For hundreds of years we have been telling children violent stories. Hansel experiences starvation. Gretel watches children being burned alive. Sleeping Beauty has a step-mother who is trying to kill her.
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2. That’s Sarah and her husband in the photo. I don’t think homeschooling has made me poor, but it depends on who you ask. For some strange reason I seem to have […]
In the last few decades there has been a huge push to develop an open floor plan in most offices. Yet now that the research is in, we know open floor plans are terrible for the workplace. The same can be said of the classroom. There are no cubbies, cubicles, or private areas in a classroom, which is […]
When we talk about school reform, we never talk about the problems that are impossible to overcome. So often I hear people talking about opting out of tests, volunteering in the classroom, improving arts education—as if these things will make a significant difference.
One of the jobs of a school teacher is to keep kids safe. Which means that the latest research about the importance of play is also about how kids need to take risks when they play. Education professor Peter Gray, who is now, officially, my blogger crush, lists the dangerous play that is essential for kids, […]
This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a artist who lives in Tacoma WA and homeschools her daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel. Homeschooling is a counter-cultural movement. Although it is gaining momentum with each passing year, there is still a stigma associated with it. Homeschoolers are too often perceived as educational cultists, weirdos who […]
My brother is getting married to a woman who is so brilliant and kind and amazing that some days I wish I were marrying her. We went to her dissertation defense. It was something about enzymes and I don’t know what else because I could understand about six words in the whole talk. But it was […]
This is a guest post from Greg Toppo, author of the book The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. He is USA Today’s national education reporter. Video games engage us more effectively and more productively than almost any other activity we have come up with. This is why video games make […]
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2. About every 45 days or so I go into a nice little panic that I am homeschooling wrong and am totally screwing over my kids. I know this is irrational, […]
The question is, of course, what makes a good role model? Or, better yet, what do we want to model? And I think the answer is self-confidence. Whatever role you have in the world, if you do it with self-confidence, then you model for your daughter what one version of a self-confident woman looks like. […]