The next big thing

 Part of me wants to be just a poet and a gardener, weaving words and guiding grapes up trellises. My grapes escaped their trellis and grew high into the branches of the pine trees above my garden, and I realize I must climb to harvest my grapes.

 Yet the only reason I have had time to dabble in such pastoral pursuits, as gardening, is because of the generosity of those of whose knees I sat at as I learned business as a child. Bedtime stories became quests of learning everything my father ate on a business trip. Movies became times to clip leads or fold brochures. Family holidays always became business planning sessions.

At 17, I opened my first business, the only dance studio in the town we had moved to for my parents business to grow. I had 3 students and we put on a full length ballet, with a little recruiting from students at the dance studio where I trained, before I moved to college.

As my parents business made its first million, I eyed the MBA program at my college. Then I got married and started having children, but the maternity clothes were not cutting it. So by my third child I opened a new business, using the infant technologies available to online retailers in the early 2000s. 

After struggling to open clothing production facilities in the USA,  mostly due to my failure to create a functioning team, and being overwhelmed with my own children’s needs at the time. We chose to downsize just to me again, but still hit all of our growth estimates until I had my 5th baby. Then I knew I could either grow my business or my children.

Now we have another business, one that I must climb to harvest. That climbing includes learning how to market the technology that revolutionized in-floor heating, learning how to manage and focus our talented team, and learning how to set up manufacturing and fulfillment. 

Our current marketing and sales team is staffed by engineers, attempting to market to the Heating and Plumbing professionals, which is the lowest value proposition market we have access to. One year ago, I took over the online marketing bringing us to the do-it-yourselfers and small contactor market. Our online sales have triple the closure rate with 10% higher margins than our average sales. 

I want to know enough to bring HUG Hydronics to the world, starting with North America and then Europe.  I need to learn how to manage people, build networks, finance a growing business, add to my abilities to analyze data and see trends, and build sustainable and robust supply chains in our ever-changing economic and physical environments. 

I see the MBA giving me the tools to climb and harvest safely. I see St. Catherine’s MBA as being particularly valuable in helping me navigate a traditionally male centered business and learning how to establish a workplace that values all voices, experiences, and backgrounds.

One by One

I have been a teacher of record for Freshman Comp as a graduate assistant for the last 2.5 years. My stint is up in December, as I will graduate. We were given minimal guidance on what or how to teach. So I naturally pulled on my 40+ years of experience teaching things like Nursery, Primary Music, Sunday School, Relief Society, Ballet, and as a homeschooling mother.

The most important thing I ever learned about teaching is that everybody is an individual. I do not teach a class of 30, I teach 30 individuals in a class. Each comes with different experiences, different styles of learning, and different skills they need to build. Their brains and bodies each work in their own unique ways.

I try hard to learn every name every semester. I try to remember their strengths, weaknesses, tolerances for complication and to adjust my discussions, expectations, council, and encouragement for each one.

We can never choose what others are ready to learn, and if they are not ready to learn it, no amount of lecturing or assignments will get them there. What a true teacher really needs to do is meet the students where they are at, and work with them where they are at. If that means sectioning your lecture to cover different needs for different students, then do it.  A beautiful, cohesive, focused lecture will only help the students ready for that material. But if you hit 5 topics, perhaps you can help 5 times as many students.

The other thing I think is crucial is to love them, everyone, individually. Get to know them. Acknowledge their presence, and thank them for coming, discuss their favorite topics. Moving away from home, to a dorm, being in classrooms or lecture halls with 100s of other students, eating dinner in a noisy dining hall, can all be human processing- even dehumanizing. It is easy to become a number or an ID login, and everyone, especially those in emerging adulthood need to be reminded that they are more than a grade or a transcript. So I look in their eyes, write down what I like about what I am seeing in their papers and make a point to call them by name at least once every class. I grade individually, looking for growth in their skills and thought processes, and try to challenge appropriately.

