Part of my foray into blogging about homeschooling is learning the rules for building traffic on this blog. So I’m playing around with SEO. To be honest, I hate SEO and I think it’s the territory of teenage boys in clothes they never change, charging companies thousands of dollars from their parents’ basement. Read more
You know what really helped me to see my world with a different lens? Reading about female genital mutilation.
It’s a big problem in some communities. girls have their clitoris removed each year. It’s extremely painful, of course, but also dangerous—hundreds of girls die each year from infections. And those who survive endure intense pain during sex for the rest of their lives. Read more
The people who argue against homeschooling focus on an argument that requires them to ignore obvious education trends. What we end up having is a discussion about homeschooling on a national level that assumes the readers are idiots. Read more
If your kids have been in school for years, they start to seem naturally dense and unproductive. The more kids conform to what school demands, the more dense and unproductive – stupid – the kids look. So when you consider taking them out of school, you worry that your kids are dense and unproductive and that you need special teaching skills to overcome that. Read more
A few weeks ago Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that all telecommuting is banned at Yahoo. All the major US newspapers covered the story on the front page – New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times – those are just examples of the hoopla surrounding this topic. Read more
One great thing about this homeschool blog is that I get emails full of links that people think I should write about. Many of those links are examples of schools overstepping their bounds. Read more
It’s important that the schools remind parents how difficult it is to teach kids because then parents will keep putting up with the crappy education their kids are getting in school—and parents will be grateful for it. Read more
It’s unbelievable to me how slow and stupid school reform is. Our public schools are too large and diverse to solve any problems in a centralized way. We already know that money will not solve problems (we spend more per pupil than tons of countries that have higher test scores). And we already know that success in our current curriculum has no correlation to success in work – for example, Princeton economist Alan Krueger found that having the gumption to apply to Harvard or Princeton is a sign of future success—whether or not you get in doesn’t matter. Read more
I was waiting for my son’s dress rehearsal, sitting next to a mom who was talking to the babysitter on the phone. On a Saturday. She said, “Tell Alex he can only have one hour on his DS and after that he should watch a movie or something. I don’t want him doing the DS for too long.” Read more
A few months back Katherine Williams asked me to send a photo of myself holding a sign that gives advice to parents about homeschooling. What advice would I have wanted to hear as a new homeschooler? She said she was going to make a video, and look, here it is. Read more