we have not been able to break into this field of volunteering.
        Unschooling a teenager may not seem a hard tool to use for other parents.  As an art teacher, I'm very comfortable with an amount of chaos and mess that apparently drives some others parents to muscles spasms. So we all have different tolerance levels for the different control buttons we run in our lives.  My control button appears to be set fairly high for educational direction, and so this is a moment of growth; not just for my lovely daughter, but also for me.  This is the beginning of a journey of courage that my husband and I have done well enough to let go and trust that she will be able to steer herself in the direction she wants to go.  She has dreams and desires for her future. This year, she gets to take herself there.
         Wish me all the serenity it will take to NOT ask for a papers on current events. To not ask her to take lessons in this or that because it will expose her to new and exciting experiences or knowledge. Grant me strength to keep trusting in the foundation that we have already given her, and to know that this has to be done.  Mostly, wish me luck in letting her make some of her own mistakes so she can grow from them, and not step in like a magic wand to make it all better!   This a journey of courage for me.