Conference Photos Up

Finally they are up! I managed to upgrade my Flickr account to Pro (the problem was at my end, not their). Check them out...

Bungee-Bouncing

 We went to the Liberty Tree Mall for dinner on Saturday. As we walked in, we saw this most curious contraption made out of steel-pipes. Bungee cords were connected to the top of the structure and came together to the harness in the middle. You were strapped in it and a motor pulled you halfway up. As you went up, you pushed against the air-mattress underneath and started bouncing. Of course Supriya wanted to do it. It was $6 per two-minute session, and she did it once. She really enjoyed herself, like we knew she would. We had to rush back for the Conference talent show, but we promised her that we will take her back for more on Sunday. We went back on Sunday after the end of the Conference, and she did it twice. This time she tried a few tricks, doing somersaults, both front and back, as the mall crowd cheered her on! Finding a calling is not going to be too difficult for Supriya. We have so many clues (such as this and her friendliness) pointing to the treasure. 

Back from the NEU Conference

We were at the New England Unschooling Conference in Peabody the last two days and had a wonderful time (except for Aseem; more on that later). Supriya was in heaven - she could just step out of the room, go down to the lobby and find somebody (usually one or more slightly-older boys) to play with. There was also a small swimming pool to play in and she must have spent 6 or more hours in there (of the 48 hours we were at the hotel)! She was on her own for much of our stay there.

This was my first unschooling conference, and I had a grand time. Some of my highlights:

• Folk-dancing on Friday: I (& Manisha too) were folk-dancing after a long time and had a ball. We have resolved to find some local venues to do this on a regular basis.
• Juggling and Hooping FUNShop: I had my juggling set and a bunch of hoops with me so I decided to offer a "FUNShop" Saturday morning 10 to 11. I expected maybe 5 people, but ended up having about 25! We had the whole range of ages and experiences.
• Talent show on Saturday night: This was the culminatiing event of the Conference, and I ended up being a part of 3 songs! I opened up the show with "Happy Together" with Ken Briggs on the bass-guitar. Apparently it went well. Later I sang harmony to Marji Z's "This land is your land". I thought it sounded very good & tight and was musically very satisfying. Close to the end Ken, Ben and I butchered Clapton's "Sunshine of your life".
• Watching Supriya: The best part for me was watching Supriya's excitement! She was so thrilled to be at a place where all she had to do was go downstairs to find friends to play with.

The biggest downer for Manisha and me was Aseem's reaction. It was too crowded for him and the space was too confining. To make matters worse, he kept losing Supriya who was too busy running around & playing with her boy-friends. He kept going back to the hotel room, and wanted to go back home.

We made many friends and hope to keep in touch with at least a few of them.

I am in the process of upgrading our Flickr account to Pro, but Paypal is acting up and not accepting my new password. So you will have to wait for the pictures...

We Discover Captain Underpants!

I just read Supriya Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds (The Third Epic Novel) by Dav Pilkey. It's just awesome! The action is wonderfully improbable and unpredictable. (Also, as Manisha remarked to me, the setting is rather subversive - the kids hate school and the cafeteria food.) And Supriya is just eating it up. I picked up two well-worn copies from our friend Janet. It looks like we need to get the whole set.

The Planets

Supriya had in her hand a bunch of pieces of paper with the names of the planets (our Solar System only - for now). It looked like she had printed it on the printer and then cut up the paper. She kept sounding them out and getting confused between Mars and Mercury. Then out of curiosity I asked her, "Do you know the order of the planets?" "Yes", she said, "I saw it on Blue's Clues once." Then she proceeded to line up the pieces of paper in the correct order, talking about how everything is boiling on Mercury and freezing on Pluto! She has a ton of this kind of info stored in her brain that comes out in the proper context. Manisha and I definitely did not know the names or the order of the planets when we were her age. She lives in a different & much richer world, in too many ways to list.

Earthboxes Planted

Manisha and the kids went to the nursery over the weekend and bought seedling of tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and cabbage. Now they are planted in our Earthboxes. Like she did last summer, Supriya will be watering them daily. This time she is going to get paid and she is excited by that idea!

Flickr!

Manisha and I have been looking at a way to backup our photos and we have found the perfect solution - Flickr. (Or so we think.) Many bloggers seem to use them. I am uploading pictures and learning to use the site. A feature I like very much is the ability to make pictures public or private. If we really like it, we will go Pro and use them as our online organizer/backup. Check out my pictures.

