The NYT app is my favorite thing on my phone. It provides a great summary of the five most important stories of the day. I always know who in the Trump administration lied that day, and one of the five items is always devoted to interesting quantitative research.
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The New York Times has a story about Germany’s outdoor preschools. The article cites research I’ve talked about here, like the book Last Child in the Woods. The article also features a Ph.D. dissertation from 2003 by Peter Häfner at Heidelberg University that shows that graduates of German forest kindergartens had a “clear advantage” over the graduates of regular kindergartens, performing better in cognitive and physical ability, as well as in creativity and social development. (I assume he has a book deal by now.)
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I’m so frustrated with homeschooling now that my son wants to go to graduate school for science. Now things are serious.
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Most of the people I know who can earn enough to support a family and homeschool at the same time were already earning a lot of money before they started homeschooling. So they took a pay cut to work from home and but they’re still making pretty good money.
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We can all agree that Mother’s Day is a manufactured day for people to support the chocolate, flower, and jewelry industries. But we can also agree that a mom ignored on Mother’s Day is not a happy mom.
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A really difficult thing about homeschooling is that a huge swath of my professional network disappeared once I announced I was homeschooling. I thought it was because they assumed I would be useless to them.
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I am always looking for ways to convince myself to leave my kids alone. It’s a challenge to follow my kids’ lead instead of leading them in education. And I have to remind myself constantly that I do not know better than they do about what would be good for them to do with their lives.
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I have spent the last ten years ranting about how stupid it is to spend money on college. So it is the Murphy’s Law of punditry that both my kids would choose conventional paths through higher education.
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I have been adjusting nonstop since we moved to Swarthmore in December. There are things that seem small, like getting my son onto a basketball team. But nothing is straightforward. I didn’t know how things work here so we were so late in signing up that they said my son could only be on the team if I’d coach.
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When my friends ask about homeschooling I say, “All the data and research says that kids don’t need to be in school. I realized that it would be totally irresponsible and self-serving of me to not take my kids out of school.”
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