Sick Day

It's bound to happen occasionally...somebody is sick and you have to cancel plans. Nobody here is very sick, but there are enough symptoms to stay home. I appreciate participating in a community where people take this seriously. This is a major bummer because Thursdays are the one day we have in person classes for everybody and we meet at a lovely park outside of the city and then go for a horse riding lesson after. It's been a wonderful routine this fall. M is out of town on a business trip right now, but normally he would be baking pizza from scratch so that it is ready when we get home from our day out. 

I'm taking the opportunity to do some fall deep cleaning around the house, and letting the kids relax and read and watch tv and play video games. We have finished a lot of our goals for the month...wrapping up the Dart and Arrow guides and choosing our next novels. Laurel is working her way through the history textbooks...currently responding with a fair amount of outrage at the child labor practices of the Industrial Revolution. Max is reading so fluently! We have a habit of five books a day for him. He listens to a story, article or poem from each member of the family and then chooses one person to read out loud to. Once in a while I pull out my Wilson Reading System cards to do a little phonics/spelling, but he is mostly just picking it up naturally. Sometimes I despair over Marko's reluctance to write anything by hand, but he is working on an extensive Google Doc that he shared with his Minecraft buddies, so when push comes to shove, he actually can produce something. 

I've been listening to a lot of Sue Patterson podcasts and thinking about how experts can and should be used in learning...and whether or not an elementary teacher, or even a secondary teacher in a school would fall into this category. I certainly have known lots of teachers who were experts in pedagogy, because that's the majority of what they teach to early childhood or elementary teachers. Back before NCLB, teachers had more freedom to do units on topics of their choosing and that's where you would see their expert knowledge or interest. Secondary teachers were more likely to have a passionate interest in a subject. I will never forget Mr. Brown and his collection of bones. I only had him for homeroom, but I learned so much about the skeletons of local woodland creatures in those 15 minutes. Not that he was teaching a lesson, he was just boiling and assembling skeletons and we would ask questions because holy-crap-teachers-were-weird-in-the-90s. He had a definite passion for anthropology. But on the other end, I was hired to be a math teacher purely because I was the most qualified candidate, having taken Calculus in community college 10 years earlier. I just had to take a test and BAM I was certified. So in this century, you never know what sort of "expert" your kid's teachers are, and unschoolers love to point that out. 

I hesitate to climb aboard that train, though because there are a lot of Americans running around saying they did their research and basically ignoring or disputing what actual professional and life-long researchers are putting out there. Twitter is a place where I often see people very convincingly write about a topic but sometimes it turns out they are missing some important nuances. Still it gets shared 1.1million times and becomes part of the American canon.

Somewhere there are facts, right?