Category: Learning Lifestyle

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Learning Lifestyle: Lego Shopping Math

A fun and practical way to incorporate math into your child’s love of Lego.

Take a look at Lego catalog prices, then go to FB Marketplace, a physical/online reseller, and/or craigslist for the same sets.

The basic math is about 10 cents per piece for a new, non-franchise set (City, Friends, etc.) Sets with special minifigs (Batman, Minions, Toy Story) go above that.

With that knowledge, it becomes much easier to price compare without looking up the new set price.

This could be a practical way to discuss value and price comparisons in a field of interest. I know my boys can look at a price and say, “That’s ridiculous.” Makes them much more helpful in deciding when and where we spend our Lego budget.

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Learning Lifestyle: Winging It

Since March 16th, I’ve been praying for clarity. Clarity on what “this” means when people say, “When THIS is over…” Clarity on how to best navigate my own family through “this.” And clarity on where my talents belong. It has felt like a long time without clarity.


Before home education, unschooling, and our learning lifestyle, I left my job to care for my young sons. It was the first time I felt God speaking to me, He told me I was where I belonged. That’s no less the case today, but as my sons stretch their independence, I feel compelled to share what I have learned and expand my mission.


I’m facing a lack of confidence that has plagued me. I forgot how many times I’ve driven forward without the necessary skills, knowledge, nor resources. I forgot how many times it worked. I might be the king (maybe fool) of winging it.

I’m posting about our learning lifestyle at my blog for the next 30 days. I don’t have clarity on all these questions, but I see it on the horizon. I’m sharing this new journey as honestly and openly as I can.


Today a friend started a new FB group for anyone who may need a place to get their children out during the week. Few rules, masks and social distancing optional. A place where parents and children can get together in person, enjoy each other’s company, and support one another…regardless of educational philosophies and situations.


I work best with other people, In widowhood I’ve discovered how critical my social life is to my being. So come hang out, let’s learn from each other and have some fun while doing it (spoiler alert: “let’s learn from each other and have some fun while doing it” is my educational philosophy).

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1004305646667310
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30-Day Learning Lifestyle Challenge: Support and Encouragement

FB event: https://facebook.com/events/s/support-for-schooling-from-hom/306451337442180/?ti=cl

Registration

Over six years as the lead facilitator in a home education environment, I’ve increasingly become a devotee of the unschooling and (self described) learning lifestyle methods.

I’ve gone from worksheets and schedules to long afternoons in hidden swimming holes, libraries, museums, Youtube rabbit holes, and lots of places children don’t frequent.

Although I’m much more IRL than virtual, I’m excited to participate in this event to offer support to the many families who find their home becoming the new center of their education world.

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What Has Schooling Wrought?

The headline was changed to reflect that the CDC Director was specifically referring to high school students and the need to reopen schools.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/micaelaburrow/2020/07/28/redfield-says-more-abovebase-suicides-than-covid-deaths-n2573278?fbclid=IwAR1mMzEnl51HxAgk8s6d8XIuJIPyB5EDBsqN-LE4a9XUBOGOA0qlacftd74

The article is terribly written, obviously with one premise in mind, then sloppily editted to include the critical fact about students.

So what questions should we ask? Is the education system creating strong, healthy individuals who can overcome hardship? Or is it creating dependent addicts who can’t survive without it?

The hardest and most important job I see as a parent is to foster my children’s independence. I want to coexist with these humans who love me, yet nonetheless want to flee from my authority. School can’t do that. School says, “You must stay until 3:00.” “You must stay until June.” “You must stay until you are 18, 22…”

This is heartbreaking information. I pray for those who are ready to be awakened from a system designed to create compliant factory workers and soldiers.

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A Losing Streak

I lost count around seven days of loses. Maybe five soccer matches? A dozen matches of jiu-jitsu punishment? At least yoga isn’t competitive and I only play the video games I can win against my sons.

It could have been easy to be deflated leading our team into a soccer tournament tonight to determine the league champion.

I can’t take credit for my positive attitude.  God made me for adversity. He made me a magnet for positive people and messages. This afternoon I heard a meaningwave song from Akira the Don that used Jordan Peterson’s voice, “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” Yeah. That’s right, I can hijack the air of loss, the funk of defeat. I can stand tall, put a smile on my face, and be brazenly confident about leading a team into a tourney of largely younger guys (shit, some kids out there).

Our success was modest in the context of the tournament, but we won our first match and bravely faced the #1 seeded team of youngsters after a break of no more than fifteen minutes.. We stayed positive and worked together to carry ourselves with pride. We played our best matches of the short season.

Within the context of team success, a teammate took a moment to ask me about my success. He wanted to know how, at 41, I run like I do and play so hungrily.

I was kind of embarrassed at the compliment, but he pressed as he really wanted to know what my secret was. I gave him the God-made-me-crazy-for-chasing-things line and left it at that.

But I think there’s value in sharing more of my story. It’s taken great loss for me to get here.

