Business trip with homeschooler

A big part of my income comes from public speaking, and it’s speaking season. So I took my six-year-old on the road. With his cello and his skateboard. Last week we were in Illinois, Florida, and California. People often say they can’t homeschool because they have to work. Here’s a snapshot of what it looks like as a homeschooling family if you take one kid to work. On a plane. And leave the other at home with an adult who has a full-time job but works from home.

I woke up, went to the hotel gym while my son slept. Then I gave a speech at the Natural Products Expo while my son ate from an absurdly lavish breakfast buffet and watched Disney channel videos from iTunes. Afterward I took him to the floor of the trade show so he could see what it’s like. He ate tons of free samples.  Read more

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Teaching self-confidence

I used to have a column on Yahoo Finance. I would write the basic advice that I wrote on my career blog, stuff like

Job hopping is good

There are no bad bosses

Don’t be the hardest worker

These are not controversial topics for my career blog. It has an audience of very smart, very high-performing people are who are managing their careers carefully so that they have interesting work that doesn’t ruin the rest of their life.

On Yahoo Finance, people were not so forward thinking. They would tell me that I’m an idiot. They would tell Yahoo to fire me. Sometimes I would get 1000 comments, and most of them were disparaging. In fact, someone at Yahoo had the daily task of removing the really offensive ones. Read more

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School reform talk is escapism

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The Washington Post announced that Sarah Wysocki has been fired. She got great reviews for her classroom performance. Kids liked her, her principal liked her. But the test scores of her students were not good enough.

There is wide agreement that teaching to the test is a vapid way to educate kids. There is wide agreement that young kids should be on the playground way more than they are right now. It’s just that we can’t think of another way to manage education on such a huge scale as the US public school system requires.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put enough money toward solving this problem that we have enough data to know we have nothing that even approximates a solution. Read more

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Teach kids productivity skills

This is a guest post from James Maher. (That’s his self-portrait, at the top of this post.) He’s a fine art and freelance photographer based in New York City. You can see his photography of New York City on his web site. 

I was on Adderall from my Sophomore year in high school until I was 27. I had significant ADD and lived in a family where everyone had ADD and so it was tough to ever get any peace and quiet or any structure. We had a television in our kitchen, living room and all of the bedrooms and they were always on. Read more

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How to deal with being an outsider

I am Jewish, so I’m very sensitive to Christian tropes that infiltrate our culture. Christmas is the biggest example of this, and I have written many times about how it is absolutely suffocating to be Jewish in December when almost everyone assumes that you celebrate Christmas. The assumption that all people are Christian permeates American existence to the point where Jewish parents are constantly having to explain to their kids why there is Christianity infiltrates so much of American culture. Read more

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Parenting insecurity

I’m pretty sure that the most insecure parents are the people who hate their parents.

Actually, I don’t hate my parents. I mean, they have apologized for everything I could ever want them to apologize for. It’s just that they ruined my childhood by being children themselves, during my childhood. So I have no gratitude toward them for what they did for me, and it makes it hard for me to understand what makes kids so grateful to their parents.

It seems miraculous that kids love their parents and it seems so hard, in my head, for me to be good enough that my kids will love me when they grow up. I know, this is not rational. I’m just telling you what goes on inside the head of a kid who had totally shitty parenting.

Read more

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What I do when I waver

This is a picture of my perfect homeschool moment: We are in New York City, waiting for The Lion King to begin. My sons have never been to a Broadway show. They are mesmerized by the grandeur of the theater, and I am giddy with anticipation of seeing their faces light up when the show starts. This is the most exciting kind of “educational moment.”

But the truth is, most of our homeschooling involves no grandeur, no lesson plans, and tons of video games. This is not to say we don’t do cool stuff. We do pottery and skateboarding and swimming, and well, you’ve heard the list before. It’s a dream-come-true childhood, really, all the fun stuff they do. But there’s a lot of time in between Broadway shows and private horseback lessons, and almost all that down-time is filled with video games. Read more

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Benefits from homeschooling

I took this picture when I was in New York City, in the middle of the week, at a totally cool place called Make Meaning. They have cakes that are ready-made, and they have totally cool things for decorating the cakes, including a spin-art setup, where the cake is on the spinner instead of the piece of paper, and you paint the cake as it spins.

I took the photo because I knew it was a special moment. It was a moment that I knew I could only have because we were homeschooling. And I thought I’d need pictures like this to remind me when I have doubts about homeschooling.

I thought the photo would remind me of the educational benefits of being outside the classroom. But the photo is much more than that.

Peter Gray, at Psychology Today, polled homeschool families, and he published a summary of what parents say the benefits are to their homeschooling.

I am struck by the four benefits that parents mentioned most frequently: Read more

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Your school activism hurts your kids

Most people I know are not homeschoolers. Most of them tell me they understand the benefits of homeschooling, but they are scared to do it. They tell me they feel more comfortable being active in their kids’ school to make sure their kid gets a good education.

But I want to tell all those people that being active in your kids school hurts your kids. Here’s why:

1. You have no tools and no information.
After a huge, protracted battle, courts required school districts to give parents access to the record of teacher performances. Now that we have had ten years of No Child Left Behind, we have ten years of data about which teachers can teach to a test.

Read more

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Maybe I should have no rules

Here’s my son, in a hotel room, practicing. I forgot the chair he usually sits on to play, and the only thing short enough for sitting was the toilet.

It turns out that there are interesting acoustics in a bathroom, so it was fun to play in there. But you can be certain that it took a lot of convincing to get him to do it.

And I’m sick of arguing.

I don’t force my kids to do very much. We don’t have schoolwork with lesson plans and workbooks. I don’t make them read stuff they don’t want to. They play video games as much as they want to.

Except for practicing their instruments. I make them practice. Read more

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