The updated, spiffed-up print edition of 101 Reasons Why I’m an Unschooler is now available on Amazon. It’s more than just 112 pages of peppery, bite-sized unschooly-ness, it’s also got a cool bird on the cover.
You know you love that bird.
You can click the bird to order. Kindle users can purchase a Kindle edition here. Got a different e-reader? Just want the pdf? Hold tight, because 101 is coming soon to Smashwords. Who loves you, baby?
Where do ideas come from?
This morning I read of the death of Diana Wynne Jones, and in looking her up online discovered she and author Neil Gaiman had been friends for some 25 years. I followed a link to Neil Gaiman’s website, read his post about his friendship with Jones, learned he had written an episode for the upcoming season of Dr. Who, which pleases me to no end, and then read some of his essays.
I liked this one a lot. For so many reasons. I think you will, too.
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Note: Crap. Could I have had more typos in this teensy post? I think I’ve corrected them all. I’m going to blame it on the pain-killers. Yeah.
Some tv randomness: The theme song for the FX network’s Sons of Anarchy opens with a line about “riding through this world all alone.” It’s an existential line. I get that. And it’s iconic: the lone outlaw. I get that, too.
I also know that the line belies the truth of that series: that the Sons don’t ride alone. The club is all about creating and maintaining community — family, brotherhood — so its members don’t find themselves all alone.
Feeling all alone can be a terrible, terrible thing. Continue reading
Out in the world the other day I heard a young boy of seven or eight get scolded for not paying attention. The thing he was not paying attention to was his page of multiplication homework.
He didn’t want to do it.
He didn’t want to correct the wrong answers. He didn’t want to figure out the unfinished problems. He was distracted by things on a shelf. He was probably hungry. Probably tired. There were tears. Continue reading
Back when I had my coffeehouse, a lunch customer inquired about the soup. “Is there spinach in it?”
My mid-day barrista rolled his eyes. “She puts spinach in everything.”
“Not true!” I said. “I sometimes use kale, or chard. Even collards.” Pointless protest. It was all spinach to my barrista. And to my customer, who skipped the soup that day.
My daughter doesn’t like onions. Not even the amazing roasted ones I make to go with the carrots and parsnips she does like. The ones I sometimes finish in cream and butter. O man. Continue reading
Here’s a factoid that will date me for sure: I published my first zine — which was known in those days as an underground newspaper– when I was twelve years old. I did it on a ditto machine.
Back then there were no desktop copy machines, no Kinkos, and making copies of anything was a challenge for anyone without a printing press. You could use carbon paper when you typed, which meant you got two or three copies at a time, or you could somehow gain access to ditto forms and a ditto machine. Continue reading
In a famous quote from Walden, in the essay, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau exclaims, “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
(To which his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have replied, “I think one ‘simplicity’ would have done it, Henry.”)
I love Thoreau, and I love that quote for its exuberance, even though I don’t care much about simplicity and I find most “simplify your life” advice pretty unappealing. Continue reading