My New Toy

I bought me a special hoop - an Acu-Hoop! This one weighs 3 pounds and the weight has made it so much easier to turn. Of course the weight also tires one out more quickly. They recommend going slow and working your way up from 2 minutes a day to 10 over several weeks. Today I did 5 minutes (& that is tiring, believe me) - which marks my first day of counting my hooping in minutes instead of number of rotations. (In case you are curious, I was doing roughly 90-100 rotations per minute.)

Rosetta Stone

Supriya and I played around with the Rosetta Stone demo CD today. It's very cool (although we are not in the market right now). Supriya wanted to do Hindi. As we went through the demo, she kept recognizing Hindi words that sound very similar to the Marathi words she knows for the same objects (e.g. elephant, horse, dog). The light that turned on in her eyes when she recognized the similarities was too precious! Later we did a couple of screens of UK English and she had a ball imitating those sounds (like "cat"). Highly recommended.

Olin College

Manisha is a member of IEEE and gets their monthly magazine Spectrum. This month's issue has this must-read article about Olin College called "The Olin Experiment".This is a new college funded by the Olin Foundation with a philosophy that may be new to the educational establishment, although not to homeschoolers:

[President]...Miller explains the philosophy behind what he calls the "do and then learn" approach. "Students start out with an audacious project, which would in many institutions be heretical, except we do that deliberately," the amiable 56-year-old executive says. "Because, after all, when you get hired in a corporation, that's the first thing that happens to you: they give you a challenge for which you've not had the prerequisites. It's all about learning how to learn. So we do that here from day one."

Here's another interesting excerpt:

The professors showed the groups a commercial unit and referred them to relevant patents and other technical documentation in a step-by-step guided design. The faculty's plan was to watch carefully as the groups progressed and discover where and why they failed. "The problem is, they didn't fail," Miller says. "They got it to work. This wasn't the highest-quality fabrication in the world; it was a very crude-looking circuit board with a lot of transistors. But it worked. And we said, 'Aha! There's something to this. You don't need to have prerequisites.' "

Even more revealing, he adds, was the effect the exercise had on the students. "They now wanted to know what a transistor is—badly. They now had a sincere, deep, personal motivation to learn electromagnetic theory and circuit design. These kids will never forget the experience they had in that project."

Gardening

Supriya and Aseem just got done watching "Magic Schoolbus Goes to Seed". By now the kids (definitely Supriya) have a decent handle on how plants grow. We are planning to plant our Earth-boxes this summer (perhaps buy a couple more even). These boxes really work. Last summer Supriya watered them every day very conscientiously. She will be doing it this summer also - and get paid to boot! We plan to pay her for backyard work and open her own retirement account with that money (it being her own earned income). Let's see how this plan works out.

A Great Quote

“When work, commitment and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.” – Anonymous

That's the tag-line for the email list for my chorus. Our hope/dream/ambition is for our kids to become well-acquainted with that "deep well".

Aseem's Additions

Aseem is going around holding up two fingers of each hand and saying, "2 and 2 make four!" Then I asked him how much is 2 and 3, holding up 2 and 3 fingers of my hands. He counted them correctly. This is how it all starts...

"20 Great Jobs that Don't Require a Degree"

That's the title of this article on CNN.com. Manisha and I think that college costs in the US are out of control (more on that in a separate post soon). It will be fine with us if our kids don't go to college. They could probably use their college-funds a lot more effectively for higher-education ala carte and/or even to launch a business.

Robots and Dinosaurs

Last week Supriya was going around building robots and spaceships with Legos. Later when we went to the library she borrowed 3 videos and 4 books about dinosaurs. She's such a tomboy.

She has been watching one of these videos for the past week. It's called "Prehistoric Planet" (narrated by Ben Stiller!). It's produced by the BBC (apparently it was also called "Walking with Dinosaurs" and won awards). It's a bunch of episodes with many special-effects and the DVD runs for a total of 132 minutes. Supriya can't get enough of it...

Goals, Strategy and Tactics

This is the rough draft of an article I am working on. Please let me know what you think!
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Homeschooling brings freedom and freedom brings responsibilities. One of the main responsibilities is to think about our goals for our kids and how we plan to achieve them. We have chosen the path of unschooling, but that word is rather ill-defined. We wanted to flesh it out more and make it our own. This is how our ideals about unschooling and our educational goals for the kids come together.

We decided to use the process used by the military to plan campaigns. You start with Goals, which is the "big-picture" statement about what you want to achieve. Then you go down one level and define what Strategies you will use to go in the direction of the goals. Once the strategies are in place, you start defining what specific Tactics you will use "on the ground" so to speak.

