Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

  Call for Submissions for Past and Present Unschoolers! Are you a current or former un-schooling family? Have you used unschooling elements or ideas in your home-based learning? Were you unschooled or homeschooled in a kid-centered way? We want your stories for an anthology! We’re collecting personal essays from self-identified unschoolers and homeschoolers. This anthology’s purpose is to shine a light on the relatable disasters, the astonishing successes in an unschooling life. We want to hear about your impressive successes and your weird wins. W e want to hear about the time your kids spent 72 hours in a tent on the kitchen counter, or the time when you developed a crush on a C-drama idol and taught yourself Mandarin. We also want to hear about disasters, disappointments, and the hard-learned heartbreaking lessons that are inevitable when you approach learning with openness, curiosity and creativity.  We welcome humor and rage and grief. We welcome stories of failure ...

  What does a family culture of curiosity mean? What does it look like to have shared family interests that lead to real-life learning and skills? What have you observed about what kids do with freedom? So my friend Myra did a cool project for her Masters about unschooling and homeschooling and she kindly let me read her thesis and it has me, as usual THINKING THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS. Did ya'll know I was homeschooled? Not forever, not from stem to stern. More like, I dropped out of high school and then haunted the basement for two years. I messed around on my brother's weight-lifting set-up, listened to my dad's record collection (Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkle, Joni Mitchell on repeat.) I played around on our 1994 desktop computer and used a CD-Rom to learn the anatomy of the human hand and post dramatic poetry to AOL forums. I read my mom's college textbooks from when she taught Freshman English ( Flowers for Algernon , The Rise of Silas Lapham , and Walt Whitman). I...