What piece of music would be the theme song for your life’s story? Explain why it fits.
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Archive for December, 2021
Podcast: The Learning Benefits of Travel & Taking Big Risks with Blake Boles
This podcast interview did not go the way I expected – in the most delightful way imaginable. We wound up discussing the power of travel in a teen’s life! Super fun.
Blake Boles is the Founder and Director of Unschool Adventures, and he’s written several helpful books including his most recent title, “Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?” He also hosts the Off-Trail Learning podcast and has delivered dozens of presentations for education conferences, alternative schools, and parent groups.
Studying astrophysics at UC Berkeley in 2013, he stumbled upon the works of John Taylor Gatto, Grace Llewellyn, and other alternative education pioneers. Deeply inspired by the philosophy of unschooling, Blake custom-designed his final two years of college to focus exclusively on education theory. After graduating, he joined the Not Back to School Camp community and began writing and speaking widely on the subject of self-directed learning.
His biggest passion is sharing his enthusiasm and experience with young adults who are blazing their own trails through life.
Show Notes
The Bohemian Travel Lifestyle
Blake grew up with some great early travel experience, living with a family in Chile for a month at fourteen years old, traveling across Europe with friends at 19, organizing snowboarding trips in British Columbia during college, and taking a transformative trip to South America at 25. Those experiences seeded a love of travel within him, which eventually grew into his founding of Unschool Adventures.
He believes that the most formative and powerful travel experiences are the ones we handle alone or with a few friends, so he tries not to set everything up for the teens he works with. He gives them the space and time to explore, discover, and make mistakes. He makes sure they come home safe, but there will be struggles along the way – and that’s an important part of the experience.
Unschooling vs. the Traditional Learning Environment
When you’re first pushing back against a system that’s being forced upon you, it’s natural to be dogmatic. Over the years, however, Blake has managed to find a good balance between encouraging people to question the traditional school experience without forcing them to believe that homeschooling or unschooling are inherently better.
Traditional school does work for some kids at least some of the time. For some, it can be frustrating, boring, or unengaging. And for those kids, there are several different options, such as going to community college and engaging in academics at an earlier age, or for some it can mean unschooling – full time, self-directed learning, or alternative schools.
The question, “Why are you still sending your kids to school?” is not meant to be rhetorical, but a question to actively engage in. Question why you are sending your kid to school, know the alternatives, and run small experiments to find out what works best for your child.
Getting Comfortable with Risk
It’s one thing to prepare our kids to be comfortable with risk. But how do we, as parents, get more comfortable with exposing our kids to risk? We have to find ways to engage in risk that we are comfortable with, whether that’s letting our kids skateboard or play video games or something else that gives them a world of their own, with choices to make.
We have to push our threshold to the limit and let our teens explore as much as we are comfortable with. Sure, there are certain risks that aren’t worth taking. But coddling our teens and not allowing them to make mistakes will only hurt their learning in the long run.
Travel is a great tool for getting comfortable with risk while opening yourself up to productive forms of it – for both parents and teens. Being willing to step away from what’s convenient and comfortable to take on big challenges is the ultimate goal.
Resources
- blakeboles.com
- unschooladventures.com
- Read: “Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?”
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Friday Freewrite: Jar of Pickles
You’re at the grocery store when you see another shopper drop a jar of pickles then walk away leaving broken glass and pickle juice all over the floor. What happens next?
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Mechanics & Literature: December 2021
Whether searching for home, new community connections, or a piece of the American Dream, the characters in this month’s Dart, Arrow, and Boomerang are all on a quest to find their place.
Read about it while exploring writing, mechanics, and literary devices in meaningful ways with your family.
[This post contains Amazon affiliate links. When you click on those links to make purchases, Brave Writer receives compensation at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]
Heartwood Hotel: A True Home by Kallie George
When Mona the Mouse stumbles across the wondrous world of the Heartwood Hotel in the middle of a storm, she desperately hopes they’ll let her stay. As it turns out, Mona is precisely the maid they need at the grandest hotel in Fernwood Forest, where animals come from far and wide for safety, luxury, and comfort. But the Heartwood Hotel is not all acorn souffle and soft moss-lined beds. Danger lurks, and as it approaches, Mona finds that this hotel is more than a warm place to spend the night. It might also be a home.
This delightfully enticing start of a new chapter book series tells a tale of friendship, courage, and community, with exquisite black-and-white illustrations throughout. -Amazon
Get the Dart.
The Lion of Mars by Jennifer L. Holm
Bell has spent his whole life — all eleven years of it — on Mars. But he’s still just a regular kid — he loves cats, any kind of cake, and is curious about the secrets the adults in the US colony are keeping. Like, why don’t they have contact with anyone on the other Mars colonies? Why are they so isolated? When a virus breaks out and the grown-ups all fall ill, Bell and the other children are the only ones who can help. It’s up to Bell—a regular kid in a very different world—to uncover the truth and save his family . . . and possibly unite an entire planet. Mars may be a world far, far away, but in the hands of Jennifer L. Holm, beloved and bestselling author of The Fourteenth Goldfish, it can’t help but feel like home.
Get the Arrow.
Great American Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) edited by Paul Negri*
Featuring 19 of the finest works from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new compilation begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 tale “Young Goodman Brown” and ranges across an entire century, concluding with Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 classic, “The Killers.” Other selections include Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Melville’s “Bartleby,” Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, “The Real Thing” by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others.
*A note about this Boomerang: These stories touch on mature themes of human experience—love, unexpected windfall, but also danger, stolen luxuries, race, poverty, and death (including suicide in “Paul’s Case”). We highly recommend you preread each story before sharing it with your teen and review the content provided in the Boomerang to help you teach these stories in historical context.
Get the Boomerang.
