Saturday, December 31, 2016

Does TV create violence?

Deb Lewis wrote:

Does TV create violence, really? Maybe guns create violence. Knives. Baseball bats. Hammers. Axes, shovels, saws? Rope? Dynamite? Sharp sticks, rocks? Maybe it's language causes violence because most killers spoke. Maybe it's books. Clothing? Day time night time wind rain snow trees birds frogs.
For lots of kids, even the bad guys on TV are nicer than the real life crazy people they live and go to school with.
—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/violence
photo by Tara Joe Farrell
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The page also has this quote:

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
—Dick Cavett

Friday, December 30, 2016

A real human being

Learn to see your child not as an ideal or a model or the memory of what a child should be like from their childhood, but as a real human being growing right there, as a real human being who's seeing and learning, and learning things that are beyond the parents' production and teaching.

They learn things that we don't know! It's awesome.

SandraDodd.com/considerations
(rephrased slightly for this post, but the original is at the link)
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp Saran
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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A fascinated adult


Because John Holt was SO interested in children, every time he interacted with one, he saw a child interacting with a fascinated adult. THIS is one of the things unschoolers need to remember. When the adult brings boredom, cynicism, criticism and doubt to the table, that's what he'll see and that's how he'll see it, and it will be no fault of the child's whatsoever.

SandraDodd.com/johnholt
photo by Lisa Jonick
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Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Associations


Billy the Kid reminds me of my grandmother. She lived in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in the nineteen-tens and a while after, when the events were more recent and richly local. She had been places he had been, and collected articles and booklets about him.

Louise's children remember one castle by giant ice cream cones they had there, and another by lollies.

Any association that help us recall or connect ideas is a useful part of our personal web of knowledge. In school, it is possible to cheat. In school, there is "trivia." In the real world, though, learning is learning.

SandraDodd.com/reallearning
photo by Louise Mills

Monday, December 26, 2016

Thirty, twenty-seven, twenty-five

All three of my children were here for Christmas. The youngest is twenty-five.

Twenty-five years ago this summer, we did not register our five year old for kindergarten; we registered him as a homeschooler. That's a long time.

I've been explaining unschooling to a growing number of people over all those years. No wonder I'm tired!


The quote is partly lifted from Twenty-five and twenty
photo by Sandra Dodd; window snowflake by Irene Adams (my sister)

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Quite small


Appreciate small moments, small gestures, small ideas. Small things make up a rich life.

SandraDodd.com/nest
photo by Colleen Prieto

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Elegance


In words, music, dance, art, sometimes beauty is in the sparseness and simplicity. Directly, simply, surprisingly beautiful. This is elegance.

Sometimes in parenting, or being a partner or a friend, there might be an elegant gesture. I hope you are the recipient of a few such behaviors, and the provider of some.

SandraDodd.com/smallwords
artistry and photo by Karen James
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