No, I do not teach according to the latest techniques or theories, even if I know them, they are only useful to a small subset at any one time. No, I try to teach what each student needs.  I teach one by one.

The Birth of a Paper

Writing a Seminar paper is a lot like giving birth to a baby.
Going into it, I get an urge to clean, only this time, not the kitchen, it is shelves of the library. I scour them for everything I can find related to my topic. I waddle out of there, my hands low, wrapped around the big belly of books that reach to my chin.

When the labor of writing sets in, there are lots of deep breathes, moans, squeaks. Inbetween expulsions of words, I get up and pace, looking for nourishment to fuel my task, to stretch my sore muscles. My back aches, my hips are sore. Sleep comes in fits. No diversion works for long, back to the pushing, relentless and seemingly never-ending, until in full bloom the paper emerges, full of the red squiggly lines, mucus of misspelled words and grammar mistakes. It needs to be cleaned off. It needs to be wrapped in the proper format.
Then exhausted, I sleep, snuggled up to dreams of concepts that came to life as the paper's ideas were born.

What the last few weeks of the semester feels like

Spring Break Dreaming

One class between me and spring break. Then it is a mad 6-week dash to the end of the semester. With not just major paper and projects due on my end, but I got to get 20 students to get through their major papers too.

And I am already wiped. Maybe I should have planned to take spring break in the sun somewhere. Next year that is my plan. This year I am taking a kid to a medical specialist because that is how Mommies actually spend spring break.

But my last class before break is planned, and the last papers that are due before break are in. So, just breathe and I can survive tomorrow.

Too bad there are no sunny beaches in Rochester, MN.

Reflections

When you look into a mirror or standing water you see a reflection, not reality as it actually is, but one that is flipped. Often times reflections allow us to see things in a different way or notice things we did not by looking straight on. So here I am going to attempt to flip my reality of the last 2 weeks on its head.

Starting school again is always hard. Christmas vacation was very challenging this year. We lost 2 dear family members, one expected due to cancer and the other my dearest Grandma, very unexpected. And what hurt was not so much her loss, because of my faith, I know that she is still with us and that I will see her again, but because I could not be there for her transition. I was in Florida on a long-awaited vacation. Vacation was fun, and still hard in some ways. Losing Grandma in the middle of it put additional pressure on the family and organizational challenges a trip of that size demands, but then my baby (toddler) sprained his ankle and had to be carried everywhere and required a fair amount of doctor visits. So I was nowhere as prepared for school as I would have liked, but it came roaring down upon me, and my baby who just started walking again the night before school started got used to having Mom always hold him, and wasn't happy about her going away routinely at all. (I am beginning to suspect grammar is one of the early things that get distorted in a reflection.)

So when I enter the class, I was relieved that most of this stuff is old hat, to a blogger of 14 years. Yup, this blog has been running since 2004. When I started the blog it was to connect with my extended family and share with grandmas lots of baby pics. The blog ended up connected with an online internet business I ran for the next 5 years and then Facebook came on the scene and stole the blogging steam. In some ways that freed my blog from the self-editing of having readers I knew and loved, and in many ways it just plain ignored it.

It is fascinating to blog again, to bring about snippets of life that deserve more permanent time than Facebook would give them, and to also share knowledge gained in the process. In this blog resurrection, I have updated both the look and functionality of my blog, adding widgets and blog roles (at the bottom of the page). I finally gave up pink as my background color,  as I no longer hope for little girls, but am a proud and exasperated mom of one pre-teen girl and one sweeter, smaller one.

I am enjoying using the RSS feed on Feedly. It has proven a most effective way to keep on top of class bogs and assignments, however, the news feeds are overwhelming.  I am much less enthralled with Twitter. The best thing about Twitter is the NASA feed I connected with. I guess I enjoy some permanence, some continuance as if I could save the perfect day (or minutes) on my blog and come back it when I need a lift. Wait, I do that. I lose myself in my blogs past to rediscover myself in the now. That alone is the most valuable reason to blog.
To see all the blogs for class, click on my tag #en3177

Interesting Ideas in Digital literacy:

"Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing."

