Category: News

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I am usually so busy at conferences that I don’t usually get to go to many workshops. But there were two that I had to participate it, and aspects of both of them amazed and stunned me.

The first was the workshop that nutritionist Dr. Joel Fuhrman did on the first day. He was speaking about the best foods to eat and what not to eat for optimum health. Sometimes he got into fairly detailed analysis.

Two students from a Sudbury school were in the workshop. One of them raised his hand and asked a very high level bio-chemical question. Dr. Furman began to answer it and realized that he had lost almost everyone in the audience. He stopped and asked the student, “How do you know about all these things?”

I responded, “He’s a democratic school student!”

“How old are you? The student was asked. He replied that he was 15 and was studying this on his own because he had great interest in nutrition.

Later Dr. Fuhrman told me he thought the students must be a very young- looking college student. “He should go to medical school!” he said.

In another remarkable workshop, Michael Landers spoke about how he homeschooled in 11^th and 12^th grade to pursue his dream of making it on the USA Olympic table tennis team. He was already the youngest person to win the national men’s championship. While homeschooling he was able to train in such places as California, Europe, and China. He was even on a cereal box! Eventually, he won the Olympic tryouts.

But the most dramatic part of this workshop came later. At one point Michael said he was also relieved to be homeschooling because he had been verbally bullied in school. Students there made fun of him, calling him “ping pong boy” and even made fun of his classical bassoon playing. His orchestra had even played at Carnegie Hall.

But then a student at a democratic school, also a competitive athlete, said, “If you were in a democratic school you could have called a meeting.”

When Michael asked what that was, the democratic school student said that when you call a meeting in a democratic school the bully had to come to the meeting and would be confronted about it. The person who was bullied could explain what happened and the meeting had to listen. If the meeting agreed there had been bullying, the bully would often have to write an apology and that usually ended the bullying right then and there.

Michael was floored! But that was not all. Then a homeschooled brother and sister pointed out that usually homeschool was with a non-authoritarian approach, “and we also learn a lot of compassion. So we don’t often see bullying in homeschooling.”

It was an amazing sequence., What is also interesting is that Michael was on track to work on Wall street and has already successfully interned there. But then he decided he didn’t want to do that and wanted to become a social worker. “Homeschooling taught me I could get off the track if I wanted to!”

A long time ago I knew a consultant who was invited to evaluate a school. At first, when visited, everything looked like it was running very well. He kept visiting. Suddenly a crisis arose at the school, and very rapidly everything fell into chaos. From that experience, he developed a rule of thumb to use in the future, one that has stuck with me: “You never know anything about a school until you see how it does in a crisis.

At the AERO conference this year everything was going well: People managed to get to the school visits, to the campus, and into the dorms with minimal problem. The mini-talks went off as planned. The live stream was working. Almost every presenter arrived for their workshops, but one presenter, Carol Nash, was stranded by bad weather in Canada and no other flight was offered! AERO participants sprang into action. They arranged for Carol to do her presentation in the original room by ZOOM. They also set her up to participate in other workshop discussions. And AERO gave her access to the live stream. As she said, “I truly appreciated the amount I could participate while still at home.”

We had arranged for attendees to eat in the cafeteria to save them some money. Catered meals are many times more expensive. It was a little touch and go, getting them to keep the cafeteria open through our meal times but we managed to do it. But on Saturday I was doing the school starters workshop and couldn’t check up on it. As we were just finishing at about 4:30 I get a text from Peter: The cafeteria was closed and locked! There was no place for the 160 attendees to have supper!

We bolted down to the main building. All food service people had left the grounds! We called a meeting in the theater. Everybody came in, and we discussed the situation. We also had time constraints. The children from Pono had their documentary and presentation planned for just after meal time and their train was coming at 8 PM!.

In the meeting, we decided to get enough food for everyone as quickly as we could. We asked people what they wanted to eat. One participant ordered enough mixed vegetable for 25 people from a Chinese restaurant, to be delivered. We ordered a dozen large pizzas that we picked up after we shopped for lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers peppers and other vegetables for a huge salad. We bought biodegradable plates, 2-gallon containers of spring water, etc. We used some of the university serving equipment that had been left in the room. Within an hour we had everyone served and fed, in time for the wonderful Pono presentation. We decided to take them to the train afterward, so they would have time for their presentation, which received a standing ovation. Crisis averted.