I meet a bunch of high schoolers on this blog, and my favorite, Thi, recently informed me that at her rich-kid, Palo Alto school all their AP tests were disqualified. Guess why they were disqualified? Because the desks were four centimeters too close together.
When we moved from New York City to Madison, WI, I did tons of research on how to pick a place to live. But I didn’t realize that once you pick a city you have to do a lot of research about where to live within that city. We had never even visited Madison before. […]
The assumption behind the idea of instilling a love of learning is that your kids are not born with a love of learning. It’s a terrible assumption. And probably wrong. Humans are born curious—as a species, we’re constantly learning something new. Babies learn to read faces because we are visually curious. Not because their parents purposefully […]
One of the best resources for a homeschool parent is kids who were homeschooled and are now grown up and hated it. It’s kind of like knowing your personal weaknesses so you can avoid them. It’s always important to hear the negative opinions. The most common complaint I hear is that kids were sheltered from […]
I spent the weekend doing work in Chicago and now I’m at O’Hare and I’m not sure I should be here. I’m not sure I should travel so much for work. The German woman next to me could not get the Internet on her phone. I used all the high school German I could remember, except Der […]
This is a guest post from Lisis Blackston. She is a former pilot and now an unschooling mom. Trying to talk to most people about homeschooling is a bit like trying to talk to creationists about evolution, or the Big Bang. They are so fiercely opposed to the notion, and have so much invested in their current […]
I want my kids to be self-motivated. I want them to do what they need to do without me bugging them.The problem is that I don’t even know if I’m self-motivated enough to write this blog. For instance, where was my post last week? I tell myself I’m committed to posting five days a week and then […]
This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a painter and a poet who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel My decision to unschool arose, not from an idea I superimposed onto our life, but out of a fundamental shift in my worldview. I put my faith not […]
It was easy for me to be anti-curriculum until my son announced he wants a Phd in science. He goes back and forth. It’s been biology, then chemistry, then physics. And back again. But it’s always in an effort to learn everything he can about how the world works. Either where we come from or […]
My son was in a guy’s home recording studio adding a cello track to a rock song. At first the process was fascinating. Then it got very detailed and monotonous for anyone not involved. Which, at that point, was only me. But I was fascinated with the technology. There were recording devices everywhere and somehow […]