Maha Bali makes a most interesting point that judgment and awareness are needed even as we are quietly sitting at home on a computer because now this time is spent connected to the world.

Wow- makes me want to snuggle up with a good book.

What do you think?

Writting Education- does it make a difference?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

This is an amazing series of articles exploring the usefulness of how and whys of writing education at a High School level.

Helps answer the question of if teaching writing does any good at all?  What do you think?

When Aliens Came (to eat my brain)

The aliens came to take my brain, last night as I lay sleeping.

I tried to ignore them, but at last I implored them to turn off the noise that was bleeping.

But then they said through a hole in their head, that it wasn’t my brain that they wanted.

They wanted a part, that wasn’t my heart and continued to pester me, undaunted.

So I turned on my light and saw in fright, that they were all gelatin blob-ish.

Green and all bluish, and shaped like a shoe-ish, almost a little bit glob-ish.

They were making plans to invade our lands, or at least all the oceans on Earth.

They wanted my gut, only a single piece they’d cut, to see what to them it was worth.

Then I saw,  that they felt the major flaw, on their part was being all photosynthetic.

They wanted to eat, they thought it a treat, but didn’t have the needed genetics.

So they’d be studying us, didn’t think it a fuss, to take a piece I would offer.

But they already had, up in their lab, a mouth, some teeth, and the epiglotter.

They ask if I’d mind, donating to their kind, a part of my lower GI tract.

So I had a choice, to give a voice to the part  they had come to extract.

What would you choose, were you in my shoes, to give to some strange blue-green aliens?

My stomach?, my liver?, my intestines? Oh dither, can’t they ask another mammalian?

I felt kind of attached, to my gut, almost latched to all the parts that I had inside.

How could I persuade them to utilize their brain stem? another answer to provide.

Can’t they instead, do what our ancestors did and become a microbe symbiont?

Search the oceans for examples, the choices are ample, and end this bizarre experiment.

But they wouldn’t be persuaded, so I felt a little jaded, an answer would have to be found.

The epithelium lining to the serous membranes combining, what choice would be good and sound?

Inside my head, I thought of what my teachers said about all of my digestive tract parts.

The stomach, the liver, the pancreas, I shivered, oh what could I live best without?.

The stomach is useful and serves a frugal, place to store my whole dinner.

It’s stretches so great, and I know my fate, without it I would be much thinner.

it secretes the acid that keeps bacteria placid, and starts the proteins dividing

The signals it sends tells when hunger should end, and for hormones it does ample providing

It churns the food, until it does extrude through the sphincter to the duodenum.

It has microvillus galore, and that is all for the absorption to be quite optimum

The border enzymes marches to break down the starches,

then the blood takes the sugars away.

The liver adds bile, and in a little while the micro chorions are conveyed

through the lacteals , which is ideal, into the blood they are delayed.

The pancreatic juices have so many uses, and are not to be ignored,

it adds bicarbonate, that coordinates, ‘til neutral pH is restored.

It also contains enzymes amaze, trypsinogen, chymotrypsinogen,

carboxypeptidase, lipase, nucleases and amylase.

But should I forget the pancreatic islets, for the importance they do play?

They send the hormones, it does it alone, helping your blood sugar stay level all day.

Insulin links with cells and we think, it helps load them with the glucose.

In the liver it sends a quiver, to get some glycogen produced.

On the other hand when glucagon from the pancreas does swell

the glycogen the liver made no longer there doth dwell.

When the small intestine has had it’s say,

it goes through the ileocecal valve and gets pushed away.

There is it met by microbial pets, and gets even further digested,

ions and vitamins and  water are all from there sequestered.

As it moves up and around it often makes sounds and gasses do depart.

and then  all the brown starts bearing down, and through my anal valve comes a fart.

About every half hour I feel the power, as the haustas does contract.

and if I don’t comply, it will get dry, as more water it does extract.

