I Tried to Learn Nothing Yesterday

"Today for Show and Tell, I've brought a tiny marvel of nature: a single snowflake. I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water, just like every other one, when you bring it in the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I'll be leaving you drips and going outside."
--Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes

I nabbed this most insightful quote from a kick-*ss blog written by a kick-*ss unschooler. (Thanks Heart-Rockin' Mama!)Yesterday was Learn Nothing Day, a holiday created by Sandra and Holly Dodd to poke a little fun at those folks who ask us questions like, "But if you don't go to school, how do you learn?"We've gotten that comment, mostly from kids. The adults are a bit more discerning in their questioning, asking if we worry about college or how we learn about physics or what our days look like because they could never "stand to be home with their kids" every day. It's ok, it's normal to misunderstand something that's out of your realm of experience, but to unschoolers, who operate on the belief that learning happens all the time - ALL*THE*TIME - it does, truthfully, get a little tiresome after a while.

I'd forgotten to warn my kids ahead of time that Learn Nothing Day was approaching. It's only the 2nd annual and I didn't pay much attention to it last year. This year, however, I told Jonathan about it over breakfast. His reply? "I wish I'd known this sooner, so I could've planned better."

He has a whole pile of new birthday gifts so there's no WAY he won't learn anything today. But then we laughed about how we were learning something while we discussed not learning anything. And then we learned how hard it is to try to learn nothing. Doh!

His school friend summed up our point nicely by chiming in, "I try not to really learn anything during summer break" with a shrug. What he means, of course, is that he doesn't do anything schooly - no reading of textbooks, no writing of reports after reading a good book, no creating a diorama to explain that cool documentary you just watched. And therein lies one of my biggest beefs with the way school operates. Schools would have us believe that learning happens only when you are being taught by someone else. They'd also have us believe that it's "work" and "a kid's job" and "very serious" and other such sobering things. And in school - it is, usually. Even the younger grades get less and less fun as the push for higher test scores and earlier reading takes over.

But kids are learning all the time - ALL*THE*TIME - in AND out of school. They're learning even when they're seemingly "doing nothing" because, honestly, it's impossible to do nothing.

What unschoolers have captured is the beautiful realization that learning isn't separate from living. That in the process of living, learning happens. ALL*THE*TIME. When you're preparing for a birthday party, you're learning. When you're reading, watching tv, playing a video game you're learning. You're even learning as you rest or watch clouds drift by or sun yourself on the beach. It's impossible to not learn.

Humans are hard-wired to learn from their surroundings, but it helps if one is interested, motivated, and inspired. And this is where school does a really sh*t job. And before you give me over to the teachers' unions for a lashing in the public square, listen - I WAS a public school teacher and I KNOW how teachers' hands are tied (to a certain extent). What would be really beautiful is if a whole bunch of school personnel rose up and said, "we're tired of this drudgery!" and started interacting - really interacting, on a level that isn't "I say - you do" - with the kids. Then watch the students' eyes light up and let the revolution begin.

I know, I know. DUDE - WHAT AM I SMOKING?

But seriously, people - we've got to stop operating under the assumption that kids won't learn if they aren't forced, coerced, prodded, and locked into a damn brick building for 7 hours of every day, 180 days a year. It's ludicrous. And we also have to stop believing that the only important things one learns are what's taught within school walls.

When talking with Jonathan's school friend today, we used the example of his juggling. He's an expert juggler for his age and he spends a lot of time researching technique, watching pros on youtube, finding the right equipment, practicing, and even choreographing new and unique rhythms. "Just think how much you learn about juggling all the time!" I pointed out, and we talked about how learning isn't something one only does at school. He does learn at school, and he's an excellent student, but that's one way to learn among many. He seemed happy at that notion, that he learns at school but he learns in other ways at other times and in other places as well, and it's not always stressful or boring or difficult.

And as for the whole "what about college" thing (or what about physics or writing term papers or learning to meet assignment deadlines or "insert stereotypical worry here"), unschooling doesn't mean you just give everything over to the universe and say "what will be, will be!" and then dance off into the sunset with your dreadlocks swaying and leaving a trail of incense behind. You do what anyone would do who wants to get into college (or take a physics class or write a paper or meet a deadline) - you prepare. Unschoolers don't learn little bits of this and that in separated-out morsels in preparation of possibly "someday" needing that information. They follow their interests and tackle their goals and learn what they need to learn as they go. And it works.

And it works on a radically different timeline from school, too. Just because state mandates say that fourth graders learn to long-divide, it doesn't mean there's some innate need to learn to long-divide at age 9. No one needs to long-divide until they need to long-divide. Not sooner, not later. And when one needs to know something, one typically goes about learning it.

Adults have a difficult time wrapping their heads around this. But usually those fears also stem from the worry that their child will be too different from other kids, or they'll appear to be neglectful parents. It's easier to follow the herd. I totally get that. That's why you'll see unschoolers hugging and jumping up and down in glee when they get together - SOMEONE LIKE ME! It ain't easy to paddle against the current, lemme tell ya.

But what it comes down to is this: What do I care about more, my child's freedom and well-being and happiness? or the nosy lady's misinformed opinion at the local mini-mart?

No contest.

