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.

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When I was in college I had a hard time focusing on prescribed topics. I couldn’t handle the feminist reading of The Republic. Seriously, I could barely even understand the Cliffs Notes reading of The Republic. Read more

We unschool in our family: video games all day, no math. I didn’t teach my youngest child how to read and write. He learned to read from Pokemon and he learned to write on Minecraft. Read more

I am certain that you cannot teach via test and that all people are teachers, not just Teachers. But I am constantly refining this thinking by asking myself, “Why don’t tests work? Why is the practice of teachers and schools inherently limiting?”

I think I’ve found the answer in the idea of stories. Read more

I took a bunch of photos waiting for the doctor to tell my son that he’s fine. (The kids are always fine until I don’t take them to the doctor and then they are deathly ill and I’m a bad mom. But that’s another post.) Melissa cropped the picture so that I look at it and forget that my son is leaning on me. He looks just fun and happy and I’m there to hear his laughs, but it’s not how I expected to be in the picture. This is exactly how I feel about homeschool: I’m there, and it’s fun, but it’s not at all how I expected to be in the picture. Read more