Category: education
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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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Bathrooms and trust
Bathroom business. It’s pretty basic stuff, a part of every human being’s daily life. When my eldest daughter, after years of homeschooling, enrolled in public high school, she had to deal with the restrictions placed on all students about their bathroom use. By the time she was an upperclassman, I guess she was a little…
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Unschooling: they still don’t get it
Today I came across an article about homeschooling by Mirza Yawar Baig that lifted a quote of mine from last year’s Boston Magazine article. In talking about my kids I said: “I wanted them to be in charge of their own education and decide what they were interested in, and not have someone else telling them…
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On depriving kids of screens
“Deprive” is such a loaded word. It came up this week in an online thread about technology, a long and winding discussion in response to a mom expressing concern about allowing her child unlimited screen time. Many unschoolers feel that limiting screen time does not mesh with unschooling philosophy, and said so. I shared my own story,…
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What are you doing this summer?
We all have them, right? Summer memories of lazy days, popsicles, swimming, pick-up games of tag or kickball, and oodles of fun. Well, maybe we don’t all have them, especially since summer has become just another season for scheduling stuff. These days, when people ask What are your kids doing this summer? the answers generally include multiple…
A Potluck Life 