If you give a parent the choice between having eight hours a day of freedom from their kids, or spending eight hours a day forcing their kids to learn to read and do math at home, no parent will chose the latter. It doesn’t matter that homeschooling isn’t really like that. Non-homeschoolers think it is. […]
So much of parenting advice is what you should be doing. But the hardest advice to take is what you shouldn’t be doing. Because it is actually more difficult to just sit on your hands and wait than to insert yourself where you think you can make a difference. Here are three areas where inserting […]
The difference between extroverts and introverts is how they think. An introvert thinks silently, and when he has come up with an answer, he talks. An extrovert thinks out loud. The process of talking helps an extrovert think.
Thank you so much for a great year. Before you get to the list of the best posts, I want to say thank you. This photo summarizes homeschooling for me so far: the feeling of being smothered by my kids, and at the same time being surprised by how happy I am with it. The […]
Amazingly, a lot of people who read this blog are sending their kids to public school. At first I thought those parents were crazy, since I’m constantly telling them their school sucks. But then I realized that these parents are incredibly open-minded and genuinely trying to get information to help make good decisions. This post […]
Here’s a photo of my family on a trip to Florida. Something that is totally unremarkable for a family photo is that everyone is different ages. Of course people who are different ages play together. The kids who want to swim go in the ocean. The kids who want to build sand castles go find […]
A few months back Katherine Williams asked me to send a photo of myself holding a sign that gives advice to parents about homeschooling. What advice would I have wanted to hear as a new homeschooler? She said she was going to make a video, and look, here it is.
I am an obsessive reader of tabloids. I know all the story lines, I know everyone’s kid’s name, and I google William and Kate when there’s a week with no news of them in print.
Families that are cohesive and intradependent generate high academic achievers. Families that are child-focused create high academic achievers. Families that are broken, non-child focused, and full of conflict generate creative thinkers.
This is a picture of a teacher in Providence public schools reading his resignation letter. He teaches second grade, and he’s fed up with the changes schools have made in order to ensure that kids are good test takers. At the end of his letter, what’s clear is that a huge result of test-focused schooling […]