By the end of 2017, we were a family of four who had found a beautiful church community and been baptized into Christ’s Way. We weren’t perfect, my eldest was acting out aggressively and my wife, Mary, and I knew we needed to work on our relationship. We were aware of the problems and working on them.

Not a couple months later, Mary got sick with influenza and strep infections. It was all unexpected and after six days in the hospital, she was gone. That was a losing streak to end them all.

In her final moments, Mary left me with a miraculous gift. I saw her rising to Heaven and, with her arms outstretched toward me, she sent a rainbow of Love into my heart. It was God’s Love, infinite. I didn’t have to worry about the loss of Love that I was experiencing, she had opened up an everlasting conduit that could never be closed.

As many widowers can attest, the first year after loss seems like an impossible dream amd nightmare. I chalk up my survival to an insanely positive attitude and an imbalance of adrenalin production. If not for those blessings, I imagine the drinking would have killed me. I had been a problem drinker for a long time, but now it was there on the darkest days of the nightmare.

I met a woman and stopped drinking because I wanted her and she wasn’t a fan of alcoholics. Mind you, I didn’t identify as such just yet, that’s why I thought I could turn it off to satisfy other desires.

It worked for a time, I even started going to AA and blogging about my newly discovered alcoholism. But it wasn’t for me in those first few months and when the relationship ended, I had to face exactly why I wasn’t drinking.

I read and listened and I came to Jesus’s words, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, Peterson helped by flipping that convention. We often take care of children, neighbors, and lovers better than we take care of ourselves. It seems altruistic until you realize that your ability to love comes from your self love. You can only love others as much as you love yourself.

I started a daily course of caring for myself. It started with some stretching and affirmations. I stopped going to AA meetings. I checked in with myself every day and remembered that feeling of infinite Love. Not drinking became too easy. I gave up fast food for myself and my boys. A small step in the right direction. I started therapy sessions for myself and my sons. I took up yoga and expanded my affirmations. I improved our diets, slowly decreasing meat consumption and greatly increasing the availability of fruits and vegetables in our lives.

2019 was a year full of little self improvements.

2020 promised more good. A new relationship with a beautiful, independent woman focused on her own self-love journey. A budding acting career, complete with talent agent, for my sons. A new grief support community, the first real place for my sons to work on their healing with other youth. I bought a used bike and started exploring our world farther and further with the boys.

The Lockdown took so much of it away. March got dark as friends disappeared and opportunities dried up.

We took to hiking and biking and getting out into as many places as we could, but heck, we were already doing that. Our experiences narrowed and I prayed for guidance on how to fulfill a promise I had made to give my sons a childhood full of exploration, wonder, and learning.

On April 1st I heard Wim Hof make some daring claims about how his breathing techniques had made his blood immune to pathogens like COVID-19. He posted at 40-day challenge and I started the next day. I’m pretty close to 120 days now. It only takes about 15 minutes and at least one cold shower per day, but when soccer returned, I discovered that I had lost very little of my cardio vascular stamina. When yoga returned, I learned that the techniques worked as well as, if not better than, stretching before class.

I’m reading philosophy and listening to history. I’m bettering myself everyday and doing my best to model that for my sons.

I engaged in some intense soccer training as games started to pop up, but had a drive for something new, something uncomfortable. I’m passable at soccer, even when losing I’m not likely to embarrass myself. Now Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ)? That is terrifying. I had heard Joe Rogan and Russell Brand and Anthony Bourdain discuss how punishing it was. Brand was especially explicit in imagining another man’s bowels full of excrement, pressing down on your chest. Yeah…no thanks.

I’ve developed a counter reaction to the mental voice that says, “No, thank you.” It’s a call to action. It’s the marker that signals, “Time to get uncomfortable, Jason.”

I’m only a couple weeks in and had a little guilt in skipping a class in preparation for the soccer tournament. But I’m glad I was able to show up with full strength for my teammates and have a good night. I can pick up an extra class next week.

I don’t have much to say about BJJ yet. I’ve collected a fat lip and sore elbow and the learning curve is as steep, energetic, and challenging as a salmon heading up a waterfall.

So there it is: find Jesus, go through incredible loss, quit drinking, honor your body with good food and good thoughts, play soccer, bike, hike, fall in love with yourself and as many others as you can stand, get crushed by every colored belt under the sun (white too), get serious about yoga and meditation, breathe in the Spirit of Life, and do all the little things that you can do today to better yourself.

With lots of Love,

Jason

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A Budding Anarchist

Many libertarians identify as anarchist. Some of my favorite libertarian thinkers are anarcho-capitalists.

Anarchism is the idea that people can coexist without a central force to compel them. Lawlessness and voluntarism are tenants of anarchism. The contemporary bastardizing of the term is partially corrected by the recent documentary: The Monopoly on Violence.
https://youtu.be/XWAEKQjN-yM

Some libertarians are anarchists because anarchism might be fairly considered a mode, or form, of libertarianism.

