Do you know the broken windows theory? Two social scientists found that if you have a neighborhood with one broken window, the whole neighborhood starts going downhill. You have to take care of little stuff to keep the big stuff on track. 
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The hardest part of homeschooling is not making the decisions about education. It’s dealing with social scrutiny of the decisions we make about education. I have found that social scrutiny falls into three categories: 
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I’ve visited ten private schools that charge more than $40K per year. And they have a lot of impressive similarities like the interior design (kid-friendly Barneys with a splash of Ikea) and the students (friendly confidence with ballet-lesson poise). So I started interviewing the headmasters  (rich-kid word for principal).
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It’s true that sometimes taking care of kids is like watching paint dry. If the paint was also screaming at unpredictable intervals.
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You know the startup world is dead when stay-at-home parents are closer to the bleeding edge than founders. While we have conversations on this blog about how to transform people’s perceptions of what school is, I constantly receive pitches from tech companies reinforcing old ideas of school.
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When they were younger my kids would say, “Mom, you’re not wearing a bra.”

I’d say, “I know. Women can choose to wear bras or not wear bras. It’s my choice.”

When the boys got older they’d say, “Mom, you’re not wearing a bra. It’s gross.”

I’d say, “My body is not gross. And I do not need to wear certain clothing in order to not be gross.”
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I had never heard this term before. I was looking for research about practicing (which I do a lot) and one coach who helps athletes, Leah Lagos, had resources for physiologically gifted kids. She recommends that parents of PGC (because there’s an acronym for everything) pay careful attention to the child’s overwhelming emotions. Parents should use a 3-step formula that includes developing a sentence to describe the fact, the feeling, and the need.
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We have spent the week in Princeton because I realized – in the nick of time – that the chemistry tutor we had for the whole year knew nothing about AP tests. The chemistry AP went fine, if you don’t count all my screaming and my slow slip into alcoholism. So I decided to keep the same tutor for AP biology. One more week in Princeton.
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As a family we’ve been isolated from the community feeling that test takers get when everyone experiences the pressure at the same time. This round of AP tests was our first time. I found myself having similar experiences to other homeschooling moms and my son found himself having similar experiences to kids on Reddit.
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Have I written here yet about my favorite day of homeschooling? Because if I have, delete that post from memory, because today is my new favorite day.

My son is taking the AP chemistry test in Germantown, PA. It’s 45 minutes from where we live because public schools won’t let my son participate in their AP testing. (Because, in case anyone needs to be reminded, public schools do not have to serve their community, they only have to do what the law says they have to do.)
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