I confess that I saved all my books from when I was a young girl. One of the common traits of girls with autism is that they read fiction at an insane rate. The only person I know who has read as many young adult novels as I have, in fact, is my friend Melissa, who also has autism. Read more
The most useful product of test scores is that they give us a way to compare students. So while few people want to learn exactly the same thing as the person sitting next to them, we force students to learn the same thing as the person sitting next to them anyway, so we can test them on the same material and compare the results. If you want to rank children or if you want to rank schools or teachers, test scores are very useful. The question is, “Why do we need to rank students?” Read more
I spent a lot of time reading about curriculum options before I decided to toss out all curriculum and just teach my kids what they want to learn. At this point, my kids have learned reading and typing via their video games. And I’m pretty sure they’ve learned a lot more, they just don’t need to check in with a teacher about what they learn, so I can’t exactly tell you what they learned. Read more
There’s plenty of information about how stupid worksheets are. They are myopic and linear and they promote competition (what page are you on?) and rigid thinking (did I get the right answer?).
That said, some kids love worksheets. My youngest son, for example. Here’s what else he likes: Read more
When I tell people that kids are curious and they educate themselves if you just give them space, people can’t imagine it. They can imagine it for themselves, as a adults, because they can think of tons of things they’d want to do and learn if they had unlimited time. But still, they don’t trust that kids would do that, too. Read more
You are lying to yourself if you think education is not for employment. Because if education were just for the love of learning, then definitely, you could leave your kid alone to learn whatever the kid loves to learn. Human beings are naturally curious and we naturally love to learn. Our brains are relatively huge. We don’t need to worry about birthing kids who are not natural learners. Read more
I am an obsessive reader of tabloids. I know all the story lines, I know everyone’s kid’s name, and I google William and Kate when there’s a week with no news of them in print. Read more
What strikes me about the conversation on my post about Cave of the Mounds is how all conversations about homeschooling seem to lead back to the argument over the well-rounded kid.
Here’s an email I received last week:
I began homeschooling in the 8th grade.
Right now, it’s my junior year (I’m 15), and I realize that I’m doing something severely wrong. I’m doing the college shuffle now (I still want to go to college), and it’s stressful and not how I want to learn. It’s frustrating. I’m a homeschooler, people who are known for being unique and different, and my application is starting to look like every other kid in public school who does the SAT’s, AP’s (I take AP online courses), and whatnot. Read more
I hated school. And I often wonder if homeschoolers self-select because they wish they had not gone to school. So I want to tell you about the day in school that I would not have missed for any homeschooling agenda. Except it wasn’t regular school. It was Hebrew school. Read more