Personal Site Editor-in-Chief of Life Learning magazine Editor-in-Chief of  Natural Life magazine Editor-in-Chief of Natural Child magazine Author of unschooling books Small/Home Business writer Poet Speaker Interview on Radio Free School

Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural  parenting, sustainable living and more by Wendy Priesnitz. Comments? Suggestions? Email Me Turning Trick or Treat on its Sweet Head – October 31, 2007 Hallowe’en has a long and storied history – from pagan celebration to being adopted by religion, to be shunned by some religions. As a kid, I didn’t much like it, probably because my idea of a costume and my mother’s couldn’t find common ground and I wasn’t allowed to eat the candy I’d collected anyway. Oh, and did I mention that I scare easily? When I had my own daughters, my ambivalence toward Hallowe’en was still firmly entrenched. I might have seen October 31st quite differently if Global Exchange’s Reverse-Trick-or-Treating program had been around in those days. Tonight, thousands of children across 299 cities in the US and Canada will be reverse trick or treating. They will be giving away tens of thousands of samples of Fair Trade Certified dark chocolate to address the persistent problems of chronic poverty in cocoa-growing communities, abysmal working conditions and the use of exploited child labor in the Ivory Coast – which produces 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. Costumes are optional. In the U.S., the Reverse-Trick-or-Treating program has joined human and labor rights groups, such as Global Exchange, International Labor Rights Fund, and Co-op America, with Fair Trade chocolate companies to raise awareness with children and grownups about Fair Trade Certified chocolate as a solution to poverty and labor abuses in the cocoa industry. In Canada, Engineers Without Borders, TransFair Canada have teamed up with a number of Canadian Fair Trade chocolate distributors. “Chocolate connects the millions of people who eat it daily to the millions of growers around the world who depend on cocoa for their livelihoods,” says Adrienne Fitch-Frankel of Global Exchange. “It is unthinkable that our children are eating chocolate made with illegal child labor or slave labor; especially when a viable solution, Fair Trade, exists right now.” Posted: 2007/10/31 10:38 AM Exporting US Foreign Policy – October 31, 2007 Boy, Canada sure is a different place these days than it was when we welcomed thousands of American resisters to the Viet Nam war! Over the last month, two American women have twice been denied access to Canada because they are peace activists. Ann Wright, retired U.S. army colonel and former diplomat who quit in opposition to the Iraq war, and Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and founding director of Global Exchange, were on their way to Toronto on October 3 at the invitation of the Toronto Stop the War Coalition but were denied entry into Canada due to previous arrests for demonstrating against the Iraq War outside the White House and in the Capitol. As a result of their peaceful protests, their names have been added to FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database – and that list is apparently dictating Canadian border policy. The border agents at the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls who barred Medea and Ann said the mere fact that they were listed on the NCIC was sufficient to bar them from entry. The database was created to assist U.S. law enforcement agencies in finding fugitives, convicted sex offenders, missing persons and members of terrorist organizations and violent gangs. It now also contains convictions for minor offenses related to non-violent protest. The two tried again last week to test the border policy, and were again refused entry into Canada. This time their invitation to visit came from members of Parliament asking them to participate in a public forum organized by NDP MP and former leader Alexa McDonough. The MPs sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper informing him they’d invited Wright and Benjamin. “This is outrageous. I’m appealing to Canadians not to treat peaceful activists like common criminals. I travel all over the world on a regular basis and Canada is the first country to use the NCIC to keep out people like us,” says Medea. Her sentiments are echoed by Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow. She says it was “absurd” to bar entry to anti-war activists. “These are not terrorists; why do we have to protect Canadians from them? We should not be allowing the FBI or Mr. Bush to dictate our entry policy.” “I am alarmed to learn that Canadian border police are enforcing rules that have been determined by the FBI and other U.S.-based agencies,” Chow wrote to Stephen Brereton, Canada’s consul general in Buffalo, N.Y. “In Canada, peaceful protest is not a criminal activity, despite how some U.S. agencies may regard it.” Both women have previously visited Canada for anti-war meetings – as recently as August, sometimes at the invitation of Canadian activist groups or political parties. “Canada is the first country, to our knowledge, that is using this beefed-up database of the FBI as its criteria for judging who enter, which is why we consider this so outrageous and dangerous,” Benjamin told a press conference. “If Canada starts to do this and keeps out people like us, maybe other countries will do it as well. We think it’s important to stop this right away.” Using Canada’s criteria, even civil rights leader Martin Luther King wouldn’t have made it into the country, she said. “We think this is absurd. It’s outrageous. It must be reversed.” CodePink has gathered over 15,000 signatures on a petition, many