Saturday 31 July 2010

Sticks and stones ...

There's been a fair old bit of name-calling in the comments section following this excellent article by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison.

It set me to thinking about the predictable pejorative terms that are usually thrown our way. Do I personally know of any home educated children (or home educators) who fit these stereotypes? Actually, no, we're a fairly normal bunch. But what happens if we consider some historical examples?

Those who perhaps conformed to one or two stereotypes

Hot-housed: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In a world of their own: Agatha Christie; Hans Christian Anderson; Beatrix Potter; William Blake; Margaret Atwood; Walt Whitman

Opinionated: Abraham Lincoln; George Washington; Thomas Jefferson

Eccentric/hippyish/yoga fanatics: Yehudi Menuhin

Obsessive/single-minded: Sir Ernest Shackleton; Joan of Arc

Evidently, some people could turn perceived problems to their advantage. The world would be poorer for the loss of their eccentricities.

Now for those who clearly subvert the stereotypes

Self-centred: Albert Schweitzer; Florence Nightingale; Thomas Paine

Middle-class: Charlie Chaplin; Louis Armstrong; Irving Berlin

Only good at one thing: Leonardo da Vinci

Poorly socialized/shy/lacking in confidence: Whoopi Goldberg; Noel Coward

Divorced from the real world: Alex Issigonis; Frank Lloyd Wright

Undisciplined: Douglas MacArthur; George Patton

Okay at arts but weak at science: Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Edison; Sir Frank Whittle; the Wright Bros; Michael Faraday; (the list of home educated scientists is very long!)

Aware of only limited social and ethnic groups: Margaret Mead; John Stuart Mill

Locked away indoors: John Muir; John Burroughs

Elitist: John Barry; Hanson; Will Rogers

So there are famous people who may reflect some of the common assumptions about home education - but those I've found appear to have developed these supposed shortcomings into definite advantages. Far, far more seem to demonstrate that most of the common prejudices and lazy assumptions are massively off-the-mark.

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words ... sometimes just become too predictable to argue about.

Sunday 25 July 2010

Learn Nothing Day .. again

Well, yesterday was our second annual attempt at Learn Nothing Day. This is the day when you do your level best to avoid learning anything at all - to prove just how near-impossible it is to avoid discovering something new every single day.

Dd was at an orchestral rehearsal in the morning, but they were running through music that they already knew. You could use some sophistry to argue that this constituted practice and building muscle memory rather than learning anything new. So far, so good. But then another member of dd's section told her about a wonderful bit of music practice software. Dd learned there was something she was quite excited to download. Only a few hours into the day and we'd already blown it.

Meanwhile, I learned that recipe kits from certain major supermarkets are rather more time-consuming than cooking from scratch (though I have to say that the resulting enchiladas were delicious).

Later on, dd visited a close friend recently returned from a very frightening spell in hospital. She had to learn how to negotiate that difficult transition period where every-day common-or-garden friends become a really important mutual support system. Her friend was really quite fragile and dd was at a bit of a loss regarding how to talk to her on a normal, relaxed level while acknowledging the things she'd been through. In the end, I don't think they did that much real-world talking, but their Sims characters did this by proxy. Sometimes videogames really help.

While dd was out, I spent some time on the web. Inevitably, I drifted to sites that help to clarify the realities of becoming freelance: I've just been made redundant from my job of 3 years. Must admit, this is both scary (financially) and a huge relief (in terms of sanity).

On a sad note, late in the evening we learned that snooker legend Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins had died. Seeing the clips of his glory days brought back a rich sequence of memories - he was the reason I actually bothered to buy tickets to snooker tournaments back in the 1980s. Of course, (like his compatriot George Best) he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know but he brought much-needed colour, character and excitement to a sport that is fundamentally two people in smart clothes bashing a few balls around a table.

We didn't actively set out to learn and what we did discover doesn't appear on any curriculum that I know of. Yet, clearly, we failed miserably at learning nothing. Which, I guess, is the whole point!

Saturday 3 July 2010

Scareware

Dd's laptop has a virus and is currently in the care of a nice, kind PC doctor. The virus is a piece of "scareware", a trojan which adopts the guise of anti-virus software (AV Security Suite). It informs you that your computer is being attacked and then links to an extortionately expensive software package which purports to remove the threat (which they'd created in the first place!). The main hint that it wasn't genuine was the number of big typographical errors on every page.

This happened to our family's "digital native", so she spotted that it was a scam straight away, but I decided to post about this in case it alerts anyone else who might be too busy to stay alert to these cons. I reckon that I might just have absent-mindedly clicked on the links and possibly made things even worse.

Meanwhile, dd, sans laptop, is catching up on a lot of reading!