Author: Jason Zerbey

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More, Please

Rhythm. Balance. The tune is always changing and we must listen our bodies to stay in the dance.

This summer has been all soccer. I was playing 4-5 games a week. It didn’t leave me feeling able to train jiu-jitsu nor practice yoga as frequently as I wanted to.

None of these practices can be done at my whim, I need to work within other people’s schedules, although I am blessed with plentiful opportunities in all of them. In the last couple weeks I’ve gone down to one soccer match a week with increasing yoga and jiu-jitsu sessions.

My body was a little surprised. For soccer, the 6-day break shook it out of its rhythm. I certainly need more than that. Come fall, I’ll be playing at least twice a week.

For jiu-jitsu, I finally trained two days in a row and observed the benefits of close repetition. I felt the fatigue on the second day, but saw a potential in myself to roll more often.

More yoga is a no brainer. My mind, body, and spirit always feel recovered and more prepared after an hour of hot vinyasa.

I’m approaching a balance and rhythm that I hope is successful through fall and into the future.

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You Can Kindergarten

Formal instruction isn’t necessary for kindergarten, maybe not even helpful, maybe deleterious.

The entire world is your free resource. Children are natural learners and will gather mounds of knowledge if you take them out to explore.

Mandatory kindergarten is only a couple generations old and there is a resurgence of young children being educated by their families.

If you’re nervous about your responsibilities, please reach out to me or a local homeschooling group.

I assure you can do this.

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Support for All New Homeschoolers

10 September 2021 EDIT: Homeschool Delaware has changed their policy on permitting certain events. My post that created the stir remains deleted and I feel strongly that there is an air of unfriendliness towards those who are not excessively compliant to public health recommendations. I find this out of sync with home education principles in that we often urge parents to be minimally compliant with overreaching school administrators.

Original post follows:

The largest homeschooling group in Delaware has taken it upon themselves to go beyond State mandates and limit the ability of its members to communicate.

After Governor Carney declared that all K-12 schools, public and private, and childcare centers would have to mask children full time, there was an influx of interest and participation in the homeschool community.

All Delaware homeschool groups became busy with new members, questions, and general activity. The mask mandate was the clear motivation.

Homeschool Delaware decided to expand the Governor’s mask order to include any indoor gathering mentioned on their page. They would not allow postings by members which defied their newly declared limitations.

One chooses home education for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common is to escape the rules and regulations of schools. Whether too lenient or stringent, a family parts ways with the school system because it no longer shares their values.

One certainly doesn’t go through the anxiety and difficulty of home education to accept less personal freedom.

Although it is the largest, it is not the only group that supports home educators in Delaware. I strongly recommend the following Facebook groups if you need help on your journey (Spoiler Alert: You do):


Delaware First State Homeschool

Allschoolers of New Castle County

Unschoolers and Others

Homeschool Recess Kent County DE

Time to Build: A Delaware Lego Club

Pages Alive Theater

Delaware Homeschool Support

SLIME Socially Learning in Multiple Environments

UnSkate

Sussex County Homeschool Middle and High School Group

Lifelong Learners of Delaware

Field Trips for Delaware Homeschoolers

Elements Homeschool Co-op

Homeschool Hangout Kent County

Tri-State Homeschool, Inc.

Homeschool Adventures (Sharon’s Adventure Afield) NJ PA DE

Southern Chester Co and Northern DE Homeschoolers

There were more than I expected and I’m grateful to build this list and connect with some people I haven’t seen in a while.

Below is the post and thread that was removed from Homeschool Delaware.

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Friends

I don’t have to ask my friends to support, encourage, or fight for me. They just do it.

Which is a pretty good arrangement because I can be terrible at asking for those things.

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Twisted Unschool

We love a good deep dive. We obsess over Lego builds, Pokémon cards, and Minecraft. After I read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days aloud, we watched multiple film adaptations and used a dry erase globe to map the journey. Before we attend a stage production of Shakespeare, we listen to commentaries, read children’s versions, and watch a film or two.

Disclosure: The links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. 

