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Unschooling This is a newer and even more controversial concept in education. One I am personally familiar with because I did this on my own! The best way to describe unschooling is with the term hobby. Taking a hobby up is a form of unschooling if you learn the hobby or subject inside and out. Learning by doing in an unstructured environment is probably one definition of unschooling. Buying a copy of Visual C++ and learning how to program and then devising your own programs is unschooling. I did this with Visual BASIC and I eventually learned how to do a lot of things and created some commercial programs that made me some money. Unschooling this way is not about getting a tutorial book, for that would be homeschooling. Unschooling is learning how to use the functions and keywords from your help files and manuals and then applying what you learn the make things happen. I wanted to make my own word processor and did this by using the functions to position the cursor with a mouse or arrow keys and then make letters happen by pressing a key. I had to devise a way of making the document remember where to start the text based on my mouse or arrow keys, so I had to create my own “footnotes” inside the save file for the text that told the system where to set up the text on the page. I wanted to offer justified text so I had to devise routine that would look at how wide my margins were (a constant), how many keystrokes were in the current line, how long the current word was. The moment I reached the margin constant the software had to store the word in a variable (que), count the letters in the word, look for spaces in the line of text, add extra spaces uniformly across the entire line of text to make the line flush to the right side, then dump the word in the que (variable) on the next line. This was an exercise in unschooling. I had no instruction book for doing this, other than my knowledge of how programming functions work, what I needed to do and then I had to devise a system to do this. This was the same method used by the first person to make a text writing program for the home computer. Then I had to build all of this information into the file that was saved so the computer would put the text back the same way it was originally written on the page. This is called formatting. When I was a child I got a telescope and started looking at the night skies. I got a star chart. I got a book on Astronomy. I read the Astronomy information in the Sunday paper and then I looked out into the night skies. I’d see a bright object and look at it and notice it had a big disk and several small “star” like objects near it. I eventually figured out that this was Jupiter and I was seeing the 4 moons Galileo saw. By playing around and using my moon filter I found I could see the cloud bands around Jupiter better than without the filter. I started taking pictures of the moon with a $5 620 film camera but they never came out when I put the Tri-X film in to the drugstore. I spent a lot of money doing this and never got any results. One day I visited a photography store and they had a little kit to process black and white film for $20 so I bought this at the age of 14, took it home and processed my own Tri-X in a Kodak Tri-Chem pack and there were perfect images of the full moon, which I then contacted printed using tools from this kit. When I was 5 years old I had one of those GAF Viewmaster viewers with disks of stereo pictures. I one day found out I could project these onto a wall if I shined a flashlight through the back and moved it closer to the wall to achieve focus. Remembering this I took a toilet paper tube, a magnifying glass, a shoe box and I fashioned my own enlarger that worked. It rendered a larger image of the full moon than my contact prints. I taped printing paper to the far side of the box. I taped my negative behind the toilet paper tube. I cut the tube down until I got a perfect fixed focus of an image on the paper by using a small light bulb behind the negative. This is a “slide projector” or “magic lantern.” Hardly a new invention, but I had never read about these things, I only discovered them by playing with things like my GAF viewer and a flashlight as a young child. This is unschooling at its finest! I got a tape recorder. I got an 8mm home movie camera and I experimented with it to see what tricks I could do. I read no books, but I figured if you blocked out half the lens with black cardboard you might be able to shoot a partial image on one side. If you turn that around and backed the film up you can shoot a different image on the other side. This is called split screen. The earliest example of this known to the cinema world comes from a 1912 Alice Guy-Blache Solax film called “Canned Harmony.” But I didn’t know that back then, I just experimented. I knew I could back the film up in a dark closet or run the film through a second time after I shot it. So, I’d shoot live action and then add white titles by doing a second pass. This is called superimposing. I also realized I could do this working my diaphragm to fade in and out in bright sunlight. If I backed the film up it would make what is called a lap dissolve. I saw these things on TV and just figured out how they did them by trial and error. No books, no tutorials. That is unschooling. I learned how to dub in dialog and sound effects on my tape recorder after shooting silent movies to a script and then synchronize playback, which is wild double system sound. When I graduated to 16mm film work later in life I got a book and learned form that. That becomes homeschooling. I learned how to make invisible splices by checker-boarding the original with black leader. I learned how to make professional dissolves by overlapping the A and B rolls and telling the lab to make a dissolve at that point. My years of unschooling and homeschooling in still astronomy, photography and motion picture work eventually paid off. I got published in Sky and Telescope for a lunar eclipse observation at the age of 16. I started making documentaries and paid TV commercials. I had pictures published in a variety of newspapers and magazines. When I finally went to film school I knew most of what was being taught to me from my years of home and unschool efforts and I had to tutor the class because they had problems grasping concepts like T/stops and F/stops (a T/stop is an actual loss of light due to the optics, while and F/stop is a theoretical that doesn’t take light loss from optics into account). I learned a little bit in a few courses that I never explored, such as the History of Cinema and Television and some professional methods in my audio courses. The same applied with my high school courses. I knew most of photography but I learned some new things with sheet film, view cameras and top quality professional Bessler enlargers I couldn’t afford at home. This brick and mortar formal education gave me a wider range of information and skills due to the fully equipped labs at school. Not all schools, however, offer such a range of professional equipment. This, then, should give you an idea of what unschooling can do with the right person in the right situation, with enough financial support to get the bare essentials required to do the task. There is, however, a lot of misuse of the unschool process. Kids who sit and play arcade games all day long might be able to turn that into some type of career if they become Beta testers for some game company, but those jobs are few and often don’t pay much money. The truly be unschooling it has to be practical. Working with remote airplanes can be practical if you do your own repair work, own modification work and learn how to deal with the electronic and mechanical engineering of the planes, on top of just making them land in one piece. Gardening can be beneficial, too, if you read books and learn how to do things. A friend of mine was into plants and I helped her start a plant business and I learned from her and she learned from experience. I now know about things like Root-tone, Chelated Iron, how to mix potting soil with sand, perlite (ground up Styrofoam) and rocks for drainage. I now know that variegated means the plant has two tones or colors (light and dark green, for example). I know some plants require nurturing the cuttings in water to start root growth before planting in soil. Some plants propagate (reproduce) by dropping baby plants on a tether (the Piggyback, as an example) that you put into a separate pot and then sever the cord once they take root. You break up some plants into smaller parts and put them directly into new pots with fresh soil. All of this was part homeschool and part unschool by doing. It’s about picking up knowledge by doing instead of by reading it from a book. Does unschool work without other aspects like books and tutorials, no! Real school or homeschool has to be incorporated into the program. Education comes from taking the best each discipline has to offer. That, means you need a well rounded education, but unschooling can be an important part of the process and is often lacking in many environments.
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