According to the most recent statistics, the share of school-age kids who were homeschooled doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 1.7 to 3.4 percent.
I’m not teaching my kids to write. It seems like this would be shocking, since I’m a writer. But actually, I’ve taught enough writing to know that you can’t teach people to write well. This is because good writing comes from practice and from a lot of reading. So I’m not teaching them anything because we are […]
Taiwan just made it illegal to give kids too much screen time. The most notable thing about the law is that it fails to differentiate types of screen time. For example, watching a Disney movie is a lot less likely to be educational than, say, watching a video that describes photosynthesis.
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. I like to hear about other homeschoolers. If you talk to my father, I am a complete failure. If you just look at test scores, and talk to my kids I […]
If your child is enrolled in school, it is illegal to take your child out of school to do family events, educational trips, etc. I know this because I when I had my son in first grade I ended up having to go to the truancy officer in my little Wisconsin town.
A large percentage of the emails I get from this blog are from teachers. Some teach in a classroom but keep their kids out of school. Some don’t have kids but they read this blog because they are sure they won’t put their kids through what they see their students going through. Many teachers who […]
This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids. She lives with her husband and three kids in Italy. What does “to be powerful” mean anyway? To have power? Power can be a bit of a scary word. Wars have been fought over power. Maybe for me it means that our girls […]
If there’s a reason I’m crazy, it’s not because of sharing too much on my blog, or taking my kids out of school. It’s not even for jeopardizing my finances way too often with way too many startups. The reason I’m crazy, if I’m crazy, is that I spend the majority of my waking hours […]
You know all those ads that say “Make $2000 a month from home!” They are not lying, but it’s a minimum wage job doing work on the phone that requires almost no skill except to sound like you live in the US. Which is to say those jobs are terrible.
Research is turning up more and more data to support the idea that people become addicted to drugs because of the environment they are in. And it’s compiled nicely in Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream: The first and last days of the War on Drugs.