Copasetic Flow

In her most recent blog post Evelyn Krieger asked if readers were trying new things, and it reminded me, that yeah, the kids and I are in the midst of that! We've taken up an unfamiliar sport—Bay swimming in San Francisco—wrapped in a familiar one from when I wa a kid—competitive lap swimming in a pool. It was one of the kids here, the seven year-old aka Tawnse who got me back into the water. On a trip to a beach at one of our coves, she fell into the water. She did what we’d talked about a dozen or so times before, and she’d practiced once or twice before—she stood back up—and all was well. Right after that though, she declared that she wanted to learn to swim at that beach. And, since we unschool, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! It’s been kinda cold—the water temperature this month has hovered around 65 degrees —but it’s been a lot of fun! The learning’s been small on some days, and immense on others. In general, everything is moving along rather swimmingly, ( yeah … I wen

 Read this article by the author of Timeless Learning  a book about changing traditional schools in ways that look remarkably reminiscent of unschooling. The author uses baseball as a metaphor, but... It's all about how we percieve tasks, how we learn, what our expectations might be, and how those expectations might have come to enter our psyches. It's about... well, you'll see.   As an unschooing parent, I frequently don't think about how schools can/should work because the two systems (traditional schooling and unschooling) are portrayed as different, ofthen orthogonal activities. However, two things lay at the base of each of these systems: relationships with kids and learning.  In unschooling there's still material to be presented, even if it's just strewing and/or talking with the kids to mine their own intrests. There are still expectations--even though unschooling tacitly eliminates them--because we're sill human and many of us, including me, grew up

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well. With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter