Pamela Corkey and her sons

Pamela Corkey

Milo Corkey

Oscar Corkey

from New York, New York 

I am new to unschooling (just under 2 years) and loving the changes it has made in all of the relationships in my family—they have gone from mostly adversarial to mostly peaceful, sad to happy. Pretty amazing. 

About us: I am a single parent, filmmaker, writer, and professor of film. Milo (not unschooled) is 21, studying liberal arts/pre-med at Marlboro College in Vermont. He's an avid reader, world traveller, and hopes to join Doctors Without Borders some day. Oscar is 13 and enjoys videogames (Call of Duty, WWE, Uncharted, and many more), baking, cooking, adventure movies, and television (South Park, Merlin, Dr. Who, Star Trek, Family Guy, Community, The Office). We are super excited to be coming to the conference and for the cross-country road trip we'll be taking to get there. I look forward to meeting so many of you!

Note from Sandra:

Also, Oscar is a cook, and is bringing some caramels he's made, to sell.  So bring a little extra money to buy what he's made.  He designed the label for them, too.  Maybe that money you'll save on the price of an upgraded room going down... :-)

Heather Booth, Monty Kerr and Austin Booth

We are the Booth/Kerr family, but I prefer to call us the Kerrbooth family because it is more fun to say ;)

I’m Heather, mom and love to knit, cook, read and garden.  My husband, Monty, is a game designer who…loves to play and design games. Austin (10) is an avid gamer whose favorite games are Little Big Planet, Assassin’s Creed and Minecraft.  He loves to design his own levels and make mods for the games that allow it, building Legos, Marvel Comics and our mini zoo consisting of a dog, a cat, a Russian tortioise and a bearded Dragon.

We are a newly unschooling family and live in Austin, Texas.  We started our journey while temporarily living in San Francisco in 2010.  I saw a listing for the HSC conference in Sacramento posted on the local homeschool board, and on a whim that weekend we packed up and drove from San Francisco to Sacramento in hopes of finding an easier way to homeschool.  Maybe some magic curriculum.  

I walked into a session that Pam Sooroshian was giving about unschooling.  She asked everyone to write down three things children need to be taught.  I wrote down math, reading, writing.  The other people in the room were saying radical things like “nothing”!  I raised my hand and asked, “How do you deal with the anxiety of not teaching?”  Pam told me to read Frank Smith and Sandra Dodd (who happened to be sitting right next to me). 

Sandra was speaking later that afternoon so I went to check her out.  I left Sandra’s talk on "partnerships in the family" a changed woman.  I bought her book and could feel old reasonings about bedtime, math, reading and eating breaking in my head and my heart.  My husband wasn’t as sold as I was walking out of that conference room, so we traded reading material; I would read World War Z If he read The Big Book of Unschooling.  And that is how we came to be an unschooling family. 

Marin Holmes

Marin is attending alone, but wrote about her family:

We are a family of three (Marin, the mom, me, 34; Buck, 42;  and Ian, 7.5) living happily in Raleigh, NC. Ian has never been to school so we are just entering our third year of unschooling. We got to unschooling by way of La Leche League and attachment parenting. Lots of people we knew stopped doing the attachment thing once their kids weaned or reached preschool age. It seemed natural to us to extend the same principles we'd gathered from La Leche League and attachment parenting to the rest of our lives. We didn't have a name for it though until I found Sandra's unschooling website and then it all clicked.

I just passed the Certified Nurse Assistant exam (last week!) so I will be assisting at homebirths in the new year with my boss, who is a midwife. I love to write in my journal, read, watch movies, think and hang out with my family.

Buck is into sword fighting and medieval history. He also loves Star Wars, the Old West and RPGs.

Ian loves Lego, movies (UHF is his current fave), drawing, playing video games, Kirby, Mario Bros. and The Presidents, i.e. his favorite plushies who get preferential treatment and bed space ;).

I am quite excited about the ALL Symposium! I am looking forward to meeting other unschoolers as well as some of the people who have had a wonderful effect on my parenting and way of life with their time and good advice. I feel like I have been encountering lots of pressure from friends and family about unschooling recently, so I am hoping to get some advice on how to deal with that.

Buck wasn't able to get time away from work and won't be coming and Ian chose to visit his grandma so I am coming to Albuquerque by myself. I can't wait to meet everyone and absorb lots of unschooling wisdom!

The good news and the bad news

Holly and Marty and I went to the hotel so they could see the conference rooms, and so we could ask questions.  Clyde, our contact, said he had bad news and good news, and which did I want first?

