This is What Happens When Kids Leave Traditional Education

This is What Happens When Kids Leave Traditional Education
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By: Amanda Froelich,

True Activist.

The homeschooling movement is a radical alternative which is continuing to grow in popularity. Because schools only offer one type of curriculum and may not cater to each students’ unique learning needs, developing a new type of education offers many benefits.

Not only do parents have an active role in the type of information being taught, but meaningful relationships can be formed with children, access to nourishing, wholesomely prepared food is available (which has been proven to improve behavior and raise IQ), and negative influences that commonly permeate mainstream education can be eliminated.

This is not to say there are no potential drawbacks of homeschooling (it can be quite difficult trying to pass off education as ‘exciting’ to certain young adults), but the opportunity to shape a child’s education based on their particular interests and aptitudes may accelerate their learning development and long-term success in life.

One example of a student who claims to be thriving as a homeschooled student is Logan Laplante. After leaving traditional education at age 9, he feels he was given the opportunity to create the type of life all kids want, “to be happy and healthy”. Now 13-years-old, he shared at a recent TEDx event how hack-schooling (as he calls it) is allowing him to make his vision possible.

Logan has the opportunity to tailor his education to his interests and his style of learning, but students subject to standard teaching methods and mainstream curriculum do not have this option. Perhaps it’s due to this reason that studies confirm home schooled children outperform their peers from both private and public schools.

Source: TEDx

Less conditioned to think within the confines of a crumbling system, home schooled children are much more likely to grow into a creative, adaptive, and forward thinking adults because of their schooling environment which encouraged such growth.

Logan’s story is similar to Jacob Barnett’s: placed in special-ed because of autism, he is now a 15-year-old theoretical physicist in line to win the Nobel Prize. With an IQ higher than Einstein’s, it was not his intelligence that needed to be questioned, but the method of best communicating with him and supporting his individual learning needs.

With different epigenetics, motivations, and biochemistries, all children learn in a way unique to them. To allow the youth of today to excel in their own development and contribute to society innovatively in the future, more open-minded curriculum and varied learning methods need to be adopted into mainstream schooling.

Public and private schools need not be condemned, but only allowed the opportunity to adopt change. There are many ways traditional schooling could be improved, but until it is fixed, homeschooling remains a solid and hopeful option for allowing kids to “grow up happy and healthy”.

Credits:

TEDx Event, Logal Laplante 

True Activist

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Party Like It"s 1799: Traditional Cider Makes A Comeback

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Chuck Shelton in the cold room at Albemarle CiderWorks in Virginia, which makes sparkling alcoholic cider with some of the same apple varieties used by Thomas Jefferson.

Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Chuck Shelton in the cold room at Albemarle CiderWorks in Virginia, which makes sparkling alcoholic cider with some of the same apple varieties used by Thomas Jefferson.

Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Feeling extra American this week? Wanna keep that post-turkey glow going?

Well, how about a very American beverage: cider?

We’re not talking about the hot mulled stuff that steams up your kitchen, or the sweet pub draft in a pint glass.

This cider is more like sparkling wine.

“This is a phenomenally funky, sour, even mildly smoky cider that had to be tasted to be believed,” says Greg Engert, one of the owners of a bar in Washington called ChurchKey.

He’s pouring cider from a tall champagne-style bottle that retails for around $ 15.

ChurchKey is a bar known for beer, but tonight, lots of people are drinking cider.

Tom Diliberto has celiac disease, so beer is out for him.

Cider, on the other hand, is gluten free.

Cider is still a small part of the overall alcohol market. But it’s growing faster than any other category, according to Donna Hood Crecca, an adult beverage analyst with the company Technomic.

“In 2013, we’re projecting that we’ll end the year at 14 million cases,” she says.

Most of that comes from major beer makers that have jumped into the cider game. The companies that brew Sam Adams, Coors and Budweiser have all gotten into the apple fermenting business in the last couple of years.

But just as craft microbrews have taken root in the beer market, artisanal ciders are now growing in the shadow of the big guys.

Vintage Virginia Apples and Albemarle CiderWorks is just around the bend from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia. “If we were crows we’d get there very shortly, but it would take us probably 20 minutes by the way the roads go,” says Charlotte Shelton, who with her brothers grows some 200 varieties of rare American apples here.

Fruit with names like Ashmead’s Kernel, Arkansas Black, Burford Red Flesh and Geneva Crab.

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The entrance to Albemarle CiderWorks in North Garden, Va.

Meredith Rizzo/NPR

The entrance to Albemarle CiderWorks in North Garden, Va.

Meredith Rizzo/NPR

America’s Founding Fathers grew some of these varieties, more often for drinking than for eating.

“We think Mr. Jefferson would’ve been proud to put this on the table,” says Charlotte.

While Charlotte works the finances, her brother, Chuck Shelton, turns the fruit into cider.