My rectum and anus is designed in the plainness of layers of squamous epithelium

the layers of skin is a strong and yet thin way to protect me from painful delirium.

My anal sphincter’s my friend and keeps me from offend-ing all of my nice underwear.

its voluntary control, keeps me on a roll until I find a bathroom somewhere.

The aliens were waiting while I sat there debating, all of the if ands and buts.

So I  told them that in the end,  a piece of me they are not going to cut.

for I had decided, they’d be better off guided to have the GI tract in whole

How it’s connected with blood and lymph vessels, would help them reach their goal.

and better yet, they needed a complete set to see how it all fit together.

So I will vow, you can take me now, in the finals week of this semester!

When I Aced my A & P

When I Aced my A & P (with apologies to the author of “The Cremation of Sam McGee)

Strange things are done in the midday sun by students preparing their labs

they read the directions to start the dissections and then tentatively give it a stab.

These fluorescent lights have seen queer sights

But the queerest they ever did see

t’was that day in the lab, fetal pig on the slab,

When I aced my A & P

The formaldehyde will cause tears in your eyes and snot drip from your nose

you will try to breath, but the smell will cleave and stick to your hair and clothes

as you cut the pig it burns and stings and you think that you may faint

but there are structures to learn, it’s nearly time to adjourn, so you wont give no complaint

Cardiovascular system, veins and arteries I missed them as I cut my pig right through.

Pull the pericardium apart, so you can see the heart, the vena cava has a bluish hue.

Things I was supposed to get a good look at disappeared beneath my blade;  

“You mean I needed to know that?” I vowed to be more careful with the cuts I made.

The heart was out, and the lungs were flung, the brachial arteries exposed

The renal, gonadal, iliac and femoral, and the kidney sat juxtaposed.

Submandibular we found the salivary gland, and the epiglottis and the esophagus

Followed stomach rugae, the duodenum assayed, and we searched for the urogenital orifice.

From the external nares to the microvillii hairs, I felt I knew my pig well enough

Don’t have to worry about spelling, which is quite compelling,  Can the quiz be really that tough?

25 names of structures, Kay Rezanka would instruct us and then point to it we would.

So we hope and pray to make no guesses today, and see if our studying would make good.

Thyroid gland was found, a brownish mound, at the brachiocephalic junction.

Found the liver lobes, and then I took my probe and pointed to the bladder of urinary function.

10 more to go, I was on a roll, getting every one correct

I was doing so well, my hope began to swell until the one structure I did not suspect.

My head hung in shame, for I had forgotten the name of the structure that was before me.

So I sat there and stared, sifting through my memories in err, but the answer was not to be.

I thought it out logically, compared it homologically,  naming everything else I saw

I winced and I cried, brought a tear to my eye, this item was my one flaw.

Then I looked at my pig, tied and rigged , with the skin peeled from its face

Until I saw it’s eyes, in their baby size, staring back at me from space.

As the eyes stared at me they seemed say “I understand why you are doing this.

but I just wanted to say, since I have your attention today, here’s the ductus arteriosus that you missed.”

My brain was wracked, for I had cracked, but now I could scrape by

A glimmer I saw, and I was in awe, as a light beam, hit my eye,

Above the heart, just beyond the start, was the pulmonary trunk’s little connection

to the aortic arch, my mouth became parched, as I quickly made my selection.

Strange things are done in the midday sun by students preparing their labs

they read the directions to start the dissections and then tentatively give it a stab.

These fluorescent lights have seen queer sights

But the queerest they ever did see

t’was that day in the lab, fetal pig on the slab,

When I aced my A & P

I plan to live to be 100!

While contemplating my goals in life, and how that relates with weather or not to do some permanent birth control, I was really torn about it, wanting to both enjoy my time as a mother and also perusing and making really good use of a medical degree (nutritional neurology, here I come!)

So tonight, Ian was asking me about retirement. And I answered that I never plan on retiring, that I want to live to be 100 and use every precious day of it to the advantage of my fellow human beings. I realized that gave me 65 more years!

