Let the frenzy begin

Line up housesitter: Check
Shop for funshop supplies: Check
Write talk: Check
Pack: Umm...

I have a busy morning ahead.

LIFE IS GOOD OR BUST

A date with reality

Kids in the U.S. are considered old enough to sign over their lives (literally) to the military at age 18. Kids in this same country cannot buy a beer until they are 21.

In Washington state, kids have long been forced to attend school until age 16. A few years ago, the Powers That Be decided 18 was better.

By convention, kids in the U.S. go off to college at 18. In other places, they start a bit earlier than that. Or later. And everywhere, exceptions are routinely made. Many of the most traditionally successful adults I know obtained their degrees sometime in their 30s, if at all.

And yet we, as a society, have firm expectations about what our kids SHOULD be doing at certain times in their lives. At certain ages. We hear about someone who is "still" living at home at ___insert your personal cutoff age here___, and we are disapproving. We judge the parents and their adult child and perhaps even their entire lives together and find them lacking.

And then there's the reverse issue. How often do you hear someone tell you that a kid is "too young" to do whatever it is they are doing? Uh huh. Says who? If the kid feels ready for something, if the obstacles and issues and practicalities have been addressed, what exactly makes a kid too young?

I am writing today to let everyone know—most especially my kids—that I have rejected all of the traditional arbitrary age limits and am adopting new ones. I've provided a few examples that are especially relevant to my family right now. You are welcome to use these if you like the sound of them. If we can't conquer the "shoulds," let's make some of our own!

Age at which kids should choose their own home and lifestyle: 16
Age at which kids should start college: 28 (if at all)
Age at which kids should be financially independent: 32

There. Now we can get on with our glorious, unfettered lives. We'll revisit this discussion on March 11, 2026.

Wrapping the point in silk

Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn.
Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it.
We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn.
Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.
~ Peggy Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I'm An Unschooler
MJ helped one of my nieces with her long division homework the other day. Hearing that she had done this got me thinking again about what a waste of time and brain cells it is to learn long division.

#1 - As Pam Sorooshian pointed out in her math talk at Good Vibrations last year, the precision of long division is just not what we need out in the real world. Think about when you use division in real life: calculating the best value at the grocery store, figuring gas mileage, seeing how many of something you can use in a given time period or distribute to each person, and so on. And how do you do it? In your head, using estimates. "258 miles on 7.8 gallons, um, that's a little better than 30 mph." Done. Typically, we don't need to know that it was 33.07692 mph. And if we do...

#2 - Most of us carry calculators with us all day every day. We have calculators on our computers, in our phones, in our PDAs, in our watches, magnetized to our dashboards, clipped to our grocery carts, whatever. With a little practice, we can use these faster than we can estimate in our heads.

So, why are they still teaching long division in schools???? It is but one example of how schools have failed to adapt.

Once upon a time, it was vital for a certain group of people to know that wearing a silk shirt under armor might save your life, since the silk makes it easier to remove an arrow if you get shot. Somebody figured this out, and the word spread, and it became part of the standard warrior curriculum. Back then, knowing this technique was a matter of life and death. Nowadays, it's a quaint little factoid.

I'd rather have my kids learning about that than long division. Long division is a dead end, an exercise in tedium, a compelling bit of evidence that "math is hard" (not to mention unpleasant), or worse, that "I am stupid."

That little silk tidbit, though... Now that's interesting. I don't remember where I learned it—probably in a romance novel—but I looked it up on the Internet. It led me to Mongols and absorbency and sutures and animal rights for worms. And it led me to wonder: Who figured this out and how? Can you imagine the circumstances...? Chloe and I laughed together as we talked about it.

In other words, that little tidbit is fun. It opens doors. It engages my brain and reminds me that the world is full of things to discover.

That is what learning should be. I wonder why our schools haven't figured that out.

What unschooling looks like right this second

Child: studying diligently
Parents: doing their level best to distract her from her self-assigned homework

Result: entertaining role reversal

The Doings Report

A quiet evening for the Maier Krewe:

• Chloe is translating and diagramming Latin sentences. (Yes, really.) She has been taking walks to the library and coming home with interesting choices like "First Year Latin" and "A Global History of Architecture."
• MJ is spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa's because spending the weekend with them only whetted her appetite.
• Frank was watching TV, but Chloe and I kept talking to him too much so he switched to the Internet, which evidently allows for more multitasking.
• I have been cruising Facebook (where I have really been enjoying "May the Fourth Be With You" day) and the LIFE is Good Yahoo! group (which is quite lively three weeks out from the conference).

Umm... THREE WEEKS OUT FROM THE CONFERENCE?!?! Holy socks, I'd better get my talk written.