Here is what I’m going to work on this year, as a homeschooling parent: 1. Spend less time trying to control outcomes. Someone recently recommended to me the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan. It’s a terrible title, but the gist of the book is that in the nature vs. nurture […]
I have spent most of my life surrounded by men. I was a high school debater, which is mostly men. I was a professional beach volleyball player, which you’d think would be mostly women, but when there’s a group of athletic women in bikinis it turns out that the world feels like it’s mostly men. […]
I remember where I was when I first heard Mick Jagger singing about mother’s little helper. I was in college. I had grown up with a mom who worked ten-hour days as a COBOL programmer and then even longer days in management. I felt sorry for the moms in the 60s who couldn’t go to […]
My younger son has been bugging me about skateboarding for a year. I’m not a big fan. I think it’s a roadmap to a concussion and also, what are we going to do about cello if he can’t play for six weeks because of a broken wrist? But he was relentless, so I decided that […]
We are at an indoor-playground type place, and it’s all boys, from about five to ten years old The place is sort of out of the way. The moms talk about how they had to drive twenty or thirty mintues to get here. They ask me how long my drive was. I say, “Two hours.” […]
Do you ever hear parents who send their kids to school talking about curriculum? No. Right? Do you know why? Because it doesn’t matter. If you use curriculum or you do not use curriculum, that is a very big question. Riverdale is a school that is following child-directed learning: no set curriculum. Most public schools […]
A friend sent me a link to a really fun set of photos — it’s Barbie and Ken’s wedding day. But the professional photographer, Beatrice de Guigne who did the photoshoot did it exactly how a real wedding would unfold in photos. What’s great is that de Guigne successfully makes fun of the absurd pretend […]
I hid in the bathroom of a coffee shop today and cried. I am so bored. Please do not tell me to learn side-by-side with my kids. I do not want to learn what they want to learn. What about my own self-directed learning? Even the people who are the biggest die-hard fans of self-directed […]
I have started dressing up. I wear make-up every day, I curl my hair sometimes after a bath. I make sure my jeans are clean and I stopped wearing the baggy ones. I dragged my son to a store with fun jewelry. And, I think, also, that I might buy $400 boots at Nordstrom. I […]
I notice that lots of people use college admission as evidence that homeschooling works. Here’s an example of a mom who says college is proof of her homeschooling success. This is shocking to me. While homeschooling is controversial, ditching college is much less controversial. There are lists of wildly successful people who did not graduate […]