Copasetic Flow

 Fronted adverbials have been a thing this week. A thing I didn’t even know existed until I saw  Anyone struggling with homeschooling should know that, despite having a PhD in Literature and having published 12 books, I only learned what a fronted adverbial was when my 8 year old's teacher said he doesn't use enough of them in his written work. — Dr. Carolyn Jess-Cooke/C.J. Cooke (@CJessCooke) January 13, 2021 The tweet caused a great deal of churn in the self-led, traditional education, and parenting spaces. Much of it deserved, and yet… It’s also a really good way to illustrate that unschooling allows space for everyone. I hadn’t heard of fronted adverbials before, but as someone who writes—I’ve had one book published, not dozens, but still—and someone who enjoys plunking around with learning languages, I was secretly jazzed about the whole thing. Fifteen years ago, I found it was easier for me to learn languages if I knew what the different parts of English’s grammar w...

 This morning, while practicing my fronted adverbials, I came across this from Idaho Bill allowing free-range parenting, the "Reasonable Childhood Independence Act", introduced to Idaho House - would mean kids allowed to engage in independent activities, like walk to the park, won't be considered "neglected" https://t.co/oRTBsSsCyE — Dr. Jacqueline Kory-Westlund (@jacquelinekory) January 15, 2021 Which—as often as the kids here are out and about—sounds great to me. But, having read the bill’s text, I’m both excited, and concerned.  First, the details. The bill was proposed by Rep. Ron Nate. It is H0003, and it’s full text can be found on the Idaho Legislature web site at  https://legislature.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/sessioninfo/2021/legislation/H0003.pdf The purpose of the bill is to redefine the definition of negligence so that it does not include activities that kids typically perform independently of parents, (or at least activities that kids typical...

Here’s a nice thing about camping against a mountain range; the sun goes down really, really early.  So it was that we found ourselves wandering back into the campsite from different directions, (the kids from the desert, my partner and I from a rock jutting out over a shallow ravine coming out of the mountains) at 3:30.  By 4:00, we’d started dinner, and our fire.  By 5:30, things were pretty dark, and pretty cold.  Half an hour later, my partner and I had climbed into our sleeping bags in our tent—the kids have a separate tent, remind me to tell you about how awesome that is for everyone another time—to read ebooks.  A half hour later at 6:30 PM, the gang, 9 year-old DAize, 8 year-old Towser, and 5 year-old Tawnse—climbed into their tent to call it a night. As much as camping physically exerts all of us in a really good way, the gang didn't instantly fall asleep. I know this, because the geography of our campsite created what’s a rather rare occurrence these d...

 So, fellow unschooling folks, help me with a thing here, if you would, please? To me, one of the tenets of unschooling is that the people who are learning choose their method of learning. We’ve held to this over the years. For example, when the oldest kid, Daize—as always, an alias—who is now 9, thought that kindergarten in public school, might be her best way to learn, off she went. When she decided, four weeks later, that she had changed her mind, I spent the better part of a day taking public transit around San Francisco getting her unenrolled. So, like I say, we take this roll-your-own  aspect of unschooling seriously, but last week, the middle kid, aka Towser, aged 8, asked me a thing… He asked me to force him to read and write. And, what am I supposed to do with that? (This is where I need your help by the way.) Can Towser be forced when he doesn’t want to be forced? In a word, No! I know this because I learned it as part of my unschooling journey. Frankly, it would hav...

Yes, yes I do rip off Dire Straits almost every time I write about free stuff.  Let’s talk about camping! We camped this week. We’re incredibly lucky to be 15 miles from a campground that is deserted on weekdays, and to be able to work remotely from there.  We’d made a habit of doing this sort of thing, albeit further afield, before the pandemic. In Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, we hopped the 60 bus—on the bus system lovingly, and officially known as The Bus—from the airport, and two hours later hopped out on an ocean-front campground where we paid on the order of, maybe, seventeen dollars a night. Again, we lucked out with really good phone signal. Waking up at 3:30 as one is wont to do when they have kids, I managed to get a lot of work done there as well. Here in New Mexico, we’re paying seven dollars a night, or at least we were until last week. Next week... We’ll pay nothing. Why you ask? I’ll tell you! Because, fourth grade. “But wait”, I hear you say, “you unschool.”...

Twelve meteors! I saw twelve meteors in the Quadrantids shower at the start of the week! I promised the 9 year old—Daize to regular readers; all the gang’s names are aliases—I’d wake her up if the meteor shower looked promising. I went outside on my own to check it out just before 4 AM. Sure enough, in just a few minutes, I saw four meteors. None of them were super impressive in and of themselves, but there were so many! I headed back in to wake up the kid.   While I was waking up Daize, her 5 year old—Tawnse in these pages—and 8 year old—Towser, as he’s sometimes known here—sibs woke up as well. I asked if they wanted to come watch  meteors. Tawnse was in. Towser decided he’d rather get a bit more sleep. A few minutes passed while jackets and snow boots were collected, then Daize, Tawnse, and I headed back outside. The kids sounded like miniature astronauts, their snow boots plodding down the sidewalk in the cold, clear, silence of the surrounding desert. I'll give her this, ...

 You may have noticed the blog went fairly quiet this year. We didn’t quit unschooling with the pandemic, but our picture of unschooling sure did change a lot. I’ll write more about that soon, but first, let me point you at some of the thing we were doing while I wasn’t writing. The gang and I discovered a 1950’s radiosonde on the side of a mountain in New Mexico. We didn’t know what it was at first, but thanks to Dr. Alice Gorman, we were soon on our way to finding out via twitter @drspacejunk the kids and I found this half buried in the forest this morning. At first I thought remote weather station, but then it occurred to me white sand missile range is 60 miles away. Look like anything you've seen? 2nd picture is housing for first. pic.twitter.com/sExFRDzAoU — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) March 25, 2020 Dr. Gorman introduced us to a nearby space archaeologist at New Mexico State University, and we were off and running. A month or so later, the whole thing was written up at De...