I told my family about how my son is passionate about clothes and he runs around Chicago buying socks, and shoes and changing his outfits between cello and piano lessons.

I told them about how he uses the Internet to track style trends and then find stores that will sell the stuff he wants. Read more

I confess that I saved all my books from when I was a young girl. One of the common traits of girls with autism is that they read fiction at an insane rate. The only person I know who has read as many young adult novels as I have, in fact, is my friend Melissa, who also has autism. Read more

It’s scary to think that if you don’t send your kids to a classroom, there won’t be thirty other kids telling your kid all about what’s available in the world. It’s scary to think it’s your responsibility now. But the truth is, it’s not that big of a responsibility. Read more

The most useful product of test scores is that they give us a way to compare students. So while few people want to learn exactly the same thing as the person sitting next to them, we force students to learn the same thing as the person sitting next to them anyway, so we can test them on the same material and compare the results. If you want to rank children or if you want to rank schools or teachers, test scores are very useful. The question is, “Why do we need to rank students?” Read more

I’ve climbed the corporate ladder and I’ve supported my family for years as a professional writer. So I’m going to tell you—with total certainty—that however you’re teaching your kid to write, it’s the wrong way. Read more

I spent a lot of time reading about curriculum options before I decided to toss out all curriculum and just teach my kids what they want to learn. At this point, my kids have learned reading and typing via their video games. And I’m pretty sure they’ve learned a lot more, they just don’t need to check in with a teacher about what they learn, so I can’t exactly tell you what they learned. Read more

When it comes to how happy you are, most of it you cannot control: 70% is what you’re born with. It’s a setpoint, sort of like your weight. You can diet, but you tend to go back to your usual weight sooner or later. It’s the same outcome even with trauma. If you lose an arm, you’ll be sad for a while but you’ll go back to your usual happiness setpoint sooner or later. Read more

The educator John Holt said, “It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.” Read more

The people who argue against homeschooling focus on an argument that requires them to ignore obvious education trends. What we end up having is a discussion about homeschooling on a national level that assumes the readers are idiots. Read more

If your kids have been in school for years, they start to seem naturally dense and unproductive. The more kids conform to what school demands, the more dense and unproductive – stupid – the kids look. So when you consider taking them out of school, you worry that your kids are dense and unproductive and that you need special teaching skills to overcome that. Read more