In school the teachers get authority because they tell you they have authority. If the teacher tells you what to read, you read it. If the teacher tells you which sources are acceptable for your term paper, you use those sources. There is no room to question authority in the classroom because it would lead to chaos. And the number-one job of a teacher is to prevent the classroom from deteriorating into thirty kids overtaking one teacher. Read more
A veteran teacher shadowed two students for two days and then wrote about her experience. She has a lot of good observations but her overwhelming takeaway is that sitting all day is exhausting. Even as a teacher for decades in classrooms, she never realized how much kids sit and how physically and emotionally painful that experience is.
This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids, and that’s a photo of her three kids. They live in Italy.
Sugatra Mitra believes that children learn best when they are asked the big questions, like “Why does hair grow and not stop growing?’ or “Does a frog know it is a frog?” or “Why is the sky blue?” Read more
Thi, my connection to the world of high schoolers, told me that she did not get a high enough score on her SAT. So her mom took away her phone. Thi’s score was 2180 which is the 98th percentile, but the score was not good enough for her mom.
Later Thi said she thinks her mom wants her to go to an Ivy League school. But only for bragging rights. Read more
This is a guest post by Karelys Beltran. She works as an office manager for a small company. She has a toddler son, and just this month Karelys had a baby girl!
My child comes to work with me. I am not so much of a hot shot that I can dictate that my workplace revolves around my wants, and especially not around my children. But I made a way to take my child to work because my priority is to be close to my son. It became a priority once I realized that for my sanity, I had to work outside the home. Read more
When I was dating my husband and he was trying to get rid of me (over and over again) he would frequently invoke the idea that if my kids and I moved to his farm, we’d be snowed in a lot. “You might get snowed in ten or fifteen days a winter.”
The idea seemed glorious, and only served to make me more persistent every time he tried to break up. Read more
I hired my editor seven years ago when he sent an email out of the blue saying that he loves my blog and he’d like to edit my posts. I needed an editor. I was used to having an editor for everything I wrote and I couldn’t imagine writing without an editor on my blog. Read more
My youngest son loves a good shopping trip. Clothes. That’s his sweet spot. Shoes in a pinch. So when I’m at a loss as to how we will spend all the extra time we have in between cello lessons, I think, well, we can shop. Read more
We are at the top of the John Hancock building and I think to myself that maybe my son’s wedding will be here…
My younger son is not a farm kid. I mean, you’d think he’s a farm kid because he collects eggs every day and he can herd cattle in a pinch, but there is no question in my mind that he will grow up and go to a city. He’ll marry a girl who does not shop at Farm and Fleet. Read more
It turns out that the more a boy misbehaves in school, the more likely he is to earn a lot of money as an adult. This research comes from economists at Johns Hopkins, and in a one-two punch to conventional education, the researchers also find that misbehaving does decrease the amount that a kid learns in school, but the lost learning is irrelevant to future financial success. Read more