A Potluck Life

Category: community

  • Homeschooling on a shoestring

    Recently I heard a parent casually remark that in her experience, homeschooling one child costs about eight grand a year. That certainly hasn’t been my experience. During the first ten years of my kids’ lives, the amount we spent was negligible. As teens the kids had interests they wanted to pursue but we still curbed…

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  • Perceived homeschooling pitfalls, and how to avoid them

    I recently read an essay by someone who temporarily homeschooled her kids. It didn’t work for her. While the author and I differ on our experiences with homeschooling, I do relate to her list of things that she wants for her kids. In her mind, homeschooling was an obstacle to those ends. In my experience,…

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  • What homeschooling gets right about socialization

    As a mom who homeschooled four children to adulthood, I’m accustomed to naysayers who focus on socialization. Sadly, it’s been decades and the ridiculousness just keeps coming. This week in particular, I read more than one article on the subject, so I decided to make a listicle on some of the tools and techniques that…

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  • I couldn’t wait to send my kids to school, but when I did…

    I first heard of homeschooling in a creative writing class.  I was in my twenties and struck up a friendship with the other young mother in the group. When she said she didn’t send her kid to school, my reaction was full of the incredulity I regularly encountered later, once I jumped on the homeschooling…

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  • Happy Pride Day

    Here in Boston, it’s Pride Day, a day to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. Pride events are fun and joyful, but they’re also serious. They happen in June to commemorate Stonewall, a significant event in LGBTQ+ history and a reminder of the work that still needs to be done to ensure acceptance and equality for all.…

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  • ‘Unschoolers’ in the news

    We’ve been getting some great feedback since Unschoolers came out on March 30. First, Patrick Farenga mentioned us in a nice review of fiction inspired by unschooling and John Holt specifically. Then we chatted with Kristen Tea for a piece in Mothering. Michelle Ristuccia wrote a great review for the summer issue of Learning Tangent. Sophia…

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  • Dylan, literature, Moby-Dick, and homeschooling

    Bob Dylan finally got around to delivering his Nobel Lecture. No surprise, it focused on literature. Why the wait? It took him some time, he said, to reflect on how his songs relate to literature. He ended by cautioning that songs are fundamentally different than literature, “meant to be sung, not read,” like the words in…

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  • Kids and theater, as they like it

    I remember the afternoon my youngest child, Abby, told me she wanted to put on a production of Hamlet. We were in the kitchen on a beautiful spring day, and Abby, who was 13 at the time, said, “I think I’m going to do Hamlet in the backyard this summer.” The declaration seemed to come…

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  • Gimme shelter

    A headline caught my eye today. Even For Homeschoolers, There Is No Happily Ever After. The writer, Linda DeMers Hummel, had a job answering phones for a curriculum company whose clients were homeschoolers. Most of the questions were about math, but then she got a call from a mother who wouldn’t let her eighth grade…

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  • ‘Unschoolers’ launch day

    Dear Readers, My co-author Sophia Sayigh and I have been working on Unschoolers for a while and I’m delighted to announce that it’s available now. Visit our website for various ways you can purchase the book in e-book and paperback formats. I hope you’ll consider spreading the word among your friends in conversation, on e-lists,…

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