Do I need to prepare my teen for college?

Here’s an email I received this week:

I’ve been really insecure lately about college for my oldest, but then every time I research Gen Z these kids are hacking their education and are basically gonna leapfrog over Gen Y… I don’t know how to prepare my kids for that.  Maybe I should just leave them alone.  Did you know that Gen Z prefers having 5 screens and only has an 8 second attention span?  I didn’t, until I read an infographic for marketers to Gen Z.  

Advice?  Especially when the oldest wants to live on Mars…. prep for college or just let her figure it out? Read more

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Is video the killer app for school reform?

When my kids want to know something, they search for it on YouTube. It would kill me to watch a video to find out where Tajikistan is. But the kids go to YouTube for everything. Read more

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How you can help a high schooler, right now

I meet a bunch of high schoolers on this blog, and my favorite, Thi, recently informed me that at her rich-kid, Palo Alto school all their AP tests were disqualified.

Guess why they were disqualified? Because the desks were four centimeters too close together. Read more

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School replaces family, one meal at a time

When we moved from New York City to Madison, WI, I did tons of research on how to pick a place to live. But I didn’t realize that once you pick a city you have to do a lot of research about where to live within that city.

We had never even visited Madison before. We looked on a map. There was a nice park, and if you live in NYC, the idea of living in a rented house on a park is a dream come true. So we moved there. Read more

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The real truth about instilling love of learning

The assumption behind the idea of instilling a love of learning is that your kids are not born with a love of learning.

It’s a terrible assumption. And probably wrong. Humans are born curious—as a species, we’re constantly learning something new. Babies learn to read faces because we are visually curious. Not because their parents purposefully instilled in their kids an interest in faces. And we acquire language without going to school because we are curious and we are self-motivated to learn. Right off the bat. Read more

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When is it time to get a tutor?

One of the best resources for a homeschool parent is kids who were homeschooled and are now grown up and hated it. It’s kind of like knowing your personal weaknesses so you can avoid them. It’s always important to hear the negative opinions.

The most common complaint I hear is that kids were sheltered from scientific basics, like evolution, and they blame their parents for keeping them in the dark in the name of religion. That’s a good complaint for me to hear, because I’ll never do that to my kids so it makes me feel safe.

The second most common complaint is that the parents were incompetent at teaching math and science so they let the kids fend for themselves. There’s a good chance that I am guilty of this neglect as well.

Read more

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It’s quantity time that matters, not quality time

I spent the weekend doing work in Chicago and now I’m at O’Hare and I’m not sure I should be here. I’m not sure I should travel so much for work.

The German woman next to me could not get the Internet on her phone. I used all the high school German I could remember, except Der Kartoffelsalat ist I’m Kühlschrank. Nothing worked, so I decided it would be ethical for me to download the Amazon mobile app onto her phone without asking. Read more

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Why are so many people against homeschooling?

This is a guest post from Lisis Blackston. She is a former pilot and now an unschooling mom.

Trying to talk to most people about homeschooling is a bit like trying to talk to creationists about evolution, or the Big Bang. They are so fiercely opposed to the notion, and have so much invested in their current world view, that it’s nearly impossible to make any headway toward changing their minds. Read more

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What is a good outcome for unschooling?

I want my kids to be self-motivated. I want them to do what they need to do without me bugging them.The problem is that I don’t even know if I’m self-motivated enough to write this blog. For instance, where was my post last week? I tell myself I’m committed to posting five days a week and then sometimes—actually, a lot of times—I choose to do something else besides write. Read more

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Unschooling starts the day your child is born

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

My decision to unschool arose, not from an idea I superimposed onto our life, but out of a fundamental shift in my worldview. I put my faith not in any external system, but in the ability of my child to know her own needs. This mindset permeates everything about how I interact with my daughter, including how I potty her and how I unschool her, even at age three. Read more

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