People protect the idea of the school teacher like it’s part of the foundation of the thirteen colonies, inherent in the core of our American being. But it’s not. It’s actually the result of the destruction of family. Starting only with the industrial revolution, while the rich people who needed factory workers were advocating that we put kids in school all day under the premise that the parents were incompetent. Read more
Cheating is really a build-or-buy decision. Should you develop in-house competency or just get it done and move on? Cheating is a really only a word to denigrate someone who refuses to reinvent the wheel. Read more
It’s a Monday night and my younger son wants to go to a movie. We decide on the 7:30pm show of The Lego Movie. He says, “Buy tickets online so we know it won’t sell out.” Read more
We all know that kids in China outscore kids in the US on math and science tests. This gap exists between schools in China and the UK as well. And guess what the UK and US are doing to close the gap? Extending the school day. Read more
Finally everyone is admitting what high-end private schools have been saying for years: The most important indicator of future success in kids is grit. Even the Obama administration has joined the grit bandwagon. Educators define this as the ability to keep trying hard in the face of very bad odds. Read more
Sometimes I look back at my life before I started homeschooling and luckily, and yesterday I came across this post, 8 Tips for anger management. It describes what was a typical morning getting ready for school: I try so hard, my kids fight and cry, I scream at them. There are 250 comments weighing in on the crazy morning rush to get kids out of the house.
So many parents tell me they can’t homeschool because they can’t be a teacher. But kids learn much better without teachers, because teachers are largely there to restrict freedom. If you leave 30 kids alone, together, they will definitely find stuff to do. It’ll just be chaos. And, of course, many kids would leave the classroom. Teachers are there to keep kids orderly. In a world of self-directed learning, there is no need for teachers. Read more
Digging up dinosaurs is not my first choice of what to do in my life. What I’d choose would look a lot less picturesque: locked in a room with wine and bagels and my computer churning out blog posts that my editor says are perfect and pure genius. But we’re not doing that. We’re in the badlands. Read more
Screen time is a scapegoat for people grappling with parenting problems of the Information Age. Our kids would be better off if we started taking personal responsibility for our parenting difficulties. But this shift requires us to rethink the meaning of screen time in our lives.
I think about this topic a lot, because we have unlimited screen time in our family, so I’m constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the research on screen time to make sure I still think it’s a good idea. Here are four lies we tell ourselves about screen time: Read more
I’ve structured my kids lives to find the very best teachers for them and I have so much respect for the adults in my kids’ lives who know exactly what to do to help them grow into their best selves. Read more