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Home
| | Good homeschooling/unschooling web sites
 | Jon's Homeschool Resource Page
Overall, the best site I know of. Among other things, it has good descriptions of
the numerous homeschooling and unschooling mailing lists.
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| Quo Vadis is
an inspiring annual gathering for self-educated adults, directed by my very good friend
(and NBTSC staffer) Evan Wright. I love QV and have attended for 2 of its 3
years. This year I am officially on
the brochure, as in "meet Grace Llewellyn." I told Evan I
thought that would be a little weird, but that he could try to use me as
bait if he wanted to, and he did. The 2005 gathering is June 25-July 1, in
the forest near Eugene, Oregon.
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| Cafi Cohen's thorough Homeschool
Teens and College site. (Cafi is a seasoned homeschooling mom--her son
and daughter are now in their mid-20's--and the author of the excellent book
And What About College: How Homeschooling Leads To Admissions To
The Best Colleges and Universities, and of Homeschooling: The Teen
Years, which is probably also excellent but I haven't read it yet.) Her
site has great stuff you won't find elsewhere, like 23
homeschoolers' college admissions essays, specific information on some
colleges' admission policies for homeschoolers, etc.
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| Peter Kowalke is a grown up
unschooler who has made it his business to be a helpful resource to others
following in his footsteps. I really enjoyed his video documentary of grown
homeschoolers, called Grown Without Schooling.
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| Don't miss Karl Bunday's extensive, radical, thoroughly
documented site: School is Dead, Learn in
Freedom! Includes, among a
trillion other things, a long list of colleges that have admitted
homeschoolers.
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| The Holt
Associates/Growing Without Schooling site. This is the oldest homeschooling support organization on the planet. These folks were
friends of the late great John Holt, and they continue to follow up on his work in other ways as well. ALAS!
Growing Without Schooling is no longer being published. This is the
worst tragedy that has befallen the unschooling community, ever. But I
believe you can (and definitely should!) still buy back issues.
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| Another very good site is maintained by Home
Education Press. These wonderful people have been common sense
activists in the homeschooling movement for decades. They have done a great deal to make the homeschooling movement a
cohesive, mutually supportive whole.
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| The Self-Education
Foundation site. The SEF is a really great organization started by
a good friend of mine (and former NBTSC staffer), Billy Wimsatt, who wrote 2
of my favorite books, Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons.
(The latter includes a sparkly, original section on
unschooling/self-directed education.) The SEF works
to build and support a cohesive movement, across cultures and disciplines,
of people initiating their own education. It funds, supports, and networks
unschoolers and education mavericks from tough backgrounds who have added
barriers to successfully educating themselves, their kids, their
communities, and the world. I am proud to say that I have served on its board,
though I can't take credit for having done much in that capacity.
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The teen resources section of the California Homeschool Network site. Lots
of good advice and lots of good links.
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The Homeschool Association of California
also has good advice and
links.
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| The Not Back to School Camp
community site--extremely interactive, and run by campers and former
campers. Ongoing discussions on many topics, some related directly to
unschooling.
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Mi familia
| My big brother Mark and his wife Debbe are amazing wildlife
photographers. Their site is here.
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| My big brother Othman puts heaps of energy into supporting the
development of more environmental consciousness in Saudi Arabia and the rest
of the Muslim world. I'm sure that's not a very accurate little summary, but
it will have to do for the moment. There's an abstract here
of a paper he presented called "The Basis for a Discipline of Islamic
Environmental Law." And here
is the text of a long piece he collaborated on, called Environmental
Protection in Islam. (I am
really proud of my family, in case you can't tell.)
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Grace links
Late one night in January 2004...
..... I was depressed. I had had a huge fight with my
closest friend and was feeling very dark and alone in the universe. I couldn't
sleep so I went to my computer to tackle some long-overdue website-updating.
While fixing non-working links one thing led to another, and soon I was
entertaining myself by unearthing tidbits about friends and family. (Like,
I knew my great grandfather Percy Hagerman was a mountaineer, but now I learned
specifically that he had been part of a duo that was the first to scale 3 of
Colorado's most challenging 14,000+ foot peaks, and like, I read my little brother-Ned's-and-his-wife-Colleen's-and-their-daughter-Bethany's recent orienteering
scores, as well as a syllabus from "Tyrosine
Kinases in Physiology and Disease," one of my little brother Richard's
UCLA biology seminars last year.) Still not ready to face the mattress, I next
scrolled through the first 71 "grace llewellyn" pages of google links.
Yep, 71--but there was tons of repetition, and a lot of the sites only briefly
mentioned or quoted me, and after about 57 pages a lot of the links weren't
actually about me but rather about, say, some book with "Grace" in the
title, published by Llewellyn Press, or some such. Anyway, it was 6 a.m. when I finished, and I was smiling. I
felt affirmed, valued, touched, and delighted by the serendipities I had
discovered. Mostly it was lots of sweet recommendations of my work. But also....
| at the end of one
bio of me that mostly sounded like all the other bios of me, I
discovered that "In
her spare time Grace is working on a novel--a murder mystery set at a
national fencing tournament, tentatively titled Stop Cut." Cool!
