Thursday, December 23, 2010

my thoughts on JY and school

You simply can't miss JY's latest post in her blog : Do you know the cupcake girl?

JY is an unschooler and proud to be one.
She wasn't always one though.
She did spend one year in N2 and K1 and a year and a half in primary school.
The moment I could quit my job, I homeschooled her.
Then we spent a year deschooling ourselves after spending 6 miserable and frustrating months attempting a syllabus at home ( I had a hard time letting go of the idea that homeschool means school at home. As in a set up where there are textbooks, workbooks and a timetable to adhere to and she had a tendency to ask me "What shall I do now?") before embarking on our unschooling journey.

Now at 12 she has morphed into Karen Cuppy Cake.

Now she tells me what SHE wants to do and tells me what she needs to accomplish her next chosen task. She does her own research, gets her books on Amazon and sets her own standards.

After reading a recent homeschool discussion online, I had fleeting thoughts on enrolling one of my boys into a school.
It is not that unschooling is not working for him...it is just that I feel that he is the academic sort, someone who would do well collaborating with other brains, doing research .....then I had second thoughts....because collaboration is not allowed in school...it is called "cheating" and what I have in mind for him only happens in tertiary level.

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