The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
This little 13-year-old always has a tricky time in jiu-jitsu. Any kid with his experience is hard to find (and a lot bigger) and most adults don’t quite know how to handle him.
But, boy, does he show up.
We’re forever grateful to Elevated Studios for being an amazing place for us to train.
Our brains don’t work like a class synopsis.
Disclosure: Some of 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.
Eight months ago I wrote about my younger son picking up an old copy of Maus Vol. I: My Father Bleeds History.
I never wrote about how he promptly put it down. It can be hard to write about those moments. It takes patience and quiet to allow learning to happen.
Then he picked it back up, reading voraciously night after night until he requested the second volume. He finished that in a short couple of days.
I don’t know of a program that would allow the stopping and starting of reading material at the student’s pace. This is one of the biggest advantages of home education and a true blessing of the child-led, unschooling approach.
I also doubt there is a curriculum that would assign this type of material to an eleven-year-old. Immediately upon finishing Maus Vol. II, he went back to an action-packed manga.
The pace of learning is unpredictable and never steady. There appear to be plateaus and valleys and steep inclines and declines…and the learning happens without any schedule in mind. A classroom setting has no room for the necessary gear shifting of learning.
This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God’s wonderful grace.
-Colossians 1:6 NLT
A setback here, a consolation or two there, today was a mixed bag.
I took a break with God’s word in the middle of my day and remembered how much my life has changed since I experienced the critical words in this verse: “…and understood the truth…”
I had heard the Word my whole life. As a youth in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I studied it. I understood much of it on an intellectual level. In adulthood, I thought the lessons and warnings could lead me to righteous living.
They did not. My drinking and temper problems were impervious to the rules and dictates I tried to impose.
It wasn’t until my heart opened to relationship with Jesus Christ that I began to heal in His grace. Through His love I found a way to love myself and treat myself as God, the Father, wished.
Understanding comes through the heart, not the brain.
We don’t let government determine how we practice religion; where we work, live, and play; or who we choose to socialize with.
Yet we are told society has agreed to let government have full control of our children for a significant portion of their waking hours.
Like every government operation, school are funded through seizure of property (taxes), politicized through elections, and protected from criticism as a “public good.”
I have chosen not to let government forces train my children. Many more are joining the ranks of the home educators. They are learning the frustration of paying property taxes in addition to their own educational expenses. The concept of vouchers is an attractive one. “Free” money always looks attractive at first.
It is important to understand that vouchers do not loose one from the yoke of government schools, but strengthen the government’s grip on the education of our children.
In this episode of The Bob Murphy Show, Jacob Hornberger discusses exactly why reform is not the path toward freedom and choice in education.
Jacob Hornberger Says Libertarians Should Oppose School Vouchers
I’ll have to follow up with more pictures, but we always have a good time carving pumpkins with our favorite people.
It wasn’t a contest, but I’m declaring Olive the winner:
Your government officials already have.
From Dr. Robert Malone:
Important to recognize that this is a work-around because congress is not funding more jabs into arms. If this product is put on the childhood schedule, Congress does not have a say in the funding. Furthermore, if the EUA vanishes, they the liability of the companies continues under the childhood schedule. This is corruption.
‘Child Abuse on a Massive Scale’: CDC Advisers Recommend Adding COVID Vaccines to Childhood Schedule
ACIP Votes to ADD COVID-19 Injections to the Childhood Schedule
There is a lot to read in these links, but it is all worth it.
The silver lining is that they are showing how little they respect the opinions of parents. Child covid vaccination numbers are miniscule and the powers that be are working to force you to enrich the pharmaceutical companies at the cost of your children. CDC and FDA are choosing profit over healthy children.
Schools will start to adopt these recommendations and parents will again revolt. Many have left in the last two years and many more will follow. The system is falling apart and will continue to collapse without the support of local families.
The transition will be difficult, but we are building alternatives to public schooling that are poised to challenge it at its foundations.
When my boys encountered a puzzle contest at the library, I wouldn’t let them use the internet since I knew the answer could be found in the stacks.
The puzzle was a shredded copy of a Harry Potter (that much was obvious from many of the visible proper nouns) book in a clear plastic barrel. This volume had been banned in certain places and the puzzle was to figure out the title of the book.
The boys asked me to look up which Potter book had been banned, but since we had read all of them, I knew we could find out for ourselves.
Disclosure: Some of 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.
A couple of the names narrowed our guesses to the last couple installments. We found copies of those books and started to compare. Ultimately, we spotted some fragments of chapter headings and compared them to the two tables of contents. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows matched two headings and we had our guess.
Our correct choice won us a car load ticket to Winterthur’s Drive-In Movie Weekend. It was an easy choice to go for the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone showing tonight.
My girlfriend and I walked the grounds for an hour before we settled in for snacks and hot chocolate during the feature.
It was a beautiful night from our close encounters with two bats in the woods to the chilly finale of the film.
My son’s friend invited him to a church youth event yesterday. This is a neighborhood friend who goes to public school and plays with my sons multiple times per week.
Isaac has not been to this church or group before and was excited when he got back, “Dad! I knew kids from Pokémon Club, summer camp, and theater!”
“Socialization” is usually the first concern of those who haven’t thought about home education. The reality is that relationships are at the core of what we do. We learn from those around us, in the places where knowledge becomes interactive.
These kids are something special. Minecraft, theater, music, analog and digital games, and non-stop creativity.
My life has been changed by the power and fulfillment I have gained through the freedom and responsibility of home education in Delaware. The federal Department of Education could only harm that freedom, I see them as an enemy to my children’s education.
You don’t need to be a home educator to oppose DOE. The agency robs influence from local communities, familes, and individuals.
It wasn’t long ago that mainstream political dogma permitted this view. Ronald Reagan ran on abolishing DOE. He won in a landslide, but did not pursue that promise. Now it is foolish to think a Republican or Democrat would even pretend to the existence of a federal agency.
The empowerment of families and students cannot be achieved through the current political system. Working outside the system is our only choice.