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| I
am on the "Ladies
we like" page of the LadyFest website, along with ladies I like,
such as Yoko Ono, Starhawk, and Frida Kahlo.
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| There
is some bulletin
board where somebody is giving away a bunch of stuff, including a copy
of the TLH, and 2 people want it and one says "the
we are the people our parents warned us against he can have, but the teenage
liberation handbook is something i'm willing to fight (metaphorically)
for." I got a big smile out of that one.
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| One of the reviews
of the TLH on Barnes & Noble was written by a group of teacher
education students--they didn't quite buy everything I had to say, but they
were far from dismissive and very thoughtful and I felt fondly toward them
and hope they are not feeling too discouraged now that they are probably out
in the trenches actually teaching.
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| I'm on the "Karl
Marx’s Top 25 Reading List for Resurgent Radicalism" written by
the Left Bank Books Collective, along with Fast Food Nation and The
People's History of the United States and other cool stuff.
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| David
Carlton,
a math professor at Stanford who's very intentional and experimental about
his teaching process--sounds like it would be a nice adventure to take a
class from him--talks up the TLH a bit.
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| Kelly
Link, an author on tour promoting her book Stranger Things Happen,
reports that during the trip "Lynne,
who is a librarian, finds a copy of The
Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life
by Grace Llewellyn. She buys it for her high school. Lynne is the coolest
librarian I know."
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| ifeminists.com
chose
my book as a giveaway prize one week.
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| And finally. The high point of my long night, the one moment when I
laughed right out loud, came when I discovered on the And
So No Sin website (And So No Sin seems to be a fascinating dance
company) that a school bus is named after
me! Upon emailing them I learned right away that the other Grace
is white on the outside and red velvet and gold lame on the inside, and 2
lovely-sounding people who've been inspired by the TLH live in it. :-) How
lucky am I?! |
My life! Stuff I am or have recently been involved in...
| I strongly recommend the work Brad Blanton, Taber
Shadburne, and others are doing with Radical
Honesty. Their work has changed and continues to change my life.
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| The Eugene Concert
Choir. I really loved singing soprano
with this quite-fine-for-a-small-city choir in the 2003-2004 season. Among
other things we performed the Verdi Requiem, a peak experience.
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| The Middle Eastern Dance Guild of
Eugene. In 1990, four of us
started this sisterly organization designed to provide performance and
learning opportunities for everybody local interested in middle eastern
dance, regardless of who they studied with or didn't study with. It has
thrived, and it makes a lot of great stuff happen--shows both fancy and
informal, workshops with nationally known teachers, etc. I haven't been
integrally involved for many years, except that I perform at many of their
shows. I love how MEDGE is a warmly welcoming, open-to-all democracy.
And I think it's a great model for self-directed learners in any field who
imagine that they would benefit from collaborating loosely with others. We
didn't make it up from scratch, by the way--we modeled it after the
Corvallis Bellydance Performance Guild.
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| White Bird Clinic
is a unique human services
agency in Eugene, and it's here because I volunteer there and think it is
awesome. It manages a lovely balancing act between, on the one hand, having its
act together enough, being "legitimate" enough to receive all
kinds of government grants...and on the other hand, remaining true to the
sometimes-radical hearts of its staff. It's a collective, run by consensus, full of really
fun, great volunteers and paid staffers (the latter including my dear friend
Kyla Wetherell). It offers a variety of important services--crisis intervention, long-term counseling, homeless case
management, low cost medical and dental care, etc.,--along with intangible, crucial stuff (like
kindness/simple respect/a nonjudgmental welcome) to its clientele, many of
whom are homeless and extremely low income folks.
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| All Round
Magazine. I already link to the website of Tilke Elkin's beautiful magazine on my Not Back to School Camp staff links page,
but it belongs here too, because the pretty, colorful, feng-shui-correct All
Round office is in my house! Right next to the kitchen, in a bedroom I don't
use. Nathen (my good friend and the AR marketing manager and a staple NBTSC
staffer) is holed up in there right now, probably feeling a little tense
because he just lost a giant computer file. He walked past me a few minutes
ago, making fun of the Steely Dan CD I was listening to.
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| I went to India for a month in 2004, and while I drew on
many helpful resources online and otherwise, I particularly benefited from
the Lonely Planet travelers' forum, Thorn
Tree.
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| Americanistan is
a Eugene band that plays mostly original material but with a strong middle
eastern influence. I often perform (bellydance) at their shows and they are
just really great people who sing and play their hearts out for dancers and
audiences.
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| I have recently been cultivating a serious relationship
with Bikram Yoga. I try to go 5 days a week. It's a
rather controversial yoga school, but I really love it. I love
the heat, the repetition (in each class you do the same exact 26 poses in
the same exact order), the constant verbal instruction (helps me stay
focused), and the lack of a lot of overt "spiritual" dogma, which
I feel leaves room for me to engage with my practice in an
authentically spiritual way.
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| And I've been having a fling, likely to develop into a
serious relationship, with ecstatic dance, specifically through the vehicle
of Vinn Marti's SoulMotion. I have
recently attended 2 retreats that rocked
my world. Feels a little like my own version of getting to go to Not Back to School
Camp (as a camper).
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