Part of taking responsibility for my kids’ education means I’m always reading research to figure out what I should do. I’ve become an expert in teaching reading, playing video games, and learning an instrument. Now I’m becoming an expert on getting into college.
I’m shocked at the number of people I coach who are disappointed by what they’ve accomplished in adult life. Most people think they will do something remarkable, or at least something that other people notice. Most people think they will make a difference in the world in a way that will garner recognition.
Here is a list of homeschooling parents I hate. It’s all-encompassing, so hopefully this list will allow each of you to feel recognized in one way or another.
My older son usually won’t put up with posing for pictures, but he is the one who told me, “Look, I match the table cloth.” So I snapped the picture. I included the description next to the painting in case he wanted to talk about the painting later on. Which he did not.
YouTube is what my son does when his fingers hurt too much to do the last hour of practice. Today we watched Benjamin Zander’s TED Talk.
Do you know the broken windows theory? Two social scientists found that if you have a neighborhood with one broken window, the whole neighborhood starts going downhill. You have to take care of little stuff to keep the big stuff on track.
The hardest part of homeschooling is not making the decisions about education. It’s dealing with social scrutiny of the decisions we make about education. I have found that social scrutiny falls into three categories:
I’ve visited ten private schools that charge more than $40K per year. And they have a lot of impressive similarities like the interior design (kid-friendly Barneys with a splash of Ikea) and the students (friendly confidence with ballet-lesson poise). So I started interviewing the headmasters (rich-kid word for principal).
It’s true that sometimes taking care of kids is like watching paint dry. If the paint was also screaming at unpredictable intervals.
You know the startup world is dead when stay-at-home parents are closer to the bleeding edge than founders. While we have conversations on this blog about how to transform people’s perceptions of what school is, I constantly receive pitches from tech companies reinforcing old ideas of school.