2019 was an interesting year.
In January, we braved the winter cold and freezing temperatures of Eastern USA to attend a wedding in Greenwich, Connecticut and also to visit the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. This December, tomorrow in fact, as I write this, we will be off to reputedly one of the hottest places in the Philippines, Gensan. How hot is it there? Well, an internet meme puts Gensan in between the Earth and the Sun.
We had two weddings in the family. My niece had hers in September and my wife, Marylene and I were the emcees. The last time I was a wedding emcee was around 8 years ago so I was nervous at first but a few minutes in, it was like slipping into familiar, comfortable clothes — or like riding a bike after a long time of not doing so. You don’t really forget how to do it and it only takes a couple of kicks on the pedal to get going again.
Marylene and I had never been to Boracay — never ever. But last October, we had the opportunity to go there — twice. Talk about making up for lost time. The first was courtesy of our supplier, United Laboratories, and the second was to attend the second wedding in the family – my nephew – brother of the niece who got married in September. We no longer emceed that one so we just kicked back and enjoyed the show.
Perhaps the most significant undertaking I had this year is really threshing out plans for starting a Self-Directed Learning Center. I wrote a lot of articles about it, studied some implementations of it like Sudbury’s democratic schooling, NorthStar and Agile Learning Centers. I organized meetups among like-minded parents or just those curious to see what this was all about, and generated interest, questions, doubts, objections — and it provided a lot of material for thought and reflection.
We were able to gather a group crazy enough to start this experiment — well actually not much of an experiment any more since we’ve seen great results from people who already experimented on this for decades. It’s not so much stepping into unknown territory as it is just following the model they have already laid out and to avoid pitfalls and mistakes they have already experienced. We already have a place and all that’s left is to fix it up and get the paperwork straightened out.
So 2019 was interesting, but 2020 will be exciting.
This is it, pansit!
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.