sabbatical- Day 3

Spent the day drawing Michio Kaku and some more Happy Punks! Turned down another god-awful book. I did put my name in to be considered for an ad job, because the pay is amazing and it’s for a good cause. we’ll see.  In the meantime- more punks!

sabbatical- day 2!

Yesterday I turned down My Little Bible Verses,  today I’ve been painting Happy Punks, Rabbits With Attitude, and Johnny Depp!

Yay, oh Yay!!

sabbatical

I’m going to be spending the next 4 months on sabbatical. What does that mean for a self-employed freelance illustrator? It means spending the next 4 months working exclusively on projects that I’m passionate about- projects that have no guaranteed financial reward.

Why am I doing this? Because the projects that have a hefty check attached to them (and 0 opportunity to actually be creative) keep nudging some amazing one out of the way! If i don’t just carve out time for them, they will simply never happen.

What are these projects? There are 2 -3 picture books that John & i have been brainstorming for a while. They’re brilliant ideas and I can’t wait to start. They have potential to get picked up by large publishing houses, but if not, we;ll hit more alternative publishers, and if that doesn’t work , go back to self publishing. We’ll also be spending time promoting The Ocean Story that we did for Stone Arch earlier this year.

Plus I’ll be illustrating a picture book that I’m collaborating on with my pal, Carolyn that is amazing. And a food blog with my friend Greg. Perhaps something with my friend, Jennifer. And I plan on spending some time learning Flash for a project with my friends Andy & erin.  And some time playing my guitar and banjo.

The checks I earn doing uninteresting books pay our bills, so this is definitely a leap of faith. We have enough saved up to do this until June if need be. If that time comes, and none of  the work that I’ve been doing has paid off, I’ll take whatever job I need to. If no one needs me- we’ll resort to credit cards to pay bills for a while. Eventually someone will email.

So- it’s kind of a gamble.   But life’s too short to spend it doing crap.

5 Things Your Unschooler Needs To Know

Reposting this from EnjoyLifeUnschooling.com

“Unschoolers will often challenge the use of the words “have to”. I’ve probably driven my husband crazy by answering his, “I have to…” with a “Really? HAVE to?” with a big grin. But I’ve been caught in my own joke, annoying him on purpose has only led me to question my own beliefs… again. Yes it’s true, I am so against the grain that I challenge myself, regularly. So here is my dilemma. You know all those homeschool and school supplemental (as if we need to supplement school) books; “What your third grader needs to know” or “What your teenager needs to know”? They always get me right at the title. “No one, NEEDS, to know anything at all”, I say in my head. Yet, sometime last week, this thought of mine (mostly sarcastic and playful) came to a screeching halt and I found myself, asking myself (who else?)…

“Is there anything an Unschooler HAS TO know?”

Is there anything out there in this whole universe, so important that an Unschooler must, must, must know, no questions asked? Is there information out there, so monumental, that if an Unschooler didn’t know it, it could drastically change the course of his/her life forever? The answer is YES. There is. And if I haven’t already blown your mind, I’m going to tell you there are actually 5 things that your Unschooler NEEDS to know, MUST know, and just HAS TO know. And just like you probably guessed, I’m going to tell you what they are in no certain order.

