Books, Books and John Taylor Gatto
July 7th, 2006 at 1:57 pm (Unschooling Life)
Yesterday, we made a trip to the library where Kenzie discovered The Gruesome Guide to World Monsters by folklore expert Judy Sierra and whimsically illustrated by Henrik Drescher. What an absolutely wonderful book! Not surprisingly, it’s published by Candlewick Press. He enjoyed it so much, he finished reading it in record time and even started to apply some of its wisdom before he went to sleep last night, summoning a Japanese Baku spirit so that it would eat his bad dreams.
He also picked up a beautifully illustrated copy of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, the first book of The Once and Future King, and after looking through it for a while, gathered a few more books, including The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, the first book of Jonathan Stroud’s The Bartimaeus Trilogy on audio cassette, and the newest Leave It to Chance graphic novel, as well as a few Shonen Jump magazines, a Scooby Doo dvd, and the 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle.
I’m in the middle of rereading Tolkien, so I grabbed the movie The Paper Chase and then spent the time browsing through a few magazines I’d been meaning to get around to. Terry filled his arms with jewelry making books and the second Woodstock Craftsman’s Manual (we own the first, already).
As Kenzie read through his books in bed, I stayed up listening to John Taylor Gatto cds. There’s nothing that lights a fire under an unschooler quite like JTG. The recordings I played last night were actually geared more toward the classroom, but were inspiring, nonetheless. He brought an element of unschooling into the traditional public school classroom, and I imagine most, if not all, of his students are better off because of it.