This whole cider thing started when the siblings gave their dad — who’s 93 now — an old hand-cranked cider press for Father’s Day years ago.

Today the hand crank is more for display. The real cider-making process is far more high-tech, similar to a winery, says Chuck.

To find out what it tastes like out of the bottle we head to the tasting room.

Chuck pours a cider called “Jupiter’s Legacy.” It’s named after one of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, Jupiter Evans.

“Jupiter passed away I think in 1798 and things bad started happening with the cider,” explains Chuck. “Bottled too early, bottles exploding. Jefferson wrote this letter saying, ‘You need to find someone with the skills necessary to take over the bottling, because we can’t have our cider exploding. … There’s a letter to that effect that’s in the Smithsonian. And we call it ‘Jupiter’s Legacy’.”

The apples are sweet, but none of that sweetness comes across in the cider. All that yummy sugar in the fruit turns into yummy alcohol during the fermentation process.

“People come in here and haven’t had anything other than macro ciders and say, ‘Ooh,’ ” says Chuck. “They think it’s going to be sweet, and it’s not.’

I ask him: Do you get people walking out?

“No,” says Chuck. “Most people buy a bottle, at least.”

News

Party Like It"s 1799: Traditional Cider Makes A Comeback

A Traditional Wedding Brings The Polish Highlands To Chicago

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Dressed in traditional Polish Highlander garb, guests pile into carriages that will bring them to the church for the official wedding ceremony.

Linda Paul for NPR

Dressed in traditional Polish Highlander garb, guests pile into carriages that will bring them to the church for the official wedding ceremony.

Linda Paul for NPR

Last weekend, a quiet block on the northwest side of Chicago appeared to be taken over by villagers from the mountains of southern Poland. That’s because a Polish Highlander wedding was getting underway. But even before the couple arrived, there was a lot of pomp, circumstance — and moving of cars.

Any time now the bridal party will be arriving and Andy Zieba — father of the bride — is ringing doorbells, asking neighbors if they can please move their cars.

“Excuse me, ma’am? You don’t know who’s the Honda belong to?” he asks.

The anxious father needs to make room because five wooden carriages and 12 horses are headed to this block of modest frame bungalows. And one of the carriages is bringing the band.

Andy Zieba and his wife, Stella, are Górale — Highlanders who grew up in the southern, mountainous region of Poland. Some aspects of this wedding celebration will be traditional Polish, other aspects will be specific to Highlanders.

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The bride’s sister helps her into a carriage after the couple receives their blessings. Renee Stella Zieba and Michael John Livernois were married in Chicago.

Linda Paul for NPR

The bride’s sister helps her into a carriage after the couple receives their blessings. Renee Stella Zieba and Michael John Livernois were married in Chicago.

Linda Paul for NPR

“I was born in a village,” Andy Zieba says. “The name is Koniowka — a small village, not big village. Like 150 people.”

When Zieba was a boy, food preparation could start days before a wedding.

“Kill the pig, you know, then make a sausage. Everything, everything. The cooking in the home. They don’t have a banquet hall at that time,” he says.

Life was tough back then and a wedding was a great occasion to kick back and enjoy life. The celebration could last for as long as three days, with hundreds of people coming from near and far.

About 500 guests will attend this two-day wedding.

The guests aren’t all here yet, but two men with black hats and broad, colorful sashes draped across their chests have ridden their horses right up to the bottom step of the Ziebas’ front porch.

These are the Pytace. In the old days, they’d ride from house to house, spreading the word that a marriage was about to take place. But today their role is more ceremonial. Meanwhile, the band is crammed into the kitchen, where they’re singing in strictly Highlander dialect. And Stella Zieba, the mother of the bride, is a blur of motion, demanding that guests taste the Polish sandwiches.

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This hustle and bustle is just a prelude for a tradition almost as significant as the marriage ceremony itself — the blessing from the parents.

“Well, they might tell them how much they love them and how much they’re going to miss them, and wish them the best of luck — and just the best of everything,” says Jessica Kulawiak, cousin to the bride. She’s jockeying for position, as the big moment arrives.

As guests are asked to silence their phones, the couple, now in place, kneels before their parents, who each murmur a private blessing.

Then, a Highlander musician steps forward with his own prayer.

After the blessing, it’s time for church. The bride loads into one carriage with her family, and the groom’s entourage into another.

There are fewer than a dozen of these full-tilt Highlander weddings in Chicago each year. So, it’s no wonder that neighbors like Elvis Delgado and Diane McMahon are gathered on their front lawns, cameras in hand.

“It’s like we’re all in the wedding,” Delgado says.

“It’s beautiful, it’s magnificent,” says McMahon. “And we’ve known these kids since they were little girls, so it’s even better to see them grown up and getting married.”

The carriages pull off, horses clopping, down the street.

Arts & Life

A Traditional Wedding Brings The Polish Highlands To Chicago