uuhomeschooler.org

https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/90232 My friend Annie and I were having one of those homeschooling parent conversations the other day, the ones where, among people who know and and live the highs and lows of this model of education, you can drop the carefully worded justification and pedagogically couched assurances that yes, the kids are learning and socializing and otherwise turning into fine samples of humanity, and instead talk about the tough parts that you actually need some support with, the hours and struggles that make you wonder why you decided to do this whole-life thing in the first place. My hard thing was the fact that my older two kids are fighting something fierce these days. Her hard thing was that bedtime reading wasn't going so well. I'm a little too close to my own issue at the moment to process it well publicly, so I gave some thought to Annie's struggle instead. (Aren't we glad we have friends for this kind of thing, to distract...

I was Googling "strabismus" the other day and came up with this article, about how the condition (where both eyes cannot work together in stereo, and so compensate using the visual equivalent of context clues to navigate the world) is actually a great boon to visual artists. Why? Because instead of seeing the world primarily in objects, which the brain translates to icons, people with strabismus pay more attention to the actual colors and contours in front of them. But of course this is a trait that can be and is learned by visual artists, over the course of many years.  In many ways, we often fall into perceiving circumstances, events, and people around us icons rather than the unique and significant collection of traits that we are actually encountering in a real-life moment. (A closeup of the painting "Spring," by artist Bertha Gutierrez . 2016) "My child is a real tough cookie." (Oh, I hear you on this one.) "This house is always a wre...