Comments on: Kids are Natural Learners

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 13:28:25 +0000

Thanks for the memories, Art…the little mercury bubbles we rolled around on the table…the magnifying glasses for starting leaf fires…the swings that almost wrapped all around the bar - all things I tried as well. I was in the emergency room a few times from spectacular crashes and falls. I also learned never to ride a cardboard box down a stairway. I wished I’d known about the poison tipped arrows because they sound very fun.

By: Artichoke

Artichoke — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 09:04:16 +0000

And we used to drive our bikes as close as we could behind the insecticide spray truck so that we could imagine we were in a blizzard in the desert, crush fluffy caterpillars to get green goop to make poison tipped arrows, burn ants with magnifying glasses, lay noose traps for lizards, and pit traps for my little brother, keep stashes of mercury in cigarette tins, and roll it around in our hands, light fires amongst the camel thorn, and try and swing so high that we looped right over the top bar … is amazing that we survived childhood to think again another day

By: Queenannelace

Queenannelace — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:44:46 +0000

I grew up in a small town too! I had a great deal of freedom by the fact, that I could walk anywhere and everyone knew me. We did not have organized sports but played outside. When the weather was bad, we played board games like Monopoly, Life, and even Rummy. No one had ADD or ADHD or Autism. We did worry about state tests. We too played in the dirt and did our own little experiments - our experiments involved the physics of crabapples. We would take the crabapple and would puncture it with the end of stick. This wonderful device could then be whipped so that the crabapple would project into the air at various velocities and distances.

I am reading a very controversial book by Charlotte Iserbyt, The Deliberately Dumpling Down of America. She worked under Reagan and considers herself a whistleblower. I am shocked with about her take on direct instruction and mandate testing. She just recently made the book available on http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com She would defintely say that the current public school system is undoing what kids naturally do.

By: Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:33:19 +0000

I love the analogy! I think this is why I moved from the “big city” back to my small hometown. I wanted my children to grow up “wiggling their toes in the dirt” and in fact they just got out of a mudhole.

I learned a lot in school and college but I think I learned to be myself amidst the mud, pets, and farm. There is a lot to be said for sending kids outside to “throw cats in trees” so to speak.