Copasetic Flow

One of the safest things for us to do, pandemic-wise, is stay outside, but you gotta get places right? For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town.  For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town. Thankfully, with the windows and the roof-top emergency door all open, a bit of breeze blows through the bus, but is there an even safer way? If you’re traveling east to west downtown, there is: the California cable car line! You can sit on the outside benches of this—usually—uncrowded resource, enjoy the fresh air, and reach your destination in style. For adults with MUNI passes, it’s free. And! MUNI is free for all youth in town under the age of 18 ! But, for cable cars, there’s a catch you need to be aware of… Cable cars aren’t automatically included in the free MUNI for all youth program. To ride cable cars for free, you’ll need a youth clipper card that says it’s OK. You can’t buy these at Clipper Card offices like the one at Embarcadero Station, (the kids and I tried...

 Fatherhood is hard! Wait, no it isn’t: I’m literally drafting this missive while quaffing a beer in downtown San Francisco (the Mission actually), waiting for the kid to finish up a class. *Thinks back* Wait. maybe fatherhood is hard? So, “What the hell am I even talking about,” you ask? Here’s an example. It starts with car seats. Car seats are a nightmare! They especially were for one of the kids. I’d plop her in the car seat and she’d start to scream. She hated it! She’d continue to scream until we reached our destination. So, ok, that was hard. Here’s the thing though. In the middle of that we moved to a city with phenomenal public transit, and I quit driving. After that, I just had to hop on the bus with the kid in a wrap. She loved it! I loved it! Except… Some bus rides are forty-five minutes long. And, sometimes? Sometimes the kid wanted to be bounced through the entire ride. That was hard. But other times? On the same ride. The kid abided. The kid snuggled into her wrap up...

 Daize, the 11 year-old, swam from the beach to the end of a pier in the San Francisco Bay today! She can now officially swim in the ocean, and since she was not the one kid that got to take swimming lessons pre-pandemic, that also means that she can officially swim at all! The whole swimming thing has been a very incremental, very unschooling sort of process. Before the pandemic struck, we were able to cycle one kid through swimming class, the now nine year-old Mota. Meanwhile, because of the one adult per kid requirement, the other two kids, Daize and Tawnse, had to wait—and then pandemic. And that meant, thanks to my lungs, we quit going inside swimming pools. But, all was not lost. Now imagine you're a kid whose dad developed pulmonary embolisms after catching something that looked a lot like SARS-CoV1, then, years later, lost two feet of his intestine because clotting; who also has a grandmother and aunt who had/have Type 1 diabetes. https://t.co/gUoSOqcJ6A — antigrav_kids (@...

 Daize and Tawnse made apple pie! It was delicious! But wait! When they started, they didn’t have flour or sugar. Did they come to me to ask if they had the requisite materials, and could I get them? Nope.  The first I caught any wind of this pie business at all was this morning when Tawnse appeared in the doorway to ask where one might find shortening. I replied that rather than looking for shortening one should simply use butter. As she walked away, I heard Tawnse holler to Daise—across the house—”Daize! Can you use butter?” Later, as my partner and I were planning what to do about various things in jobs, with kids, and for dinner, Daize, Tawnse, and Mota appeared again stating that they’d planned their day. I commented that kids-plan-adventure-day was actually scheduled for Thursday mornings.  They stared at me blankly—I haven’t told them about that part of our new schedule yet, but the blank stare gave me the moment I needed to collect my thoughts, realize that my par...

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 ...