Stephen King’s The Shining has become our latest rabbit hole. The audio book took us 16 hours over several weeks to complete. It was darker than I expected and more personal. Jack Torrance is an alcoholic writer who has not lived up to the promise of his youth. He’s tormented by his perceived responsibilities and feels that his next failure could mean complete tragedy. It does. He leaves his son with a lone parent and plenty of nightmares.

I heard many of my darkest fears while listening between destinations.

Next we rented Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. I had only ever caught bits of the movie in the bad old days of broadcast television. Jack Nicholson is haunting as Torrance, but there seemed to be a few odd choices in what was preserved and jettisoned from the original text.

Tonight we watched Room 237, a hyper-detail exploration of the film. It delves into the departures from the book that appear to have intentionally enraged King. It also examines conspiracy theories and synchronicities that border on insanity. The movie appears to be as mad as Torrance and as expansive as the demons inhabiting the Overlook Hotel.

It has given us more history to traverse and ideas to carry forth as we continue to discuss and review what we have consumed.

Our next plan is to watch the 1997 TV miniseries. I watched it at the time, but entirely forget it. I don’t have high hopes but for the fact that it must cover the text more closely than Kubrick chose to.

I’ve never been thrilled by King and was not expecting this to be much more than a bit of scary entertainment in the car. I was delightfully wrong and look forward to learning more about Kubrick’s film and completing our viewing of the film adaptions.

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Perfect Timing

Delaware’s window for homeschool enrollment opened today, conveniently balanced against Governor Carney’s ruling that all children must wear masks in school.

There is one direct way to communicate your disatisfaction with unscientific mandates on children: take them out of government school.

The community of homeschoolers is growing. Although libraries and many institutions have failed our children in the last year, the home-educating moms and dads in Delaware are amazingly supportive.

Homeschool enrollment is easy and there is still plenty of time to figure out how you want to proceed.

The following is from the Delaware Department of Education and will get you on your way to freedom:

Good afternoon,

Nonpublic schools are required to annual report to the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) a statement of pupil enrollment as of the last school day in September on or before October 5th, pursuant to 14 Del. C. § 2704(b). 

You are receiving this email as a reminder to complete your annual enrollment report. Please complete your school’s required annual enrollment submission on or before October 5, 2022, through the DDOE’s Nonpublic School System. To report, log into EdAccess (https://launchpad.classlink.com/ddoe) and click on the Nonpublic Schools application icon to start the enrollment submission process. Select the Annual Enrollment tab at the top of the screen. Be sure to read the instructions on the screen and submit the enrollment for your school.  

To see a copy of the Enrollment Report or Acknowledgement Letter, please select the Records tab after you have submitted the annual enrollment.
If you have any questions or issues, please email nps@doe.k12.de.us. Please remember we receive a large volume of tickets during the reporting period and are responding in the order they are received. We appreciate your patience during this time. 

If you plan to close your school, please email the above email address with your school name, effective closure date and reason for closure. 
Please be advised that the Delaware Department of Education – Nonpublic Support office is not currently open to the public due to COVID-19. If you have any questions or issues, please email nps@doe.k12.de.us. 

Thank You, 

Delaware Department of Education Nonpublic School Support Team

nps@doe.k12.de.us

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The Bad Guys Love War

Republicans and Democrats agree on War. They love it. In my lifetime I have seen both parties gleefully start new military excursions all over the world, typically targeting poor countries.

Yemen has been called the poorest country in the world and Barack Obama’s war there has continued to kill through R and D regimes.

Joe Biden again extended our 20-year stay in Afghanistan and it remains to be seen whether he will remove all US troops.

Scott Horton may be the greatest voice in exposing the political elite’s obsession with empire building. His podcast contains so much information per episode that it can be difficult to absorb at first, but after a few episodes, you will start to understand the arc of US war over the last 20 years and beyond.

A great place to start is this interview on Dave Smith’s Part of the Problem: The State of the World with Scott Horton.

Horton has also had many informative episodes on The Tom Woods Show, in shorter format than the previous resources.

I particularly hope young people can access this critical information before choosing to join the US military. The American press is in collusion with the government to hide the death and destruction our elected officials are delivering to the most vulnerable populations of the world. People like Scott Horton are working hard to starve the war machine.

Once informed, many young people will refuse to participate in foreign military incursions. In this way we can force the military to focus on true threats to our homeland.

Disclosure: The links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.