Rainbow Cake Unschooling

Monday's lesson : layered cake

What lessons come with making cake?

• Crack and separate eggs.
• Divvy cake batter between three pans. You can't eyeball it; you must use a measuring cup and --like siblings require--keep it even.
• Decide to make our own food coloring or go with the artificial (issues of food safety vs appearance and taste).
• Level a cake layer after it comes out all puffed on top.
• Mix butter-cream frosting from a recipe.
• Experiment with frosting tips and find that butter-cream goes soft quickly. It needs to be chilled to make textured designs.
• Improvise frosting flavoring when the vanilla is used up for the first batch. (Almond flavored the 2nd batch)
• Experience that cake, delicious as it is, leaves one with a sugar hangover.

This American Life & testing

Listening to "This American Life" on the radio last Saturday. Coincidentally it's about back to school and, specifically, TESTING.

http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/474.mp3

The point that made me sit in my car long after I needed to was how what predicts success later in life is not high school. It was found that kids who drop out and take the GRE GED perform poorly at other tasks later in life. The key is not the content of high school, though.

It is learning to stick with something. The kids who stayed in school did not gain advantage from the classroom content. They were kids more likely to stay through until the end of something.

What gave kids an advantage through life was having support from a trusted adult and a demonstration of "values" or "character traits."

It's being the mother duck to the ducklings: here's how we do this, how we do that.

Teachers don't get that latitude. Parents have the edge at raising successful people--as long as they know their power.

Please give a listen. 

Testy about testing

I didn't collect data, but if I had to guess at the second most asked question about home schooling?

Testing.

Do you test them?

"It is my favorite and my best"

 "It is my favorite and my best" 
~ Lola, 
of "Charlie and Lola." British cartoon.

At the store, we encountered one of my daughter's best school friends. She rushed up to us, looking three inches taller than when we saw her last year and wearing shorter hair and glasses. She beamed at M.

"Are you coming back to school?" she asked.

"Nah."

"Will you ever come back?"

"I wouldn't count on it," M. said, smiling tenderly. She likes her friend, and she did not want to let her down--but there you go.