1. Joy: Do you know joy? Do you know what brings your child joy? Do you fill your world and theirs with things and opportunities that bring you all joy? You must! My children love being at home and free from control and coercion. They value their joy like no other child. I’m always wondering… how can I bring them even more?
2. Trust: We live in a distrustful world. Rules, laws, regulations, and forced “guidance” tell children they aren’t trusted. Trust your child, change the world. A child who grows up trusted, becomes trustworthy and trustful. Trust your child to learn and make decisions for himself. Just make sure it’s not in spite of the fact that you don’t. Oh and most importantly, be trustworthy.
3. Mistakes: Our society doesn’t always value mistakes. Punishment of a mistake, negates learning from it. And no I don’t mean “learning their lesson” or “learning their place”, I mean real, natural learning. Making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. A mistake can happen anywhere, anytime and is often unavoidable. Unschoolers should feel safe to make mistakes.
4. Love: This knowledge isn’t the sort of knowledge you can test or measure. It isn’t the sort of information that you are requiring your child to learn and find. They can’t read it in a book, find it on the internet, or get it at school. Love actually starts with you, it should be unwavering, and it should encompass all of the other things that your child must know. Being loved, promotes loving. A child who grows up unloved or even feeling unloved, will likely have difficulty expressing or feeling love. I believe that all children need to know love.
5. Friendship: Parents are friends. Doesn’t that go against the mainstream?! My children not only have my love, my trust, and my guidance (if they want it) but they have my friendship. I am there for them when they need me and even when they don’t. I am joyful and trustworthy. My children and I are humans, we make mistakes and I still give my love freely. When presented with a sticky situation my children know I am on their side. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that they know that. I won’t leave them physically or emotionally alone when they need me, ever. I am right where they need me to be.

It was my intention to write this piece without clear examples of how to make sure your children know these things. These five things, although highly important, should never be forced or tested. As a parent, it is your job to think about and figure out how you will make sure they know these things without actually requiring them. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

 

 

Sounds like a good Jr/ Sr year, to me!

Check out what this guy suggests as an alternative to Graduate School. I think we should try some for the last 2 years of high school.

From Powells.com guest blogger Chris Guillebeau:

“Skip Graduate School, Save $32,000, Do This Instead”

Three years ago, I invested $32,000 and the better part of two years at the University of Washington for a master’s degree in International Studies. The verdict? It wasn’t a complete waste of time and money. Once I accepted that 80% of the course requirements were designed to keep people busy, I enjoyed the other 20% of the work.

If you’re strictly interested in learning, however, you may want to get a better return-on-investment than I did.

Here’s how to save $32,000 (or more) through your own self-directed, alternative program.

Here’s how to save $32,000 (or more) through your own self-directed, alternative program. Feel free to revise, subtract, or drop out whenever it’s convenient to you.

The One-Year, Self-Directed, Alternative Graduate School Experience

• Subscribe to The Economist and read every issue religiously. Cost: $97 + 60 minutes each week.

• Memorize the names of every country, world capital, and current president or prime minister in the world. Cost: $0 + 3-4 hours once.

• Buy a Round-the-World plane ticket or use Frequent Flyer Miles to travel to several major world regions, including somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia. Cost: variable, but plan on $4,000.

• Read the basic texts of the major world religions: the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and the teachings of Buddha. Visit a church, a mosque, a synagogue, and a temple. Cost: Materials can be obtained free online or in the mail — or for less than $50 + 20 hours.

• Subscribe to a language-learning podcast and listen to each 20-minute episode five times a week for the entire year. Attend a local language club once a week to practice. Cost: $0 + 87 hours.

• Loan money to an entrepreneur through Kiva.org and arrange to visit him or her while you’re abroad on your big trip. Cost: Likely $0 in the end, since 98% of loans are repaid.

• Acquire at least three new skills during your year. Suggestions: photography, skydiving, computer programming, martial arts — or even the flying trapeze. The key is not to become an expert in any of them, but to become functionally proficient. Cost: Variable, but each skill is probably less than three credits of tuition would cost at a university.

• Read at least 30 non-fiction books and 20 classic novels. Cost: approximately $750 (be sure to support Powell’s!).

• Join a gym or health club to keep fit during your rigorous independent studies. (Most universities include access to their fitness centers with the purchase of $32,000 in tuition, so you’ll need to pay for this on your own otherwise.) Cost: $25-75 a month.

• Become comfortable with basic presentation and public speaking skills. Join your local Toastmasters club to get constructive, structured help that is also beginner-friendly. Cost: $25 + 2 hours a week for 10 weeks.

• Start a blog, create a basic posting schedule, and stick with it for the entire year. You can get a free blog at WordPress.org. One tip: don’t try to write every day. Set a weekly or bi-weekly schedule for a while, and if you’re still enjoying it after three months, pick up the pace. Cost: $0.