Wow- I have accomplished a lot in my 35 years, what am I going to accomplish in my next 65?

Here are my absolute plans:

1. Raise beautiful and inquisitive children that question everything and reach out and drag the answers out of the universe.
2. Learn, learn, learn, learn
3. Act, Act , Act, Act
4. Teach, Share and help others question everything and act.
5. Spend years serving the Lord, become one of those Mold people (Mormon + old) that have the energy to run around serving in Temples and and substitute teaching and serve everywhere they can. You know it's a Mold when you see a big smile under a crown of white curly hair (only mine might be white braided hair) who always know just the right thing to say to uplift those around them and whispers words of confidence when you need them most.
6.  Then be changed in a twinkling of an eye and continue my work.

Now my tenative plans:

1. Go to med school, study under nutritional and neurological professionals.
2. Work with special needs children (ie... everyone) and their families and uncover their problems, hopefully using a nutritional approach the vast majority of time.
3. Work for many, many years, gathering research and experience.
4. Share this research and experience.
5. "Retire" (at about age 90) into Mold-dom and then spend the last years of my mortality running around just to serve the Lord.

So, now I need to act as these are my goals. ... nutrition, exercise and learning and living :)

Busy Day

Wow, I have had a day.

Wednesdays are have usually been busy- but today has been very busy.

At 8am I had two parent teacher conferences, followed by picking CSA shares- then doing Clay's schoolwork with him. Laundry, lunch and running to Brainerd for my Bio Lab. Following 2 hours of learning how to use microscopes. Stop by cell phone shop to switch up to new phone (old one broke). Then the bank, grocery shopping, shopping at fleet farm (for bunny supplies and Galen's XLT shirts) then I stopped at Grandma Ruth's and Nathan's and helped them clean a window and see them off to the hospital again. Picked up some fresh picked corn and then Home again for dinner, tortilla making, more laundry, diapers, and 6 zuchinni cakes- I put several in the freezer for school lunches. Then study some chem, scripture study and a little time zoning to a show on netflicks.

I have done enough today, that I wasn't even disappointed that we didn't do yoga. I have been up since 7 am and am looking forward to a good night's rest.

Top 10 Reasons to Give my a Scholarship for Midwifery Studies

10. So more woman can be guided through childbirth.
9. So more babies can enter the world in harmony and love.
8. So my own dreams are realized.
7. So I can show my kids that it is never too late to go back to school.
6. So my kids can have shoes.
5. So my parents' financial planners get off my back about earning enough money.
4. So I have a good excuse why I don't have my dishes done and my floor mopped.
3. So my curiosity will be satisfied, a least for a bit.
2. So I can lead the way in advances in well woman care.
1. Because I was born to be a midwife.

How to Handle Challanging behavior in children

A new Approach-


http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04/23/lincoln-high-school-in-walla-walla-wa-tries-new-approach-to-school-discipline-expulsions-drop-85/

There are just two simple rules, says Turner.

Rule No. 1: Take nothing a raging kid says personally. Really. Act like a duck: let the words roll off your back like drops of water.

Rule No. 2: Don’t mirror the kid’s behavior. Take a deep breath. Wait for the storm to pass, and then ask something along the lines of: “Are you okay? Did something happen to you that’s bothering you? Do you want to talk about it?”

It’s not that a kid gets off the hook for bad behavior. “There have to be consequences,” explains Turner. Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.

Dear Elementary School Principal,

It was so nice of you to send us a certified letter reminding us that it is our job to try to keep our autistic 12 year old going to school everyday.

Apparently you have not talked with his teachers, para or advisers yet as to the efforts we have gone through in dragging him to school kicking and screaming, or to the joy we have at home when we can't even get him through the door and then he spends all day screaming while hiding underneath the kitchen table.

As we do tend to the parental duties of feeding and caring for our 12 year old, he is now officially bigger then most adults, weighing in at 175 pounds and is 5'8" in height, and because we have no desire of becoming physically incapacitated, we have therefore given up the tactic that we have used for years to get him into your school of picking him up and carrying him while he is throwing his tantrum.

