by Jennifer Kobrin
June 29, 2011
For me, the connection between language, food and sustainability is obvious. In 2006, I spent a year living on a farm in rural Costa Rica. After numerous stints trying to learn Spanish, this is where it stuck. I learned the word for the sweet pancakes we used to eat with peanut butter (arepas), the herb my adoptive mother Miriam used to tear off a bush outside her window and throw into the cooking pot in one quick motion (culantro), and the fruits we plucked from trees, bushes, vines and the roof (guanabana, mandarinos, naranjas, mangos, pejivalle, papaya, piña, platanos, bananos) .
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by Jennifer Kobrin
June 8, 2011
Earlier this week I heard a radio segment on NPR’s All Things Considered about Sam Fuller, a sixteen year-old that is part of a small section of the home-schooling movement called un-schooling. Learning for an un-schooled child is driven entirely by his or her interests and motivations. For example, Sam did not learn to read until he began playing the card game Magic at the age of 10, which required being able to understand text written on the cards.
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