Paddling upstream gets easier. I tried to learn nothing yesterday. I gave it a really good go. I was so tired from hosting 4 parties in 6 days that I sat on my butt almost all day, sorting through digital photos (oops, I learned how to use flickr), blogging (oops, I used an online thesaurus to choose some words), reading magazines (oops, I flagged several recipes and art activity ideas), and eating (oops, I learned that grazing on leftover party food all day makes me a bit queasy *BURP*).

I challenge you to learn nothing for one day. And then, the next time you wonder about us wacky weirdo unschoolers, perhaps you'll pause and think.... "You just might have something there...."

Source: I nabbed this article and quote from another awesome, unschooling, blogging mama, Piscesgrrl. Thought it timely with the approach of the traditional school year.

Rare Albino Whale Spotting

July 2, 2009--Migaloo, a twentysomething rare white humpback whale was seen this week along Australia's each coast, where he's migrating northward with other humpbacks.

Source: National Geographic via Youtube.com

Stingray Averts Killer Whale

...not sure if it was ultimately successful in its attempt.

A stingray leaps out of the water as it is hunted by a killer whale, whose fin can be seen below the ray, just off St. Heliers beach in Auckland, New Zealand, Wednesday, June 24, 2009.

(AP Photo/New Zealand Herald Photograph, Brett Phibbs)

The Salty Waters of Saturn's Moon Hint at Life

By Jeffrey Kluger Friday, Jun. 26, 2009

If water is the elixir of life, it's no wonder that Earth — which is 70% ocean — simply teems with living things. The other planets and moons in the solar system don't have it so good. They're forbidding places that are hydrological deserts, and thus biological ones too.

That, at least, had long been the conventional wisdom, but in recent years, scientists have come to learn that by some measures, the solar system fairly sloshes with water. Mars, we now know, was once as wet as Earth and still harbors ice and perhaps liquid water. The moon is thought to have water locked in permafrost at its poles. Jupiter's moon Europa is probably home to a globe-girdling ocean beneath a thin rind of ice, and its Jovian sisters Callisto and Ganymede appear to be icy and wet too. Now, according to new findings by the Cassini spacecraft, one more name can be added to the list of water worlds: Enceladus, a small moon orbiting Saturn. What's more, Enceladus' water might be unusually hospitable to the emergence of life.

(See the 50 highs and lows of space exploration.)

The Cassini probe, which was launched from Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004, had a big job to do: principally, studying the planet's elaborate ring system and taking a census of its litter of moons — of which 53 have been found and named. Of those, Enceladus, discovered in 1789, held some of the deepest secrets.

(See pictures of Saturn.)

Even viewed from Earth, the 310-mile-diameter moon appears bright white, almost as if covered in ice or snow; when the Voyager 1 spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 1981, it confirmed that long-distance impression. More intriguing was the way Enceladus behaved. Embedded inside Saturn's E ring — the outermost of the eight bands that make up the ring system — Enceladus seemed to orbit with a thick clump of ring matter trailing behind it, almost as if it were dragging the material in its gravitational wake. What astronomers suspected instead — and what Voyager confirmed — was that Enceladus was not dragging matter but expelling it, chugging through its orbits like a locomotive and leaving a vapor trail behind it. What astronomers couldn't know for sure was what the exhaust was made of.

(Watch a video of the first broadcast from the moon.)

"Potential plume sources on Enceladus are an active area of research," says Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

In 2005, Cassini helped advance that research when it endeavored to determine the composition of the exhaust in the most straightforward way possible: by flying through it and registering the thousands of high-speed pellets that collided with its skin. The speed and density of the pellets confirmed that they were ice. Analyzing the precise composition of that ice has taken years, but the results, published this week in the journal Nature, were worth the wait.

Not only is the ice made of ordinary water, but it's salt water, with sodium turning up in the samples no matter how many times the ring material was retested. "Our measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain carbonates like soda," says Frank Postberg, a Cassini scientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. (See a photo-essay of the world's most competitive space programs.)

For biologists, that's huge. The only way to account for that particular chemistry is if the salts have dissolved out of rocks in the interior of Enceladus into a large quantity of standing water, as would occur if the moon had a subsurface ocean. "Both components [table salt and carbonates] are in concentrations that match the predicted composition of an Enceladus ocean," says Postberg. "The carbonates also provide a slightly alkaline pH value, which could provide a suitable environment on Enceladus for life precursors."

How a moon that hangs in the frigid depths of the solar system could keep water in a liquid state is not much of a mystery. Too small to have a molten core and too far from the sun to feel even a flicker of its heat, Enceladus does have other moons — principally outlying Tethys and Dione — orbiting nearby. Each time those moons pass, they give Enceladus a gravitational tug, which causes it to flex slightly. Do that enough times — and the 4 billion years the solar system has been around is more than enough — and the pulsing moon heats up in much the way a wire hanger does if you bend it repeatedly back and forth. That explains both why the water stays liquid and why it's repeatedly squeezed up through cracks and into space, where it flash-freezes into icy mist.

The book on Enceladus is by no means closed, and Cassini has two more flybys of the moon scheduled for November. Scientists aren't expecting to find proof of biology there anytime soon — but now, at least, they've got a good reason to look.

See an interactive graphic of landing sites on the moon.
See TIME's space-exploration covers.

Source: Time.com