We have, of course, tried the traditional bribing of our son with toys, gifts, cash or video game time to get him to be willing to attend school. When we find something that peaks his interest enough he does consent to go until it is time for him to leave then house. At that point he takes on the same look as a deer in the headlights and clings to anything he can so that he can not be made to vacate our premises.

Yes, we would be thrilled to work with you and your school team to get him out of our house everyday. My ears, toddler and puppy would be ever so grateful. In that regard I have been requesting appointent times with the school psychologist, and autism specialist, along with his normal team of teachers, and specialists.

You are more then welcome to join our meetings and look forward to any constructive advice you may have.

Have a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. As to us here we will focus on getting through the changes in schedules with as few tantrums as possible.

Sincerely,
Tired Mom

Healthy School breakfasts

Not as hard as they think....

The other day I attended a school breakfast with my children. They had a special day for "Moms and Muffins". But at that time, not only was I eating a muffin and a little plastic container of OJ, but I was watching the other kids eat a normal school breakfast, which is now free to all kids at the school.

The free breakfast is a great idea. It is very nice to know that my kids will have something to eat at school no matter how rushed or out of groceries we are in the morning.

While we sat there and ate a decent size muffin and drank our OJ, I saw the other children walk out of their line with a small cup of highly artificially colored and flavored (highly sugared) yogurt, a small muffin and a milk. And it struck me that there was nothing in that breakfast that had any real nutritional benefits. (except the milk).

And I also noticed that all the items were easy to serve in individual throw away containers. UGG! I realized that it made it all easy to serve, but in exchange it was not easy on the Earth or the Children's bodies.

You would not imagine stuffing you highly tuned car with junk- sugar and solid oils?, SO why do we stuff the children's highly tuned bodies with junk and then want them to sit still and listen and learn?

So- I have thought up several options for easy, healthy school breakfasts that kids would love and it would be nourishing to them.

1- Yogurt parfait. You serve each kid a serving of plain yogurt in a bowl. Then they walk down a yogurt bar where they can add items to their yogurt. These items include fresh (or previously frozen) cut fruits, sliced nuts, rolled oats, granola and honey.

This simple idea includes whole grains, protein, pro-biotics and fruit.

2- Whole wheat cinnamon rolls with fruit and a cheese slice. The keys here are to make the cinnamon rolls healthy and serve serve real- not processed cheese.

3- Breakfast burrito bar. Each child gets a wholegrain tortilla and then walks down the bar that offers scrambled eggs, black beans, shredded cheese, diced tomatoes, onions, fresh green, salsa, plain yogurt (to use as sour cream) and of course a side of fruit.

4- Oatmeal bar. Serve them a bowl of oatmeal and let them top it off with thier choices of the following: Raisins, brown sugar, honey, cinnamon, nuts, plain yogurt, other dried or fresh fruit.

5- Breakfast sandwich- use a wholegrain english muffin or bagel and put real cheese, eggs, and ham inside. Bake until warm. Great, warm and filling. Offer with fresh fruits.

Galen's special ed teacher (and now IEP coordinator) sent home a note yesterday that read
"I am concerned that Galen will be falling behind if he decides not to work in school or at home. If you have a suggestion to help him please let me know. Mrs. R."

Now, those of you who have been reading my blog lately know that I have some nontraditional views on education- as in I believe children are designed to learn, but not to do worksheets and definitely not designed to sit down 8 hours in a classroom on a beautiful spring day.

I responded by email and wrote the following:


Hello Mrs. R,
I got your note this morning regarding Galen's lack of cooperation/homework in your class.

The last few weeks haven been very autistic for Galen. We have had many hard days with him. However, he seems to be pulling out of the worst of it and actually was talking in sentences this morning and was willing to walk unto the bus by himself (rather then be carried,kicking and screaming, as often happens).

