ElementalMom

I am pleased as punch to announce the Launch Party for my friend Tammy Takahashi’s new book, “Deschooling Gently”. From the Hunt Press site,

On Sunday, October 12th, from 2pm-5pm, homeschoolers in the greater Los Angeles region are invited to come celebrate their recognized freedom and the beginning of their school year, at the launch party for the newly published book Deschooling Gently: A Step by Step Guide to Fearless Homeschooling, by Tammy Takahashi.

Diverse homeschoolers with children as young as preschool age, all the way up to high school age, from a varied religious (or not) and cultural backgrounds will join Tammy Takahashi and Hunt Press in a festival of games, food, and camaraderie.

At 3:00-3:30, Tammy Takahashi will speak on the topic of “The Real Cons of Homeschooling: Socialization and Socializing.” This provocative and inspiring talk will change the way you think about how homeschoolers make friends and understand culture.

This event is free. Everyone is welcome.

October 12th
2pm-5pm
Center for Spiritual Living, 4845 Dunsmore Avenue, La Crescenta, CA 91214

More about Deschooling Gently: Deshooling Gently is a much-needed and refreshingly drama-free view on how to make the transition from School with a capital S, to homeschool, including directions and information on how to get educated on the laws governing homeschooling in your state. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Praise for Deschooling Gently by Diane Flynn Keith, Author of Carschooling, Editor of Homefires.com, Founder of UnviersalPreschool.com, and Publisher of ClickSchooling:

“If you are new to homeschooling, thinking about homeschooling, and especially if you are unhappily homeschooling—read this book. It will save you hours of time, tons of frustration, and a backpack full of money. Deschooling Gently is an intelligent, practical, frank, and fearless guide on how to take the “school” out of homeschooling in order to raise children who are happily educated, life-long learners. Tammy Takahashi gently shows you how to redefine curriculum and other schoolish concerns as a set of goals and tools with limitless possibilities that will help your children be the best they can be. Buy several copies and sprinkle them around the house as constant touchstones to maintain balance, flexibility, fun, heart, and meaningful purpose in your family’s homeschool life. Deschooling Gently is one of the best homeschool books I’ve read and destined to become a classic for homeschoolers in the 21st century!”

Deschooling Gently is available through Amazon and other online booksellers, for $19.94. It is also available through special order at any bookstore.

Tammy Takahashi lives and learns with her three children and her supportive husband in sunny Southern California. She is the editor of the California HomeSchooler magazine (http://www.hsc.org), and writes an alternative education blog (http://justenough.wordpress.com). An acknowledged and leading expert on homeschooling and unschooling, she’s also been interviewed on CNN, Fox News and NPR.

She has written many articles for Home Education Magazine, Natural Learning (formerly Life Learning) Magazine, and CHNews. She has presented at the Homeschool Association of California conference for the past four years. She was a workshop presenter at the California Homeschool Network Expo for the last three years, and was the featured speaker in 2007. Tammy Takahashi is available for workshops and speaking engagements.

For more information, please contact Angela Hunt at ahunt@huntpress.com or 310-890-8617.

Tags: deschooling, homeschooling, hunt press

Aaaaaaaaaaaand here we go again!

The Lesson of Failure

This one was about an event that happened over 20 years ago. How weird, the little things that stick in your head…

Tags: LWOS, school

In a scant week and a half, I am going to be speaking at the Trust Birth Conference in Redondo Beach, CA.

I‘ve never even been to a birth conference before. I’ve heard a lot about them, heard people talk about what they saw and what impacted them. So I’m kind of flying blind in terms of trying to gauge my audience. I’m having to go on faith that what got me the invite was whipping out my impromptu soapbox about women, especially digital native women, reclaiming their voices through the use of multimedia. Apparently it was a strong enough statement that it got Carla Hartley of the AAMI to go ahead and put me in for the Sunday general session. Woah.

I‘m worried, a little, because I’m talking geek to birthy types, and I’ve had some spectacularly bad luck with that before. You don’t tend to realize how steeped in your paradigm you are, until you try to communicate outside of it, and end up with people looking at you like you’re from Mars. I’m going to be floating the talk around to some folks this week, to get feedback from both the birthy and the geeky sides of the fence.

My talk has been spinning in my head for months, but I’m still only about 3/4 of the way to having it written.
There are many, many presentation styles, and I’m currently quite enamored of the one going around the geekerati circles, that involves pictures at rapid speed, but not a single word or bullet point on any slide. I’m still stressing about whether or not my audience is actually going to engage with that or not. But in the meantime… that’s enough blogging. I have a speech to write…

My pal Angela sent me a copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, with the note “You’ll want to shake her occasionally, but a good read.”

