When I lived in New York City, I saw a lot of amazing school stuff going on. Gorgeous gardens tucked between skyscrapers. Tall cast iron gates helping children feel important and special. Tons of details that were too expensive for the lifestyle we could afford. I spent a lot of time wishing I could get my kids into a school like that. Read more
By now you must realize that I have a huge bias about the purpose of homeschooling: I think we should be raising kids to go out in the world and figure out what they want to do with themselves. It’s a skill that I see so many people missing because they spent their life being told what to be interested in. Read more
I can see that books are becoming retro. People don’t have stacks of them in their home anymore. And lately I’m seeing books as artifacts, like a globe that shows Africa smaller than the US. But I am convinced that it’s important for me to leave books laying around because I see, in hindsight, that my parents had a lot of influence on me based on the books they had around the house.
For example, I spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia. But our edition was one of the last made by Britannica, and it was so complex, with an index of abstracts and then a reference to a page of an article in another volume that seemed, often, unrelated, so that actually, I was reading a print version of the Internet, and, no surprise, it got cumbersome very fast. So I turned to the shelf of Agatha Christie mysteries and wished I had found those before I blew through the shelf of Nancy Drews at the library. Read more
It’s recital time. My youngest son just had his cello recital. While I was sitting in my seat, watching eighty kids run around eighty cellos and hopefully not crushing them, I thought about the last meeting I had with my son’s psychiatrist.
We go to a child psychiatrist so I can have someone keeping tabs on me. I want to know that I’m doing okay and not messing up my kids as I take them way way off the beaten path.
The psychiatrist said that I need to make sure the kids have goals they have to work hard to achieve. Read more
There’s a reason that you see so many photos of the same activities on this blog. Because I’m not a big fan of dabbling. I want the kids to find what they are great at and focus on that. There is a wide body of research to show that being great at something feels a lot better than dabbling.
We should use this research to guide education, because nowhere in the world is well-roundedness still valuable. The last time you actually needed to be well-rounded was when the landed gentry was trying to marry off one of their daughters in the 1500’s. Then, it was good to find a woman who could dance, speak a bit of French, cook enough to supervise the household help, and play a bit of piano and keep up with male conversation about politics if need be. That’s well rounded. Read more
I’m looking for some way to decide if I should make my son go into Madison tomorrow for gymnastics. And swimming. He loves both of them, but he hates to leave the house.
I can understand: I hate to leave the house, too. I think most people who have Asperger’s hate to leave their house. Well, we hate to do anything because decisions about transitions are so hard. So right now, I am engrossed in writing and my son is engrossed in his Bionicles and we’re really happy. Mostly because we know no one will bother us. We can do this all day, until dinner. Read more
The demise of the college education is coming fast. It’s clear that college is largely a rip off. At this point, Generation Y is the most in-debt generation in American history largely because of the over-inflated price of a college education. To illustrate this situation, Sannah Kvist took photos of Generation Y with everything they own. One of the photos is above, and it’s a great illustration of post-college disappointment. (There are more photos from Kvist’s project here.) Read more
We were registering my son’s pigs for the county fair. He has done it one year already (it’s one of my all-time favorite posts) and this year he was an ace at reporting the breed, class, weight, and ear notching. But when it came time to give his last name, he said, “Rodriguez.”
The woman said, “Can you spell it?”
He said, “Um. No. I don’t think so.”
I spelled it. Read more
I am watching how other people homeschool. I am noticing that while moms mostly say they try to pay attention to who their kids are and what their individual needs are, I think each family has their own homeschool style. And I think homeschooler parents can be divided into five groups according to their core focus:
1. Religious
The parents are fervently religious and homeschool centers around imbuing the kids with this feeling. These families usually spend a lot of time in their church community. They want their kids to grow up and “do the right thing” and there are clear ideas of what that is.
Here is what I’m going to work on this year, as a homeschooling parent:
1. Spend less time trying to control outcomes.
Someone recently recommended to me the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan. It’s a terrible title, but the gist of the book is that in the nature vs. nurture debate, nature is winning by a landslide – it’s just that no one likes hearing that, so it’s underreported. Imagine this cover of Psychology Today: “Nothing you do as a parent matters as long as you’re in the middle class.” That wouldn’t sell any magazines, would it? Actually, that’s probably why the book has such a terrible title.
Anyway, it’s a great book, full of quirky evidence (like parents do not affect the age a son has intercourse) and amazing studies (twin studies, sibling studies, DNA studies). I have never been so certain that as long as you are meeting a kid’s basic needs, parenting does not matter in terms of outcomes.