I am great at work. I was born to dream up big ideas and then sell them. I love a meeting—as long as I’m talking the whole time. So, actually, I love a lecture. But the only time it’s socially acceptable to lecture is in the context of work. So I really love work. Read more
School is designed to help kids succeed in the workplace. The genesis of compulsory education was to create effective factory workers. Today, enlightened schools realize they are creating knowledge workers rather than factory workers. But here’s the problem: most women don’t want to work full-time. Which means it’s overkill that school focuses so heavily on the workplace. What about home life? Why don’t we educate girls for home life as well? Read more
Time magazine did a cover package on the end of college. I tell you this because Time magazine is the pulse of American ideas. Something is mainstream when it gets into Time. Because those journalists don’t aim to frame public discussion so much a summarize it in a way to reflect the discussion back to us. Read more
The kids were really excited to go with us to vote today because they have watched approximately 40 campaign ads each day for months. If you live in a swing state, all YouTube ads are campaign ads.
So the kids are conversant on a wide range of political topics. For example, “Mom, do we have gay friends?”
Me: “What?”
“Barack Obama says we need to vote because our gay friends can’t get married or serve in the military.” Read more
I hated school. And I often wonder if homeschoolers self-select because they wish they had not gone to school. So I want to tell you about the day in school that I would not have missed for any homeschooling agenda. Except it wasn’t regular school. It was Hebrew school. Read more
What is the point of parenting if you don’t get to force your own agenda? We start doing this early, by picking a mate. I picked smart, good looking, and Jewish. I didn’t pick good social skills. Believe me, I would have, if I had understood their importance at the time. But one result of not having social skills is you don’t know why anyone else needs them, either. Read more
I am not an expert on child rearing, but I am an expert in career planning, so it seems to me that I should be pretty good at helping my kids find careers. Here are things I’m doing:
1. Exposing them to the idea that career is important.
I do a lot of career coaching, and I do most of it in the car, while I’m driving the kids long distances. The coaching makes the drive better for me, and an unplanned offshoot is that the kids are learning about how to focus on issues surrounding a career. The best quote from the back seat: “Mom! Tell him to take the Myers Briggs test!” Read more
My son is obsessed with fashion. He wakes up in the morning, tries on ten outfits, and when I laugh, he says, “Mom! Don’t laugh! You know fashion is really important to me!”
Just the fact that he talks about it like this blows me away. The rest of us barely even change our clothes. He quickly learned that buying clothes in the store is way more fun than online so now when we drive to the Chicago suburbs for cello, we also go for clothes shopping. Read more
One of the most effective ways to show parents that they don’t need to be teachers in order to homeschool is to show parents how completely ridiculous forced curricula is. I internalized this idea when my youngest son was learning to read. I didn’t teach him. But I watched carefully to see how he learned.
Doctors have finally started talking about the long-standing practice to medicate low-income kids with Adderall so they can compete in the school environment. To those of you who follow the Adderall debates, this confession should come as no surprise. People in both the medical community and the academic community have been predicting school would come to this. In a test-based classroom world, Adderall is a major boost to anyone’s performance and it shouldn’t be only rich kids who have access to it. Read more