With a recommendation like that, what else could I do? I sat down to see what the deal was. And ended up taking quite the unintended ride.

EPL is the story of a woman who hits thirty (naturally), freaks out over pressures in her unhappy marriage (naturally), goes through an unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), and then goes on a pretty self-indulgent and thoroughly control-freaky pilgrimage to try to get her act back together. And in doing so, she meets characters (naturally), has revelations, has several serial breakdowns, and eventually (at the convenient end of her trip and her book) meets the man she’s going to marry.

In the process, she has internal battles with her Wellbutrin prescription, eats incredible-sounding food that would probably kill me, makes all kinds of decisions about how to handle things that help you understand where the chaos in her former life probably came from, and ends up halfway around the world trying to recreate the world she left behind.

I know, I sound pretty hostile. That’s largely because I get all pissy like that every time I read a book that I could have written, better. I think my personal journey, through hitting 29 (overachiever!), freaking out over my unhappy marriage (naturally), going through my unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), going on a pilgrimage to get my act back together, meeting characters (as you do when you’re paying more attention to the people around you than you are to the noise inside your head), and meeting the man I married, in my not so humble opinion, is a far more entertaining journey than the one in EPL. In any case, mine had diving with sharks, a government coup at gunpoint, and several fistfights in it. At least when they made a movie, they’d need a special effects budget (the mark of any really good story is the number of explosions in it, IMO. Which probably explains the chaos in my former life, too.)

Those of you who lived through those years with me are probably chuckling at this point (I can hear you from here, Bubba). And wondering how I’d manage to disguise their identities in the final draft.

The fact is, everyone thinks their story, their journey, is interesting stuff. And the fact also is that people who should be writing but aren’t writing enough get pissy all out of proportion with the people who actually have nailed book contracts to write about what they do.

I‘ll take it as a sign. A sign that I need to get busy, writing.

Tags: Books, divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert, EPL, pilgrimage, Writing

I had a ton of fun with this post. Entitled “Farmers’ Market“, about our weekly shopping trips, and how quite a lot of education about a really huge array of topics happens inbetween the apples and the lettuce. Check it out.

Through a strange set of circumstances, I find myself today thinking a lot about Christy Brown’s mother.

The tenth of her 22 births, Christy was born with cerebral palsy, in the crushingly poor Dublin of 1932. Despite being told he was a vegetable, he was not human, Mrs. Brown persisted.
“It is his body that is shattered and not his mind, I’m sure of it”.

Famously, at the age of five, Christy snatched a piece of chalk from his sister’s hand with his left foot, the only piece of his body under his control, and wrote on the floor. The first word he wrote, two years later, after dilligent coaching? M-O-T-H-E-R.

In my younger years, as a passionate reader of Irish literature, I was enthralled by Christy’s writings. Like a younger, harder, more bitter James Joyce, he illustrated for me the land of my ancestry. Listening to the Pogues, reading Christy’ intensely descriptive words, I could simultaneously feel like I’d found home, and also the complete understanding for why my ancestors left there to come here.

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
And we dance”

Obviously, I’m a very different girl now than I was back then. Still in love with James and Christy; I’ve made room aboard the boat for my copies of their works. I find odd comfort there sometimes. I reread “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man” when I was pregnant with Rowan and couldn’t do anything but read, and it was a completely different book from what it was in high school.

So again, I find myself back with Christy. (And Shane McGowan, naturally. Somehow they go together, for me.)

Christy Brown, a clown around town
Now a man of renown from Dingle to Down
I type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose
And where it’s gonna end
God only knows

Down all the days
The tap-tap-tapping
Of the typewriter keys
The gentle rattling of the drays
Down all the days

I have often had to depend upon
The kindliness of strangers
But I’ve never been asked
And I never replied
If I supported Glasgow Rangers

What would Christy have become, without his mother? I think about the odds she was overcoming, and I am absolutely stopped in my tracks. Twenty two births? Thirteen children, one profoundly handicapped? How incredibly easy would it have been for her to throw up her hands, declare she couldn’t cope, and leave Christy to rot in a corner? She didn’t have laundromats, she didn’t have take-out dinners; she had grinding, grinding work.

And her love, mother’s love, was so big, it got straight past those who marginalized her 10th child, past the work and the poverty and I cannot even begin to imagine the physical exhaustion, to hold him up as someone worthy. Worth existing.

So here’s to you, Mrs. Brown. I do not even know what your name was. Christy refers to you as mother, everyone else calls you Mrs. Brown, or Christy’s Mum. I only hope to God I can be half the mother you were.

Yay! I’m up, by way of LWOS, at the Carnival of Homeschooling:

From Life Without School Laureen says Gracias, Dora! as Laureen finds that children learn when they are interested and when and from what we may least expect!

Check it out!