Today it felt we were exploring the forbidden forest of Hogarts castle. Greenery surrounded you from all angles and the trees were quite beautiful and quite large. 

Apparently some of the dementor scenes from Harry Potter were shot in the Highlands of Scotland which is where we adventured today. Just for memory purposes we traveled through Glascow, Glencoe, Fort Williams and the Scottish Highlands.

An unusual way of life is what stood out to me today. We visited a man who had been Shepard for 16 years. He took over his fathers business and so we got to see how he trains each of his dogs, how they round the sheep and respond to commands. It was very clear that herding sheep was something this man felt passionate about. Interestingly, towards the end of our visit he spent some time expressing his viewpoints on our current education system. His kids had originally been in school, but he felt the curriculum was telling lies. Since that moment, his kids have stayed out of school and his reasoning was that the curriculum is not useful and that his kids can be educated without the UE curriculum. 

I must say I wasn't angered by his speech. Rather, I felt the need to be introspective. Here is a man who does not care about standardized test scores and feels education doesn't necessarily need to happen  inside a classroom and to this I would say-absolutely. I would disagree with his statement about teaching being a cult. However, arguably, he felt his children were not learning anything about farming or the ecosystem or herding sheep probably because the "curriculum writers" did not feel the need to include this information. In this way, when the curriculum is so far removed from our own lives, it can seem like a cult. And that is where I would agree with this man again and say that too much emphasis, I think, has been put in finding the "right curriculum" and not enough people have begun to realize that no matter what curriculum is used, it may not actually apply to the lives of all the students in your class.