Homeschooling brought me to voluntarism, the non-aggression principle (NAP), libertarianism, and anarchism. Howdy🤠

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Not The Moment?

I have a couple significant disagreements (“questions” may be a better term) with this article, but there is a strong argument that this year has not been a good one for homeschooling.

This Pandemic Is Not Homeschooling’s Moment

As an irrational optimist I look at the folks who were close to choosing home education before government forced the Lockdown. The families who were most likely to join the ranks of educational freedom and the learning lifestyle are the ones who may have benefited from the unexpected push. Those families were already questioning the wisdom of allowing the State to control most of their children’s waking hours.

Most families in the school system are all in. They must be. However automatic the decision to place their children in the education system was, it remains a critical one that must be defended. Bringing all the assumptions of the school structure into one’s home is jarring. Couple those assumptions with unemployment, a perceived public health crisis, and nonstop negativity from the media, and the opportunities for any type of success are slim.

As for us, an “unstructured” (ugh, that is one problem I have in the piece) home-educating family, we are in a marginally advantageous position. Our learning lifestyle is built on flexibility, but relies on community. Museums, libraries, parks, gardens, art studios, concert and lecture halls, and private educational providers are not only the places we go to for learning, but, more importantly, the places full of the people we learn from. Security guards, docents, educational leaders, volunteers, other homeschoolers, and those who are living the lives my children might envision for themselves populate our learning lifestyle.

My sons regularly interact with people doing their jobs and sharing their experiences. The Lockdown cut off our most valuable learning resource: humans. The relationships we’ve established over six or seven years of home education continue to be the shining stars on our learning journey. I don’t know what it will do to my children’s brains to not be able to see the smiles of their museum and library friends when they walk in, to miss that surprised look when they shake someone’s presumption about the abilities of homeschoolers, or to struggle to understand an accent through a face mask. As I struggle to maintain relationships under rapidly-changing societal rules, I wonder how much damage is being done to our children.

This all came out a bit more dire than I had intended. We have had significant victories in our personal lives and the few relationships that we’ve been able to put work into. We’ve improved our physical health through diet and activity. I’ve deepened my spiritual practice and discovered the friends who will be steady in tough times.

We have made the best of our situation, but it remains that our freedoms have been limited and our world has gotten smaller. I continue to wrestle with those facts.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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Friday Fishin’

The Zerbey Boys, six years ago.

Delaware Nature Society has been hosting our adventures for a long time.

I started with a wagon, wheeling the boys around the marsh pond at DuPont Environmental Education Center (DEEC). I learned about their dip-netting program and almost as soon as my younger could walk, he was knee deep in muck.

Today Isaac wraps up a week of camp at DEEC.

We’re blessed to have places that go deep into our memory. Places where the seeds of unschooling were planted.

God bless you and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,

Jason

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What Can Be Achieved Without Governmental Force?

It is hard for people to grasp the harm they’re doing to themselves and others through poor eating habits because the patterns run deep. It runs through generations. We have to analyze the mistakes our parents made. We have to look at FDA recommendations that have made millions dis-eased. We have to look at why government has any standing to control what we put in our bodies. We have to look at why that government assumes those powers. Did we grant those powers? And what else is government entirely incapable of governing (read: regulating)?

I started this journey when I went to local government for help with home educating my sons. I was informed that there was no sharing of curricula or resources with homeschoolers. I was scared to take this on, but I did.

If a college dropout like me can cultivate a learning lifestyle for my children without government help, what else can individuals achieve through voluntary interaction?

God bless you and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,

Jason

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FFT: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Tired. And kind of confused. I hardly knew what happened in my first class at Elevated Studios in Wilmington, Delaware. It took a conversation with my son, who had watched, to start to understand that I might have learned a couple things.

I’ve been watching my sons train and compete for five years. We’ve visited around a half dozen other studios and there’s no where else I’d rather be.

During the Lockdown I’ve been preaching self improvement, immune boosting, and holistic strengthening of mind, body, and soul. The opportunity to train with some of the best in the art seemed too much for me to pass on.

It was more uncomfortable than I expected, and in different ways. I was nervous to watch the drills and copy them, the moves are intricate. But that wasn’t so bad. It was the matches. Five five-minute rounds. I lasted four matches. I had no idea what I was doing. I just didn’t want to look like a fool. I expended energy all over the place. I was one degree away from “flailing.”

But what else could be expected? BrenĂ© Brown’s phrase, Fucking First Time (FFT) came to mind. I had been more scared about this first class than anything I can remember since bungee jumping over a canyon in New Zealand 20 years ago. Just like the jump, I did it. I knew what the fear meant. I knew that that’s where I needed to go.

I can feel myself pushing forward already. I want to participate in all five matches. I want to prepare myself for that, to be ready to push further than I did today.

It’s an exciting shift in my life, to be exploring and testing the world as a habit. More of an anti-habit, stronger in discomfort.

God bless and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,

Jason