"Mix them all up together," I said, thinking that would be a fun joke.

So he said the room differential had changed, and now the upgraded rooms (microwave/fridge) are only $5 more than the plainer rooms.  So instead of being $61 plus tax, they were now only $56 per night, plus tax.

"But that's good news.  What's the bad news?"

"They changed the room rates."

So it WAS mixed up together.  But the joke was his.

The "plain rooms" now have mini fridges.  They're pretty small, but it's really refrigeration.
The upgraded rooms (for $5 more a night) have a larger (still small, but larger) refrigerator and a microwave.

They're VERY easygoing, even though we're not using any of their catering or options.  We can bring food in, we can bring liquor in (not just for New Year's Eve, if we want, but beer or wine with lunch if you're that kind of person).

I asked about extension cords to get plug-ins for more laptops in the room, and he said no problem.  So we'll bring some power strips, so people can play on computers during talks and report back out to the world the cool things the speakers say. :-)

The breakfast room is WAY nicer than I thought it was when I saw it last time.  For one thing, there's another whole room I hadn't seen.  They will have scrambled eggs, biscuits & gravy, waffles, fruit, yogurt, pastries, cereal,  6:00 to 10:00 every morning for hotel guests.

Keith will put snack food out every day (and some of you might bring your leftover Christmas snacks or something, maybe).

Another family

I just received a registration from New York, so that makes 17 states, 28 moms (and I'll add them to the list when I have final details on all three names).

Marty and Holly are about to go with me to talk to Clyde with my last-minute questions, and so they can see the facilities.  Keith went with me the first time.

I have some other bio information, and I'll get back to that this afternoon.

Canada/Ontario UK/England US: Arizona California Oregon Idaho Montana Colorado New Mexico Texas Nebraska Iowa Wisconsin Michigan New Hampshire Massachusetts New York North Carolina Mississippi

Shelby and Lily Coleman

Shelby's daughter Lily is 11. They live in Pasadena.



"The little girl is Lily and the big dog is Rosie, the chocolate Lab, the little dog is Lulu the miniature dachshund."

---

Shelby wrote:

Lily and I have been un schooling together since she was 5 years old. I read an article about it in Mothering Magazine and decided that it was for us. I pulled all of the applications we had out to schools in Manhattan and never looked back. It wasn't until this summer that I found out there was a community out there of Radical Un Schoolers who shared my life philosophy. We attended the Northeast Conference near Boston in August. Wow! We were both blown away with the experience and it gave us such a lift to be in and around "our tribe". No one could believe I had never heard of Sandra Dodd. I guess I have had my head in the sand or something! I bought the book, and bought 5 more to share with friends and family. Couldn't have said any of it any better.

We live in Pasadena, CA during the winter months and summer on Long Island in New York.

Lily is passionate about animals. We have 2 dogs and 2 cats. We un school along side my sister and her two young boys. The current rage among them is Minecraft. We are so excited to meet everyone in New Mexico. Lily asks me to tell everyone she is a little shy but give her a chance and she will talk your ear off.

I left school in the 8th grade and that was the best decision I ever made.

Heather Brown's Family

Like a lot of others we learned about unschooling through La Leche League and Attachment Parenting friends. We knew we wanted to homeschool when our oldest son, Holden, was a toddler and that gradually led to unschooling. We are enjoying watching the boys learn as they grow, just by being and following their passions and ours. As the boys are getting older is nice to hear so many wonderful comments from family members about how much they enjoy the boys and how smart they are and how glad they are that they have so many friends. When the boys were younger we got a lot of questions and now no one really asks us a lot of questions, they just treat us with respect and vice versa.

We just take things one day at a time and try to realize our boys will be with us a short time and to make the most of the time we have together. We both lost our moms while they were in their 50s and Cliff's dad passed away in his 50s also. This just solidified our beliefs even more and brought us all that much closer. Having support from other unschoolers in Iowa, like Chris Sanders and others in our area helped us a lot. We have also met many inspirational unschoolers at conferences and traveled wide and far to be with other unschoolers we have connected with. We are all excited about the new journey we are on and looking forward to connecting with more people and new experiences.

Cliff, Heather, Holden (10), Camden (7), and Shadow

They were marked "Norwalk, Iowa" on the list earlier, but they're on the road, so that's been changed to Iowa/Texas/traveling Here's their website, with more information:

http://www.truebluebrowns.com/

---

December 14 addition:

I've added this of my own volition, and if Heather wants it removed, she should send me a certified letter explaining the reasons. It's VERY CUTE.

(The embedded video isn't working as well as the one at JibJab works.)

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!