There are sixteen personality types. The type that thinks most out of the box is ENFP. They are very very open to new things, so new ideas hit them all the time, and ideas hit this type of person in an emotional, visceral kind of way, which makes it hard to fit the idea into another person’s mold of how to organize ideas. Read more
The mental and emotional developmental rates of teens in high school is the equivalent of the developmental rate of somebody who is put in jail, according to Joseph Allen, professor of psychology, in his book Escaping the Endless Adolescence. Teen brains are developing at a very fast rate at that point in life, but they develop at a slower rate when the limitations of their exploration is so severe as in school. Read more
A big barrier to homeschooling is that it’s very easy to envision a major downside: no more free babysitting. But it’s harder to imagine the upside. We have more examples in media of gay couples raising kids as a normal setting than we do of homeschoolers raising kids in normal settings. So it’s hard to imagine the upsides, but there are plenty.
Here are eight ways my life got a lot easier when I started homeschooling: Read more
I am going to summarize the findings presented in an incredible TED talk by Ali Carr-Chellman professor of education at Penn State. Like much of the education research coming out today, her conclusion makes it completely clear that parents should homeschool boys. But that’s too controversial for her to say. So I’m saying it.
Here’s the research she presents:
You already know that everyone learns differently. You already know that each kid has different interests, and you know that kids learn at different rates. So you know, intuitively, if you set up school to be a competition, it will not be close to a fair fight. Read more
My husband is experimenting with letting pigs be free range. It’s a difficult experiment because he doesn’t have a lot of other farms as a model. Most farmers think the pigs need to be confined so they are manageable to the farmer. There are so many pigs and only one farmer, so most of farming is about how to get the pigs grown, and to market, without letting them overrun the farm. Read more
When I started homeschooling, I used workbooks. I got my kids through a whole grade level in about two months. But I found myself forcing my kids to learn stuff they were not interested in learning. The constant arguing killed me, and the lack of excitement over learning seemed like the opposite of what we were aiming to do. Read more
It’s a big day in the history of gay rights. The majority of the US population believes that gay people should be allowed to get married, which matters because married people get financial benefits and protections that unmarried people do not have. The majority of people in the US think it is illegal discrimination to deny gay people these same protections and benefits. Read more
This is a guest post from Anna Keller. She just took her son out of school.
We’ve just pulled our son out of a private, academically rigorous preparatory school. He’ll finish 8th grade in a minimally supervised online program and spend most of his day in a baseball training program for high school-aged athletes. Read more
The hardest part of homeschooling for me was at the beginning, when all I could see in front of me were endless days of kids, no breaks because they won’t be at school, and me slowly turning into a crazy person. Read more