This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a painter and a poet who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel. Earlier she wrote Unschooling Starts the Day Your Child is Born.
Tonight, as Phoebe was getting ready for bed, she turned to me and lamented, “I only know how to read one book, Mama. I only know how to read “Maisy Big, Maisy Small.” She looked longingly at her bookshelf. Read more
It turns out that Burning Man is filled with startup founders streaming down from the Ramen-stocked futon-furnished studio apartments in San Francisco. This is shocking to me because it used to be that startup founders were obsessed with their companies. The founders thought of nothing but their product, their market, their competitors. There were no vacations, and there were no distractions. Read more
I read about families in Israel that settle the West Bank. I am a Jewish person who is horrified by the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel, but I don’t have any good solution, so I’m reticent to pass judgment. Mostly, I just try to do good when I have the opportunity.
This is a guest post from Kerelys Beltran. She has a toddler son. And she is one of the most prolific and insightful commenters on this blog. Karelys sent this email to me and I thought it would be fun for everyone to read.
I thought you were so ridiculous when you said, vehemently, that parents sent kids to school because they wanted a break. Who in their right mind would ever sacrifice their kids’ well-being for their own? Read more
I’ve launched four startups, and my kids are well aware of the investors my life spins around, and the startup that has good days when my employees are at the farm and work feels like a party, and bad days where I pretend I don’t even work at my own company because I’m so sick of the pressure. Sometimes the kids have a hard time grasping, though, how I make money. They watch Sky Does Minecraft’s YouTube channel with his ten million subscribers and my kids say, “How do you make money when you don’t even have a million subscribers?!?!” Read more
Americans love to debate what, exactly does it mean to be rich. This is probably because we don’t have a handy divider like the British class system.
Do you see this Lego person as rich? Did you say yes? You are right:
Which goes to show that when it comes to rich, it’s hard to define but we know it when we see it.
Yet still, we fret about even the middle-class label for ourselves. Read more
For those families going to London this fall, (which is probably none of us but this site sounds so exciting and cosmopolitan when I start a post that way, doesn’t it?) there’s an exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum called Disobedient Objects. The exhibition is a celebration of our natural ability to break rules.
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In education we continue to approach the same problems with the same sorts of solutions, despite the fact that they’re not working. Instead, we need a fundamental shift in how we educate our children. Our public school system was designed to meet the needs of a long-ago era—the Industrial Age. Old ways are not working because now, we are in the Information Age. Read more
This is a guest post from Daphne Gray-Grant. She is a writing and publication coach.
We started homeschooling our three kids because I’d hated school as a child. I wanted to give them a better life and I knew that had nothing to do with the public school down the street. Or with sitting at the kitchen table supervising math and English workbooks. Read more