I am fascinated by yesterday’s well-organized walk-out in Boston public schools. What would happen if all the high school students in the nation refused to go to school? It’s logical that they would not want to go to school. They are infantilized. High school is pretty much living hell for most kids.
This is an anonymous guest post. A reader sent his mother the following quote from me: So for 2016 I’m going to accept who I am: Someone who struggles every day to accept the realities of parenting in the context of a world that celebrates people who give up everything for work. I am always […]
I don’t believe in curriculum. I don’t believe in telling kids what they should learn. I believe that inconsistency is the sign of open-mindedness and creativity. So it’s with pleasure that I tell you I’ve a penchant for curriculum for emotional intelligence.
I recently read this op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. A teacher wrote it. He has a typical story about how he thought homeschooling was terrible when he was teaching in Chicago public schools. He talked about socialization, math, all the objections we’ve heard a million times.
A big reason conversations about our school choices often turn controversial is that education and money are closely related. And money has replaced sex as the topic we most like to keep secret from our friends. So a lot of the education decisions we make based on money are not topics we will freely discuss in […]
Individualized learning is the idea that we don’t all learn the same way, and each kid should be able to learn the way they learn best.
There are so many comments on this blog about how difficult homeschooling is for a single parent. My first recommendation would be to get enough child support and alimony to make it work. But of course, not every ex-spouse is responsible. So if there is no extra money coming from an extra spouse, what can you […]
I fired our writing teacher. I was hesitant to fire her because she is the only black person my son has ever talked to outside of a store setting. But once I started thinking like that, I knew I had to fire her.
At the end of the course I have titled How to Write about Your Life I offer to edit people’s writing for six months. I charge $600 to edit anything they write during that period. One of the people who signed up was Erin Wetzel.
Kids in poverty are behind before they get to school, which means the problems we need to fix are not problems with school.