We thought it would be instructive to use this process of planning in fleshing out our educational process. Here's our progress thus far.

Goals: Empower our kids to become happy and financially successful. (There are multiple ways of defining the latter - comfortable/financially independent/rich/wealthy etc. Our preferred one is financial independence, but that's a separate story.)

Strategy: The strategy for both these goals turns out to be quite simple and straightforward: empower the kids to become the best they can be. There is a lot of research to bear this out, such as the following.

Happiness

Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology and the author of "Authentic Happiness":

The good life ... is a life wrapped up in successfully using using signature strengths to obtain abundant and authentic gratification.

In other words, finding abiding happiness comes from developing and actualizing your authentic self.

How about the negatives or weak parts of our character? What do we about them? Indeed, what can we do about them? Again, Dr. Seligman:

I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your Signature strengths.

Career Success

There is a parallel strengths-revolution going on in management theory. Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, authors of "Now, Discover Your Strengths" write:

Casting a critical eye on our weaknesses ... will only help us prevent failure. It will not help us reach excellence.

Marcus Buckingham goes one step further in his latest book "The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success". If you want to achieve individually (i.e., for what he calls Sustained Individual Success), his blunt recommendation is:

Do what energizes you and eliminate what drains you.

In a nutshell, focusing on and developing my kids' strengths will not only make them more productive and successful in life, it will also give them enduring happiness. Seligman and Buckingham do use the word strength differently. Seligman is talking about character strengths such as curiosity and humanity (check out www.viastrengths.org), whereas Buckingham is pointing at our innate talents and intelligences. But the essence of the message is the same: build on your strengths.

So there we have the core of our Strategy - help our kids identify and develop their strengths and talents and passions. (We will pay attention to their weaknesses only to the extent they make our kids dysfunctional.)

Tactics

Before we can help the kids develop their strengths, we have to know what they are, and that is where the process starts. We pay attention to the kids' developing interests and make sure they get opportunities to exercise their strengths. Respecting their obsessions is a big part of this.

Another tactic is to model the learning process ourselves. The kids have watched me as I taught myself to hoop and to juggle. I did them not to show them how. I learned these skills because I was interested in learning them. This kind of self-directed learning is a part of the process for us.

Supriya has always shown us what she wanted and what interested her, thanks to the broadband connection between her brain and her mouth. She has many areas of strengths and we are doing our best to help her develop them:

• interpersonal - lots of playdates, social time
• kinesthetic - gymnastics, swimming, snowboard, skateboard, bicycle, juggling, sledding, hooping
• music - singing with the AllTogetherNow homeschooling family chorus, singing with Band in a Box on the computer, playing her drumset, drumming in the van, listening to different kinds of music, watching musicals
• building - crafts, art, Legos, robots, Popular Mechanics subscription

It has not been so easy reading Aseem. He is an introvert and likes to play by himself. The computer is his buddy primarily because he can do things at his own pace. We are getting to know him better and better. His primary mode of learning is through touching and doing, for example baking and helping Manisha with laundry. He also has good kinesthetic intelligence. He can throw a ball very well, so Santa got him a magnetic dart-board. He is making good progress riding his bicycle and roller-skating. He is certainly a curious little boy and we know he knows much more than he can verbalize.

Our "Money Curriculum"

Manisha and I believe that one of our most important responsibilities is to help the kids develop a healthy relationship with money (mainly through demonstration & modeling). This column on Marketwatch by Paul Farrell, titled "8 Secrets of Financial Happiness: Use psychology to reduce money stress, increase peace of mind", gives a concise overview of what our "Money Curriculum" might look like.

Which Grade is Supriya in?

As we were driving back from Harmony Hill, Supriya asked me, "Am I in the second grade?" I said, "No, you are in the first grade. You will be in the second grade in September." Then I expanded, "But I don't believe in grades. You are singing at about 4th grade level, and you are reading at first grade level. Grades don't mean much." I don't know if she understood what I was talking about.

That conversation led me to this interesting thought. Grades are often used as proxies for age, but they can also be indicators for proficiency or level of accomplishment. And then for each of the thousands (millions?) of human activities, one could earn a grade. For example, Supriya's would be: Singing - 4, Reading - 1, Math - 1, Gymnastics - 3, Swimming - 1, Roller-skating - 3, Drumming - 3, People Management skills - 4, Clowning - 3, Music History - 4, Acrobatics - 4 etc. So which grade is she really in?...