My two and a half year old grandson can’t sit still for more than fifteen seconds...UNLESS...he’s engaged in putting together a puzzle or finding images hidden in a picture or otherwise engaged in challenging activities. He can identify an acorn and tell you it came from an oak tree. Thank God his parents plan to homeschool because this boy would be a problem student. I wish I’d had the knowledge and resources when my children were young to have followed through with my dream of homeschooling them. My heart sings when I imagine this little guy’s future studying in the wilderness of our property. Great article❤️thank you!
What a wonderful book! I was that child in school...notes home about my daydreaming. I never became successful by the world's standards, but I did grow up to homeschool my own two now-adult children, and receive the best education ever. I still work with homeschoolers, and I'm still basically a five-year-old at heart. I am curious about everything. What I'm finding is that today's kids aren't curious about anything, except the homeschooled kids. congratulations on having the best excuse ever to read amazing books.
Yet somehow our 19th century education system keeps bumping along, treating kids like so many interchangeable widgets being assembled in a factory. I'm hoping we get to a tipping point soon (maybe we're tipping now and I just don't realize it) where the whole traditional system is consigned to the dustbin of history.
Shamefully I should know the answer to this, but is that book The Boy Who Drew Birds?
That is the children’s bio on Audubon that we carry in our part time bookshop/bookfair. It’s just one of the truckload of our classically-recommended titles I haven’t gotten to yet!
love it! I would take my kids on book forraging trips at the salvation army store. Even though they are young adults now, they were eager to hit up a really good library sale with me a while back.
I love this, but from my own experience know that a child, then adult, who has a differentness from the norm is likely to draw the eager, predatory attention of anyone in the extended family who is a psychopath. He will be persecuted; smeared relentlessly behind his back because things other than the acquisition of money, power, and status appeal to him. He may find eventually, to his shock and long after the time has past when he might attempt damage control, that his reputation has been hacked to shreds. He will have become permanently stigmatized. In the most horrible cases, a person will learn that he has been disinherited. It happened to me.
Psychopaths have an inborn expertise at destruction. The child who hasn't been raised to be a cutthroat needs to be taught there the woods are thick with cutthroats, and what to be alert for in spotting them. Cluster B personality disorder, as it is euphemistically termed, has become so rife in the population that teaching children about its existence has become at least as necessary as teaching them common first aid.
Your Substack today is particularly lovely, Dr Gaty, and I'm sorry I've thought it necessary to marr it to some considerable extent with such a gloomy comment, but the aphorism, "forewarned is forearmed," has an urgent applicability in families in which children are being raised in such truly prolific ways.
I love the idea of birds wintering together in the frozen lake just as I loved the movie of the penguins taking turns sitting on the egg or how bears eat themselves into obesity and then hibernate for the winter and come out thin, We humans have lost our ability to deal with the snow, ice and cold of winter preferring to rush to mexico where we can sit in sunshine all day and drink taquila all night.
My two and a half year old grandson can’t sit still for more than fifteen seconds...UNLESS...he’s engaged in putting together a puzzle or finding images hidden in a picture or otherwise engaged in challenging activities. He can identify an acorn and tell you it came from an oak tree. Thank God his parents plan to homeschool because this boy would be a problem student. I wish I’d had the knowledge and resources when my children were young to have followed through with my dream of homeschooling them. My heart sings when I imagine this little guy’s future studying in the wilderness of our property. Great article❤️thank you!
What a wonderful book! I was that child in school...notes home about my daydreaming. I never became successful by the world's standards, but I did grow up to homeschool my own two now-adult children, and receive the best education ever. I still work with homeschoolers, and I'm still basically a five-year-old at heart. I am curious about everything. What I'm finding is that today's kids aren't curious about anything, except the homeschooled kids. congratulations on having the best excuse ever to read amazing books.
Yet somehow our 19th century education system keeps bumping along, treating kids like so many interchangeable widgets being assembled in a factory. I'm hoping we get to a tipping point soon (maybe we're tipping now and I just don't realize it) where the whole traditional system is consigned to the dustbin of history.
Shamefully I should know the answer to this, but is that book The Boy Who Drew Birds?
That is the children’s bio on Audubon that we carry in our part time bookshop/bookfair. It’s just one of the truckload of our classically-recommended titles I haven’t gotten to yet!
love it! I would take my kids on book forraging trips at the salvation army store. Even though they are young adults now, they were eager to hit up a really good library sale with me a while back.
I love this, but from my own experience know that a child, then adult, who has a differentness from the norm is likely to draw the eager, predatory attention of anyone in the extended family who is a psychopath. He will be persecuted; smeared relentlessly behind his back because things other than the acquisition of money, power, and status appeal to him. He may find eventually, to his shock and long after the time has past when he might attempt damage control, that his reputation has been hacked to shreds. He will have become permanently stigmatized. In the most horrible cases, a person will learn that he has been disinherited. It happened to me.
Psychopaths have an inborn expertise at destruction. The child who hasn't been raised to be a cutthroat needs to be taught there the woods are thick with cutthroats, and what to be alert for in spotting them. Cluster B personality disorder, as it is euphemistically termed, has become so rife in the population that teaching children about its existence has become at least as necessary as teaching them common first aid.
Your Substack today is particularly lovely, Dr Gaty, and I'm sorry I've thought it necessary to marr it to some considerable extent with such a gloomy comment, but the aphorism, "forewarned is forearmed," has an urgent applicability in families in which children are being raised in such truly prolific ways.
Sir you do write the most inspiring and uplifting articles!!
As I write this, I watch the wonderful birds feeding on the homemade suet I put out for them.
Thank you!!
I love the idea of birds wintering together in the frozen lake just as I loved the movie of the penguins taking turns sitting on the egg or how bears eat themselves into obesity and then hibernate for the winter and come out thin, We humans have lost our ability to deal with the snow, ice and cold of winter preferring to rush to mexico where we can sit in sunshine all day and drink taquila all night.
Thank you for sharing insights into this book - we need to keep fresh ideas coming to benefit our youngsters.