I am leery of people saying that kids need teachers. But here are three instances where I sort of like the idea.

1. Train kids for jobs that don’t exist.
Sixty-five percent of today’s kids will have jobs that don’t exist today. So there is little point in training them to do the jobs we can already do—after all, there will be an entire aging Millenial workforce to take those jobs. It makes more sense to me to train for jobs that don’t exist, and the best path to those jobs would be today’s teen tastemakers, since they will be the future high-spending (or not) consumers and ladder-climbing (or not) middle managers of their time. Read more

The name of the course is, Be Your Real Self Without Feeling Frustrated. It includes four days of on-demand video sessions and email-based course materials. Sign up now.

My driver, Carla, is an INFJ. I probably spend more time with her than I do with anyone else, so I focused really hard on being an expert on her type because the best way to get along with someone – an adult or a child – is to understand their type.

INFJs are complicated. They are creative and giving but it takes them  awhile to trust someone enough to show themselves. Also, most of an INFJs life happens inside their head, so you have to have patience to let them process that way.

A great example of this is when Carla took care of my garden for a month when I was traveling. She’s an expert at peonies, but she didn’t tell me until later. After she had made the peony bed phenomenal and pointed out that I bought three rare peonies and didn’t even know it. She said she didn’t tell me at first because I wouldn’t have cared. And you know what? She’s right.

That’s another thing: INFJs are always right about people.

I know a lot about INFJs, but I love learning more, so I did some random googling and I read something a teacher said to an INFJ first-grader: “People have been trying to figure out the meaning of life for centuries, so you are not going to figure it out right now. Give yourself a break. Have some fun. You can think about the meaning of life when you’re older.”

The problem with that is thinking of the meaning of life IS fun for the INFJ. And also, they always function older than their years, so they don’t need to “wait til they’re older.”

It feels good to understand something like that. To put one more piece in the puzzle. But then I thought, I want to know more about my own kids. Every little thing I learn about my own kids’ personality type makes me a better parent. So I got sidetracked and googled ESFP. That son’s type is very hard for me.

But more on his type later. (Like when I do a course about why ESFPs get diagnosed with ADD when they just need to be in a dance class.)

My point here is that it is absolutely imperative that parents and spouses understand the personality types in their families. I’m convinced that marriages would stay together if people understood type, because knowing someone’s type makes you less likely to expect something of them they cannot deliver on. And knowing your own type makes you more likely to understand why your spouse can’t be as great at doing what matters to you as you are.

Parenting should be an exercise in being an expert on your kid’s type. It’s like parenting blind vs taking off the blindfold. That’s how dramatic it is to be an expert on type. So, this course is for INFJ types. And other courses are coming. And meanwhile, do a google search. Learning just one more thing about my sons makes me happy.

And, if you’re not sure about your child’s type, you can email me and I’ll help you figure it out. Meanwhile, here’s a link to the INFJ course.

This course includes four days of on-demand video sessions and email-based course materials.  The cost is $195.  Sign up now.

 

 

This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids, and that’s a photo of her kids with a Workaway visitor. Lehla’s family lives in Italy.

Workaway is a website that’s aim is to help people who are travelling to find a place to stay for free in exchange for helping their hosts. By creating a swap between the host and the traveller a fine balance is met which enables each party to benefit. Read more

Kate Keyhoe is a professor of American literature and creative writing. With her husband, she homeschools her daughter.

I’m supposed to be writing right now – not this, some bloggy letter to Penelope Trunk but really writing, as in poems or lyric essays or a think piece on the last avant garde art installation I saw. Read more

I like this photo because it’s from when I was in preschool, and my experience of preschool was pretty good.

I went to a daycare center for families that had some sort of problem. This was in the early 1970s, when my mom was programming with punch cards and her job counted as a family problem. No one had a working mom. So we went to the closest daycare center, an hour and a half away from our home. Read more

The productivity industry is huge. Companies spend billions of dollars training employees to be more productive, tips and tactics are common cocktail party chatter, and even universities are teaching productivity tools as a way to differentiate themselves. Read more

This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2. 

When the kids were little we had an official first day, and a last day of school.  It is a given that children learn all the time, and don’t stop learning, but for the sake of this conversation let’s assume everyone agrees with that simple logic shall we?  The real reason we had an official first day and last was because I needed to know that I was done.
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Every time I hear a flight attendant tell me to put my mask on before I help my child, I realize how that moment might be worth the price of a the plane ticket, just for a reminder that I can’t help my kid if I can’t breathe. Read more

I like looking at what the super-rich do for education because they are not bound by the same social rules as the rest of us. For example, it’s so common for Hollywood stars to homeschool their children that we don’t even blink an eye when we read about it. Read more


The cacophony of parents talking about their great charter school is really disheartening. There is no evidence that charter schools work. And the reason for this is that no one knows how to reform schools effectively and charter schools are schools.
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