Because I’ve yet to entirely vanquish the schoolteacher in my head, every once in a while I find myself perusing the school system’s scope and sequence. This is a weighty document that spells out everything a child in a particular grade is supposed to have covered, and – with any luck – mastered. Eight years […]
Unschooling: Coping with Critics
My husband, my son, and my mom are truly unschooling enthusiasts, and they love to talk about it with pretty much anybody. Thomas has even been known to start singing its praises to the cashier at the local grocery store! Being an introvert, I find I’m a little more reticent when it comes to sharing […]
Mother-Daughter Relationships
So I planned to write this as a lovely Mother’s Day sentiment, dedicated to my mom. But then I remembered that I have 4 kids and a house virtually buried under mountains of laundry. Luckily, my mom’s birthday is conveniently located about 10 weeks after Mother’s Day. Since I’m generally about 2 months behind in […]
Might is Spite
It seems to me that children are routinely treated with a lack of respect. Many of us afford more respect to complete strangers than we do to our children. We speak to them rudely, handle them forcefully, and override their needs and wants in order to better meet our own. A few weeks back, Ted […]
Holt: Creed of a Slave
This idea that children won’t learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the jargon of the behaviorists, “positive and negative reinforcements,” usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, “If we […]