Spring has traditionally been a rough time for Galen in school. He has often had a strong lack of desire to be in school the last few months and just wants to play.

Galen has a "no homework" policy in his IEP. This allows us time at home to be a family rather then spend hours every night on a few worksheets. When Galen is willing to work, we are more then happy to help him, and often reward him for the effort.

My feelings on why he is not working in class lately is that his physical needs are unmet. This winter the poor kid probably backlogged hundreds of hours of outdoor time and needs to release/ fulfill that need.

May I suggest teaching him physically? Take him outdoor and have him solve math problems relating to things/actions outside. This can be things like dividing rock piles or playground toys or even trees.

For reading I would suggest the same approach- have him read signs, road maps, plan a trip, have make a map and write directions..... there are so many things you can learn from when you are outside.

If you have to be inside, give him extra outside time as an incentive, and also keep him working "hands on." It is a favorite math game here to divide toys or chocolate chips, or cheddar bunnies. And make him read the box of the cheddar bunnys. When we do the homework at home, it is through the real application that we do each problem.

I hope these suggestions help- 8 weeks to go :)

Raya


However, I kind of wanted to go on and shame the educational system for thinking of homework as learning and therefore not doing homework as not learning.... but I felt it would not help Galen to create a rift between his teacher and mother.

I also wanted to say that kids are natural sponges for learning about the world and rules of the universe and that schools are rooms that separate the children from the world and the universe that they are trying so hard to learn about. So now we will see if they seriously care about his learning or just about his worksheets.

the roots of autism

There are 2 main hopes I have for autism research.

1. That they find something that makes it medically diagnosable (allergy, chemical reaction issues...., something so that we understand what it is we are dealing with inside the child's body. It also should be medically testable.... and treatable). Now in all reality. There will probably be splinter groups of no more then 15% of autistic labeled individuals at any one time who actually fit the medical diagnosis, but then they would be removed from the "autistic" group and given the label of what ever the problem really is. But if you take that 15% several times, you would significantly make a dent in the autism population.

2. the find the cause(s), and hence a way to stem the tide of new autistic children.

Now don't get me wrong, I love autistic children, they are special. They work on a different plane of reality, that seems to be a beautiful place. But Sometimes they feel trapped in an ugly place, and other times, you can't interact with them on anywhere near a normal way.

overall, my Galen actually dose well with changes. He enjoyed changing his room, and actually feel asleep by 11 pm last night. He expressed to me yesterday (while in his happy place) that he didn't want to go on the field trip today. I told him that he didn't have to. However, this morning, he fought with us every step of the way for getting him dressed and on the school bus because he has some fear of this field trip... so of course, I assured him that we would call the school and he wouldn't have to go. But that didn't improve his behavior this morning.

oftentimes, the change of setting really helps. When he gets on the bus and on his way to school he usually realizes that he lost the battle to stay home, so might as well not fight it any longer.

I remember growing up, that it was always hard to want to go to school. It was hard to walk out of your security zone and into a building with 500 other children and adults who get paid to tell you what to do, and what to think. But I was a good kid. I did it day after day, because I was told that was were I was supposed to be. Now, as an adult, it is even harder, because I know schools are much more big babysitting operations then places where you really learn anything.

In many ways schools really screw up that natural learning mechanics, curiosity, and desire to explore that we are all born with. The problem is that we have spent the last 100 years thinking that school is important, when it is the learning that is important. Schools teach you how to work with in a system, and this is fine, if you plan to spend the rest of your life in somebody else's system.

overall, I hate systems, corporate entities, things that have exisisted so long that there has to be rules, and then more rules on how to deal with the rules, and so forth, until the entire reason for the thing was forgotten under a pile of paperwork and corporate "Culture". And then they try to make it all better by hanging a few motivational posters. It is definitely the way to lose touch with the earth, and the real laws that govern our planet.

