Tag: homeschooling
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The rich, complex legacy of John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto has died. He was a brilliant, complicated man with a huge presence and heartfelt opinions. He won awards for teaching in the public schools of New York City, but those prizes mean little compared to the difference he made in the lives of scores of students. He was also a monumental influence…
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Learning to read without being taught
Last week I saw an online discussion thread asking parents to share experiences of their kids learning to read without being taught. I thought about my two oldest children, who spent some time in school before being homeschooled. I had stories about their early reading, but none for my children who never went to school.…
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Conscious homeschooling
What is unschooling? That question has been debated among homeschoolers for years, but what’s happened recently is something I never would have predicted. The word “unschooling,” originally coined by John Holt in the 1970s, has come to be applied to free schools and alternative schools, or, if you will, unschooling schools. That’s reflected in an…
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Banned Books Week and the freedom to read
In case you didn’t already know, it’s Banned Books Week. The top ten challenged books of 2017 include some that I let my kids read, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In case you’re wondering why that classic coming-of-age story might be inappropriate, the reasons are violence and use of racial slurs. Although I…
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A commercial-free childhood
A friend of mine volunteers for an organization called Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. In a time when marketers have unprecedented access to children, I think it’s a worthy cause. I had occasion to think about this last night after running into a fellow homeschooling mom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Our kids…
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Putting our trust in kids, and in ourselves
Being a parent is a tough job. So many decisions to make right from the get go. Where to have the baby. How to have the baby. How to feed the baby. Where to put the baby to sleep. Before you know it, it’s how to toilet train, how to handle screen time, how to…
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The misguided goal of trying to get kids to pay attention
Less than two weeks after NPR’s How to Raise a Human series addressed the issue of chores, they focused on the same Maya children to talk about paying attention, and once again they contradicted many of the messages of their piece with the headline: A Lost Secret: How to Get Kids To Pay Attention. First…
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Don’t try to get your kids to do chores, just let them
I loved this NPR article on kids lending a helping hand around the house. I also hated it. The title, for example: How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores (Without Resenting It). I understand about click bait, but still, there’s so much implied in that title that I dislike, including trickery and veiled coercion,…
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School stress is not inevitable
Whenever I watch a movie, if something surprising happens I literally jump out of my seat. Heavy-handed foreshadowing has no effect on my startle response. Telling myself it’s just a movie or any other form of head talk doesn’t help. I jolt, I jerk, and sometimes I involuntarily shriek. Friends and family think it’s cute,…
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Are homeschoolers abandoning schools?
My last two posts have been reprints of articles I wrote years ago for Growing Without Schooling. Before I put my old issues back in the box, I want to revisit one more piece (from Issue 83) that was part of a larger discussion on the topic Are Homeschoolers Abandoning Schools? A lot has changed…
A Potluck Life 