from Canadians, to protest Canada’s policy. Posted: 2007/10/31 10:20 AM Undervaluing Children and the Elderly – October 22, 2007 A recent U.S. government report says that people who look after children and the elderly are prone to depression in large numbers. Along with home health care aides and other people who provide personal services, child care workers have the highest rates of depression among full-time workers, according to a new survey by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Almost eleven percent of people in child care, personal care and service jobs said they had experienced one or more major depressive episodes in the past year. Symptoms of depression include various physical ailments as well as persistent sadness and pessimism; feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness, or hopelessness; loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities; difficulty concentrating and complaints of poor memory; fatigue and lack of energy; anxiety, agitation and irritability; thoughts of suicide or death; slow speech and movements. That sounds like the opposite profile of someone I’d trust to care for my most vulnerable family members! Unfortunately, the study didn’t probe the reasons for the high level of depression in these occupations. But I have to wonder if the relative low pay and sometimes difficult working conditions usually associated with day care and elder care contributes. Ironically, around the same time as the depression study was released, I read another study about depression in the journal Child Development. Researchers studied young people who had attended an unusual daycare center – one at which staff received a “decent wage” and benefits. They found that those who grow up in poor, unstable homes face an increased risk of depression, but that high-quality day care during their early years can counteract the effects of a disadvantaged environment. Makes you wonder why our society seems to so undervalue the personal care occupations, doesn’t it? Posted: 2007/10/22 1:15 PM Demolishing the Elitist Label – October 11, 2007 One of the assumptions I’ve long argued against regarding homeschooling is that it’s elitist. When I’ve managed to demolish all the other arguments against life-based learning, reporters and critics who consider themselves to be too progressive to ever support homeschooling pull out what they figure is their trump card: Well, they allow, it might be tolerable for well-educated, upper middle class, two-parent families to homeschool, but kids who live in poverty or with uneducated parents need school in order to succeed academically and socially. They’ll have to rethink that smug little generalization now that the conservative think tank The Fraser Institute has released its latest research on the subject. According to Claudia Hepburn, co-author of Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream, 2nd edition and Director of Education Policy with The Fraser Institute, homeschooling appears to improve the academic performance of children from families with low levels of education. “The evidence is particularly interesting for students who traditionally fall through the cracks in the public system,” Hepburn said in a statement. “Poorly educated parents who choose to teach their children at home produce better academic results for their children than public schools do. One study we reviewed found that students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentage points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.” It also appears from this research that some of the factors that are commonly thought to negatively affect a child’s school success may be based on biases inherent in school systems. “The research shows that the level of education of a child’s parents, gender of the child and income of family has less to do with a [homeschooled] child’s academic achievement than it does in public schools,” says Hepburn. Posted: 2007/10/11 2:30 PM Socialization, huh? – October 10, 2007 A new report of a 20-year study of children in a rural Quebec town draws links between verbal abuse (read: bullying) by teachers and precocious sexual behavior of girls younger than 14. Researchers led by psychology professor Dr. Mara Brendgen found children at elementary school who were shouted at, harshly criticized or embarrassed by teachers in the classroom had an increased risk of early sexual intercourse. The study, published last month in the American Journal of Public Health and conducted by a team the Universite du Quebec and the Universite du Montreal, also draws a link between peer rejection and girls engaging in early sexual intercourse. Brendgen told the media, “Basically, it’s a similar experience that they have from the teachers as they have from peers, in the sense that they are really publicly humiliated and exposed.” These students – who are estimated to number as many as 15 percent of the school population – often  turn to generalized delinquency, perhaps to give their battered self esteem a lift. The researchers found that “disruptive” students – those with “attention problems” and a “diminished interest in school” – are most frequently targeted, supposedly having provoked their peers or teachers into negative behavior. An earlier report about the same research project, which was published in 2006 in Pediatrics, stated that “Many adults mention past incidences of verbal abuse by the teacher as the most overwhelming negative experience in their lives.” But Bregnan says we should be careful not to “lay blame” on anyone. Parents are, instead, supposed to help their children make new friends who will help “protect them from the loneliness and depression that result from rejection and victimization.” Funny