Life Without Plastic

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When you look the graph on Beth Terry’s site it’s pretty clear that for even the most dedicated among us, getting rid of that last itty bit of plastic waste might be the hardest part. For the record, her plastic waste is 2% of the national average.

Her upcoming book is probably really useful and informative. (It’s available for pre-order on her site.) But what I especially love is the quality of (plastic-free) production and packaging. Very smart. Very handsome.

http://myplasticfreelife.com/2012/05/compost-this-book-but-first-check-out-how-cool-it-is/

Keep Your Eyes Open

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People say you have to travel to see the world.  Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.

Auggie Wren, “Smoke” (1995)

Put Them in a Box

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I watched Waiting for Superman recently.

So many loaded terms. “Success.” “Failure.” “Achievement.” “Learning.” So many experts who know what’s best. So many devils. So many details.

It’s an exasperating film, full of unfounded assumptions, not least of which being the assumption that putting kids in a box is the starting point for all learning.

It Takes that Long to Break a Child’s Will

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Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years.  It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will.  It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.  Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college.  For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

Unschooling Conferences: The Best Stuff Happens In Between

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My daughter was 11 the year we went to our first unschooling conference. It was a big one. There were 300 or so people in attendance. We knew exactly none of them.

We’d been unschooling in our fashion for a couple of years, making the segue from an eclectic, workbook-based homeschool approach to something less schooly and more fun. In our homeschool co-op we’d become the fringe family, the ones who didn’t “do school at all.” (We also didn’t do religion, which pretty much put us into the Satan’s Spawn category, but that’s a subject for another day.) Continue reading →