My son wants to be popular and the center of everything and loves a crowd. He went to preschool and kindergarten and his only school memories are of him being the Mr. Popular center-of-everything and he misses that. I remind him that he was three grades ahead of everyone else and the school wouldn’t change his curriculum and he doesn’t care. He says he wants to help the other kids catch up to him. Read more
Do you remember when you were a kid, staying a little too long in public restrooms reading the writing on the wall? Did you ever notice that there’s very little writing today? It’s because social media has replaced writing on the bathroom wall. Read more
The big barriers to work‑life balance are time and guilt. The best way to solve those problems is to homeschool your kids. I know because I work 70 hour weeks, and when I pulled my kids out of school, I didn’t work fewer hours, but my life got a lot easier. Here’s why. Read more
So many posts on this blog deconstruct the idea of school. For example:
School is a babysitting service
Boys need to be medicated to cope with school
Forced curriculum assumes that kids are not naturally curious
I’m constantly shocked at what I discover about schools. I can’t believe how much de-schooling I have to do for myself to see clearly when I look at the idea of school. Read more
When you are deciding what’s right for your kids, you probably seek out some trusted people to listen to. That’s how I started homeschooling. (And every trusted source told me to forget about curricula, but that’s another story.) Something I’ve noticed is that all the people who are telling us about education reform actually have a vested interest in the status quo. Which creates a chronic problem of intellectual dishonesty among school reform advocates. Read more
Okay, look. I love that everyone sends me homeschool links. One of the huge perks of being a blogger is that every day people send me links to articles about topics I’m interested in. It’s like a personal news tracking system. Also, sometimes I’m really touched when people send me wacky links that I love, even though they are totally off topic. Read more
The world is full of advice about how to become a morning person, because in the work world most high achievers are morning people. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why this is. In the morning, of course.
The problem with sending your kid to school and complaining about school is that you send the message to your kids that you are not the locus of control. That’s positive psychology talk that means you are doomed to despair. Positive psychology is sort of the anti-Freudian psychology. It’s the study of what makes people happy, instead of Freud’s obsession with what makes people sad. Read more
The question of how to homeschool as a single parent is actually how to make money and homeschool at the same time. Because of course it only takes one person to homeschool. Read more
Matthew and I went to couples therapy this week. I have a long history of going to couples therapy.
This post is potentially offensive to everyone’s sensibilities. I’ll just start right now and tell you that if you’re a little kid being sexually abused by your dad, you are living in a messed-up but really close, special relationship. So in hindsight, when my dad and I went to therapy with a child psychologist (because for some wild, mysterious reason that no one could figure out I was a difficult child), it felt like couples therapy. Read more