that one of the main criticisms about homeschooling is that children will miss out on the valuable socialization experience that schools offer. Hah. Posted: 2007/10/10 5:20 PM Political Offsetting – October 10, 2007 Today is election day here in Ontario. As in every election campaign, there has been enough political hot air generated to affect the climate. And that is too bad, because they haven't been talking much about global warming – except that they all have been painting themselves as the greenest. All four of the main parties — the Liberal, Progressive Conservative, NDP and Green — are running what they call “carbon-neutral” leaders’ tours and campaigns. The Green Party leader  is known for getting around on his bike and using trains during campaigns. And the NDP leader used a hybrid SUV instead of a diesel bus for his tour, and his party reportedly served local organic produce on biodegradable plates. Of course, that sort of green behaviour was very fringe back in 1996 when I was the leader of the federal Green Party using post-consumer recycled and hemp paper for my literature and thrusting re-usable cloth signs on anyone who would reluctantly admit to caring about the environment. And in those days, we didn’t have this campaign’s main feel-good carbon-neutral weapon – offsetting – to assuage the guilt from generating greenhouse gas emissions by donating money to tree planting or solar energy programs. While it’s great that these guys (yeah, the leaders are all guys) are paying enough attention to global warming to feel guilty about their massive footprints, I am skeptical about carbon offsetting significantly changing anything – neither consumption patterns nor carbon generation levels. And change is what we need. Big change. Fast. After all, it was just yesterday that Australian climate change expert Tim Flannery said that worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level of greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold scientists had not expected for another decade. That’s scary. And so our politicians are busy offsetting while the Earth burns. Posted: 2007/10/10 4:05 PM The Power of Problems – October 3, 2007 “Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson The last six months haven’t been “bad times” for me, but I’ve certainly found them challenging. Well, when you own a business, all months are challenging! But lately, it seems like I’ve been dealing with one issue after another and sometimes a few at once, both personal and work-related. There’s nothing wrong with challenges, and my “problems” are small. In fact, my life is very good. But the other day, I began to wonder what the universe was trying to tell me and why life just couldn’t be a straight line instead of so bumpy and wavy. After all, I whined to myself, doesn’t one earn some peace and quiet by the time they reach their fifth decade of life? And then the universe sent me the answer, in the form of that week’s copy of an email newsletter from author and life coach Cheryl Richardson. Her topic? The power of problems. First of all, Cheryl reminds us that there are very few problems that are life-threatening. And mine certainly aren’t, thankfully. Many years ago, I learned a similar tactic to employ when I need perspective on the challenges that come my way: I ask myself what is the worst that could happen. The probable outcome always seems so much better! And that realization enables me to move into problem solving mode, rather than stay stuck in my reflex state, which is to rehash the details and worry about all the possible awful scenarios. That seems easier said than done, but what keeps me focused is knowing that even if the outcome of the situation doesn’t end up being perfect, I will have learned something about myself and about life. And, if I solve the problem thoughtfully and carefully, I will have become a better person – kinder, more empathetic, wiser and more insightful. Not to mention more relaxed. And, as Cheryl says, that opportunity for growth is the gold that is hiding in every problem. Posted: 2007/10/03 4:20 PM Refusing to Test – October 3, 2007 Kudos and support go out to a teacher in British Columbia who was given a disciplinary hearing by her employer and has been given a letter of reprimand. Her crime? She refused to give her grade three class a standardized reading comprehension test. A teacher for 27 years, she said the test is stressful for young children. She told CBC News that her job is to provide the best learning environment possible for her students and that her decision not test her students resulted from the tears of a little girl. The school board, of course, is hanging tight onto its need to measure, classify and sort. Posted: 2007/10/03 1:45 PM Return to current weblog Comments? Suggestions? Email Us copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2007

Topics & Passions: natural learning simplicity environment parenting creativity / writing books ~ What I'm Reading: Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth - New Poems by Alice Walker (Random House, 2003) No Turning Back - The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle B. Freedman (2002, Ballantine Books/Random House) Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken (Viking, 2007) ~ What I'm Listening To:  Best of Nina Simone by Nina Simone (Sony BMG, 2007) Between the Earth and My Soul by Laura Smith (MCA, 1994) Fresh Air by Mary Kastle (Demo EP, 2006, marykastle.com) ~ Fav Bookmarks: Daughter Blog Junkyard Sports Radio Free School Parenting Without Punishing The Guardian Organic Consumers Association Free2be Common Dreams Grist Magazine ~ Fav Quotes: Art, Writing, Creativity Life and Living Men and Women Learning Environment and Peace