When you strip away all the garbage that piled up... and get back to the real problem, you realize that a few bugs are much less of a problem then the chemicals designed to get rid of them, and then the chemicals you use to overcome the chemicals you used (ect). And then if use look at it close enough, and did in enough dirt, you realize that the bugs might actually be useful, if balanced right. And then all of a sudden, the system nature put forth millions of years ago is dramatic and complex and functions really well. And all you have to do is tap into it, and then the garbage is gone, and there are nutrients, and you are happier, you feel full of light and your garden grows while you dance in the sun, and splash in the puddles.

Maybe that is what autism is.

We have finally succeeded in separating ourselves so far from the earth, that the autistic generation has no roots at all.

Maybe we need to plant them, water them, nourish them with sunshine and good dirt, and teach them to join the earth. Maybe then, if we are joined to the earth too, we will be able to communicate with them and see the amazing simplicity, clarity and wonder as their minds and bodies operate.

New Years Eve

Well, I was kinda planning on working today. But I have a hard time justifying it. And it is always easier to work when the kids are back in school.

I love school. When it started this September, I was all thrilled, and offered to pay more tax levies to meet the schools needs. I love our small school, that has all sorts of programs to help challenged learners and many teachers who are passionate about their work and their students. It is a tool I use not just to help my kids but for my sanity.

Don't get me wrong. I love my kids, I love to do things with them. But with all the other demands on me (mostly business, small children, pregnancy...) I just don't have the ability to keep them busy and engaged enough around home to keep them out of troubles.

Hmmm, Now I am so off track, I don't even remember what I was going to blog about.

Well, Have a happy new years.

Guerrilla Learning

How to give your Kids a real education with or without school. By Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver

A new book I am reading and would like to share:

"when you get down to it, unschooling is really just a fancy term for "life" or "growing up uninstitutionalized"

most of the homeschoolers- the kids in freeer, "unschooling" homes as well as those doing more traditional "School at home"- were engaged in ambitious, serious projects of one kind or another
...... in addition to their academic progress, they were learning the critical skills needed to devise a project, commit to a goal, and, at the risk of real failure, make something happen in the world."

Real learning requires meaning.
In schools it is a little too guided, too disconnected, too removed from the world.
People can be asked to absorb a certain amount of meaningless data in good faith, the promise that it will eventually be related to a larger world and transformed into information. But most people can't absorb 12 years of it.

Classrooms make poor worlds.
Children work on always putting things into their "world view", to make sense of the world around them and their questions are the most critical clue to what information is currently required by their emerging internal maps of the world.

That is why allowing kids to follow their interests can make learning so powerful.
They are searching for the missing info in their mind models.

Then it talks about the industrialized model of schools, turning out citizens to fit into cogs. That is one of the two main functions. The other is to babysit, so parents can be cogs.

Then it hits the apex of the first chapter: that it is our- the parents- ultimate responsibility to educate (or allow learning) for our kids.

I like that it also trys to help you work with in the system for some of it.

"you can view school as a deadly serious, meaningful test of what your family and children really are and the only significant source of your children's learning. Or you can choose to look with certain rules, certain penalties for losing and rewards for winning, and certain costs of playing. It doesn't have to define who your child or your family are, it doesn't have to be the only or the main source of your child's education. It probably won't much help your children find and develop their strengths, grow as a whole, healthy and spiritually connected, intellectually vital people, or find their calling in life. But neither does it have to crush their spirits"

First exercise given in the book:
List everything about which you know enough about on to contribute significantly to a conversation or to write a pithy booklet called "The beginner's guide to _____"
Write down everything you are good at- your skills, anything from webpages building to changing diaper....
Next put an a star by each of the items that you learned mainly in school or college.

I did a quick mental list, and about 99% was not learned in school.
Everything I do daily was not taught in school. I learned through doing, kind of trial by fire...
cooking, cleaning, financing, web stuff, people relationships, marketing, house repair, clothing...

Like many things in life school can be a poor master, but a good servant.
If you recognize it for what is it, and be aware of it's dangers, then you can use it as a tool
Like a skill saw.

And that concludes chapter one- hand around and I may share the best parts of other chapters.