I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when mainstream media gets something so spectactularly wrong, but I expect better from the brainiacs at Slashdot.

So imagine my surprise to read the headline “Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, “Unschooling” ” on Slashdot today, and to learn that unschooling, a method of homeschooling that I and many of my homeschooling friends have personally known about for at least a decade - and which has been around since at least the 70s when John Holt wrote about it - is something new and now.

At least Slashdot only acted as if it were something new - the Baltimore Sun was much more insulting, calling unschooling, and I quote, “a byproduct of home schooling.”

Hrmph.

You can read the Slashdot piece here, and read the Baltimore Sun article here.

Here are the details on the young Boy Scout here in Colorado who desperately needs O Negative blood. He is in one of our local Boy Scout councils, and that’s how I got involved in trying to help find donors for him.

Justin was camping with his family a couple of days ago and was bitten by a Black Widow spider. When they went to the hospital they discovered his low white blood cell count, and he was diagnosed with leukemia.

Then infection set in.

Right now he is having the bone marrow test to determine what type of Leukemia he has, as well as the spinal tap to begin chemotherapy. Today is Day 0 of his treatment. The infection is “ravaging” his body and they said if they can’t get it under control within the week, they will probably lose him.

As it was told to me, antibiotics aren’t helping because antibiotics work with white blood cells and Justin has almost no white blood cells right now, which is why the desperate need for O Negative blood donors.

The hospital contacted registered blood donors (for O negative blood types) and have this week covered for donations but need people to sign up for next week and the week after that and perhaps beyond. I’m told that it takes three days to process the donation before they can give it to Justin, but they can’t keep the blood, once donated, for very long because the quality degrades - so they’ll need ongoing donations for a while.

If you or anybody you know can help, please email me here.

By the way, you can send Justin a card through the Children’s Hospital website. Just select the design you’d like to send, fill out the information, and the hospital will print it out and deliver it to Justin. You can send Justin a card here. His full name, which you need for the card, is Justin Campbell.

I used to love going to the Brewing Market and teasing the barristas because their sign on the case where they have their pastries and snacks offered, for the longest time:

Bagels and “Cream Cheese”

Scary. I pondered aloud what they could possibly be offering as “cream cheese”, rather than actual cream cheese, and scarier still, was that few of the staff actually understood the source of my bemused merriment.

I only wish that I had a picture of the sign for you. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Today, I went into the Brewing Market, all set to joke around with the one barrista who did get it, and who would roll her eyes and laugh at it with me, when to my shock and horror, I saw that the sign was gone, replaced with a newer version, missing the offending quote marks around Cream Cheese. (Keep reading below the picture.)

I felt like an old friend was gone - and as I was saying so to The Barrista with a Clue my eye fell upon the rest of the signage, just above it:

Whew. It’s good to see that some things haven’t changed. Like, the literacy level among the sign-making staff at the Brewing Market.