AHA Weblogs Blog: Home Education Magazine Editor’s Blog
I was writing a letter to a friend this morning, trying to explain why I feel so amazingly optimistic about the homeschooling community these days, and I thought maybe I should share some of what I’d written with my blog readers:
We coordinated with Kim Campbell last year to do a “blog of blogs” for the AHA – and just go take a *look* at this absolutely marvelous resource she’s created: AHA Weblogs Blog.
I am in total awe – and I lose countless hours just reading – every time I go there! This homeschooling community is so unbelievably rich in committed, caring, savvy, fun, I-could-run-out-of-descriptive-words people, openly sharing their lives and their children’s lives by simply recording magnificent photos and endearing moments and family histories and the little things that happen in life to make it the wondrous adventure it is. I’m waaay more optimistic about the homeschooling community now than at almost any time I can remember! In fact, I’m *downright excited* – does it show?
Interestingly, when I hunted up the URL for Kim’s AHA blog I noted again that she’d added this blog a couple of weeks ago, saying this about me:
Although she doesn’t state it directly in her blog, one of her motivations appears to be bringing homeschoolers together by connecting us with other fabulous blogs and websites and publications.
That’s precisely why we do this work. Good call, Kim!
Cruising a few weblogs at random today I came across one with this title and, remembering a favorite HEM columnist who’d used that line many years ago, I thought to myself, “What are the chances…”
It wasn’t the long-lost columnist (who I’d love to touch base with again), but a lovely and utterly engaging blog by an unschooling mom in Pennsylvania (and sure enough, she was quoting the HEM columnist):
Hauling Up The Morning – Bravenet Web Journal
       “May we keep hauling up the morning!”
                                                 - Rogue Dalton
“I like the metaphor of a sailing ship upon the sea for parenthood and for homeschooling. There are no completely reliable charts, and so we must often navigate without them. We must learn for ourselves how to find the currents, avoid the reefs and storms, and enter the harbors. As we haul up the sails to go on sailing, so we haul up the morning for the adventures of each new day. There is room for everybody on this ocean, and there is no pilot’s license required or worth having. We must trust ourselves and our children. ~ Earl G Stevens, Home Ed Magazine
It’s been a couple of days since I posted here because we’ve been focusing on getting our Sept/Oct issue pulled together before I fly back to Alaska tomorrow. Mark and I have both been here in Washington (state) for the last three weeks, but with homes in both states it’s time to say good bye and board the big bird.
Annette Jurczak of the National Charter School Watch list posted information about her newest project on several lists last night. She wrote: “I just started a new topic at the NHEN message board. It’s called “Protecting Homeschool Freedoms & Clarity.”
“I hope to see some of you over there responding to me about what I have posted. I started this thread because not everyone understands why clarity in language is important when we talk about hsing to other homeschoolers or charter schoolers. I am of the opinion that our homeschool freedoms are dependent on homeschoolers understanding their laws and using clarity about those laws to avoid attempts to reform homeschooling. Public school is being reformed, not homeschooling. Thanks for your time.”
Important reading for anyone interested in the future of homeschooling.
I was looking for information about something else (blikis, or the blog/wiki combination) when I stumbled across a comment on an interesting site, Minding the Planet: Integrating Blogs and Wikis — A Higher Unifying Framework, which rang true for me: “I’m ambivalent about the no-thought-required aspect of blogging – free, uncensored writing is excellent practice; on the other hand the discipline of thinking about where something goes is often clarifying.”
Maybe it’s because I’ve made my living as a writer and an editor for almost a quarter of a century now, but this blogging thing has, for me, definitely seemed to be a double-edged sword. I’ve already deleted three blogs because they skated too close to places I didn’t really want them to go. Was that my fault as the writer/blogger – or was it somehow the seductive quality of the media, the blog, that leads one to write things a little less cautiously, a little more carelessly, than one might otherwise?
So does that somehow make us bloggers closet exhibitionists? Likewise, are those who read our bloggings a wee bit voyeuristic? Am I reading too much into the whole thing, or is this “free, uncensored blogging” creating a whole new dynamic by which people relate? Not just the writer/reader dynamic, but the “why am I writing and why are you reading” dynamic, which usually doesn’t go beyond a somewhat superficial reasoning like because it’s there.
Food for thought.