• Set your home page to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage. Over the next year, every time you open your browser, you’ll see a different, random Wikipedia page. Read it. Cost: $0.

• Learn to write by listening to the Grammar Girl podcast on iTunes and buying Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Cost: $0 for Grammar Girl, $14 for Anne Lamott.

• Instead of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, read The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs, a good summary. Cost: $10 or less.

TOTAL COST: $10,000 or less

Note: The total cost of the self-directed, alternative graduate school program does not include housing or food, but neither does the tuition for traditional school programs in the U.S. and Canada. Freedom and independence, however, are included at no extra charge.

Study hard! See you tomorrow.

÷ ÷ ÷

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non-Conformity. When not traveling to every country in the world or every state in the U.S., he lives in Southeast Portland. Say hi on Twitter, Facebook, or the AONC site.

 

Bay of Fundy

Started off the school year with a field trip to Campobello Island. The learning experience of these trips out-values anything else we do the test of the year. It’s an amazing way to learn how folks who live in different areas live.

We just can’t quite figger out how to prolong these, do more– or just LIVE by the ocean where we’re all SO happy?

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when do you start school?

Ok, September’s come around and is almost over and we’ve barely done anything schooly. what have we done? Lived for a week on an island in the Bay of Fundy- one of our favoritest places in the world. We watched whales, dolphins, seals… explored tidepools and found star fish, sea urchins and anemones, picked plastic off the beach, watch krill wash ashore and fog roll in. Listened to the foghorn, walked to the lighthouse, took hikes. Learned a little bit about why one of our best president’s spent his summers across the border. Spent time in a library. Didn’t get lost.  Watched bald eagles follow seagulls and wait for the whales to pop up. Watched huge golden eagles soar past our deck. Stayed together in a very small house and made music and dinner and got along.

What else? The week before last we went to an opening at Greylock Arts that included a story that we all worked on together.  Our very first collaboration. Hopefully not the last.

Then last week we started reading To Kill A Mockingbird, started going to the Greenfield Anime Club, went to visit NBTSC, saw Bennington Monument up close for the first time, took a hike and some walks, installed Adobe apps. Harry has started messing w/ After Effects– glitches need to be worked out in the rest.

 

summer…

Can’t believe summer’s nearly over. The garden has a few last breaths in it- some hopeful looking cabbage, broccoli, lettuce and spinach. But this freaky hot and sunny weather may dash those hopes. Regardless! Happy about the abundant harvests we’ve had and the cidery smell underneath the crabapple tree.

We have one last trip planned- we’re doing our annual pilgrimage  to New Brunswick. I think this is the last for a while- we’ll be trying to head ever North-Easter on subsequent trips. But this year will be lovely- we’re packing our instruments and  staying in a little cottage on a cliffy beach with a little treehouse. I’ll be working on a book that’s due soon about the ocean and hopefully working on my banjo playing. What else? dunno! Can’t wait!

This summer the kids have squirreled themselves away in their rooms for heaps of hours working on music. They’ve produced some incredible stuff – I think 2 weeks at Rock Camp was inspiring. Two of their projects were for book trailers- here’s a link to a vimeo page.

The summer has been great, but I’m really looking forward to fall.

creativity, with a discount. hopefully.

I’m so hoping to be able to get an educational discount for this:

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium which includes (among many other things):

After Effects, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator , Flash Catalyst , Flash Professional, and Soundbooth. We could have a very productive summer and beyond. The price without discount? $1,699. With discount $449, which is still a big investment, but holy smokes. It would go a long way in fulfilling my “They will continue learning new techniques for digital photography, animation, illustration and film making” curriculum goal.

Hugo was so excited to try the free demo for After Effects- we’ll see how that goes-at least it’s a start!

The Dropout Economy

Here is an interesting article from Time Magazine. I’m lifting it in it’s entirety:

“The Dropout Economy” By REIHAN SALAM

Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com