Mark your Calendars
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Backup copy in case that one disappears:
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July 24th is Learn Nothing Day!
It's a holiday for unschoolers, and gosh, do we ever need it! That old adage "you learn something new every day" is so true! We are learning all the time...
"You live you learn
You love you learn
You cry you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn
You grieve you learn
You choke you learn
You laugh you learn
You choose you learn
You pray you learn
You ask you learn
You live you learn"
You love you learn
You cry you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn
You grieve you learn
You choke you learn
You laugh you learn
You choose you learn
You pray you learn
You ask you learn
You live you learn"
~Alanis Morissette, "You Learn"
Don't we deserve a day off? ;-)
So, with the holiday just six weeks away, we are going to have to think hard to figure out how to take a day off from all this non-stop learning! Obviously, we can't go anywhere; we'd see something new or meet someone new and then we'd learn something. So, we'll have to say at home. But stay at home and do what?
Let's see... maybe we could just sleep the day away? No, that won't work! How many creative ideas arise from dreams? Lots! That opening guitar riff to the Rolling Stones' song "Satisfaction"? It came to Keith Richards in a dream. Likewise, Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody to "Yesterday" floating around in his head. Here is a list of some other songs and stories, including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and also Frankenstein, that came to artists while they slept. I'm sure the list is not all inclusive!
Okay, so sleeping all day is too risky. Hmm... maybe we could "zone out" in front of the ol' "boob tube" for the day? Ah, no; that won't work. 'Cause "boob tube" is a misnomer; there is really so much to learn from watching television. Even if we carefully avoid all the "educational" channels, even if we steer clear of the game shows (where we might pick up a fact or two), even if we try really hard to find something incredibly insipid and or asinine, there remains a very really risk that our brains are bound to make connections between what we are watching and what we already know. That's what brains do. The next thing you know, we will be thinking creatively, and having ideas, and learning. Uh-oh!
Okay, maybe we could play games all day? Hmm.... well... we can't play Boggle or Scrabble or Scattergories or Upwords or Malarky. Mad Libs is out. Ditto Monopoly, Clue, Statego, Battleship, Othello, DaVinci's Challenge, Mastermind, chess, checkers, Go, card games of any sort... Heck, even Jenga requires strategic thinking.
Video games, maybe? Lots of folks say those rot your brain! But wait. Even those folks admit that video games can improve eye-hand coordination. Kinesthetic learning. DRAT! And the truth is, many video games teach so much more: reading, writing, typing; goal setting and problem solving. Economics, both micro and macro; history; mythology; science and technology; geography and mapping skills... and and and on it goes. Looks like we'll have to avoid video games, too, on Learn Nothing Day.
Well, golly gee! This is really going to be a challenge! It's a good thing we've got six weeks to plan; we're going to need it. How can you go a day without learning a single thing?
But seriously...
For more on what can be learned from watching TV and playing video games; these are just a sampling of the many articles out there discussing the benefits:
From The New Yorker:
From CNN:
From Wired:
From Discover:
From Live Science:
