The scariest article I read in all my research about homeschooling is about how far parents in Silicon Valley are going to keep their kids off of phones. A Dark Consensus about Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley. The article was from 2018. It was clear to me then that the parents in Silicon […]
I talk with a lot of you so I know there are an inordinate number of people who homeschool their kids because their kids are training for the Olympics, or are prodigies in chess or music…. the type of kids who are extremely specialized and do their thing all day and schedule tutors after their […]
A lot of times when kids first leave school, they spend a few months playing video games. That’s all. Just video games. And the parents freak out.
The reason I have so much trouble writing about my homeschooling journey is that not everything worked. But I know if I don’t start talking about it, I’m not going to help people do it better than I did. The biggest issue was not my kids. It was me. I made a lot of decisions […]
The people who are most unhappy with public schools in the US are people without children. Parents, it turns out, report that their schools are great. Translation: school is such a sacred form of free childcare that parents systematically mix up causation and correlation in order to keep believing that school is okay.
The truth is that I have partial attention all day and it’s exhausting. Working while homeschooling means constant interruptions all day long. Almost everyone who I have ever coached has had to pause for a minute while I did something for a kid.
It’s impossible to control the hopes and dreams we have for our kids. They start forming even before the sperm hits the egg. It’s an unconscious human thing that we do. I didn’t want a kid who loves school, so it sucked that his favorite part of school is tests. I am always hunting links to […]
At some point I realized the kids I liked most are the hard-core gamers. I encouraged my kids to carve out time each day to take gaming seriously. One of the things I’m most proud of in our homeschooling is that my kids play League of Legends. This game is similar to chess if you […]
The first time we talked about allowances in our family it was my sneaky way to do math. My grade-school aged kids couldn’t tell the difference between a quarter and a nickel, because why would they have any need for that outside of a school assignment?
As a homeschooler, I knew college applications would be tricky. We started focusing on them completely at the beginning of the summer. And our interactions became more and more combustible until the final forms were due January 15.