You already know that everyone learns differently.  You already know that each kid has different interests, and you know that kids learn at different rates.  So you know, intuitively, if you set up school to be a competition, it will not be close to a fair fight.

Part of my foray into blogging about homeschooling is learning the rules for building traffic on this blog. So I'm playing around with SEO. To be honest, I hate SEO and I think it's the territory of teenage boys in clothes they never change, charging companies thousands of dollars from their parents' basement.

You know what really helped me to see my world with a different lens? Reading about female genital mutilation. It's a big problem in some communities. girls have their clitoris removed each year. It's extremely painful, of course, but also dangerous—hundreds of  girls die each year from infections. And those who survive endure intense pain…

The people who argue against homeschooling focus on an argument that requires them to ignore obvious education trends. What we end up having is a discussion about homeschooling on a national level that assumes the readers are idiots.

If your kids have been in school for years, they start to seem naturally dense and unproductive. The more kids conform to what school demands, the more dense and unproductive – stupid – the kids look. So when you consider taking them out of school, you worry that your kids are dense and unproductive and…

A few weeks ago Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that all telecommuting is banned at Yahoo. All the major US newspapers covered the story on the front page – New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times - those are just examples of the hoopla surrounding this topic.

One great thing about this homeschool blog is that I get emails full of links that people think I should write about. Many of those links are examples of schools overstepping their bounds.

It's important that the schools remind parents how difficult it is to teach kids because then parents will keep putting up with the crappy education their kids are getting in school—and parents will be grateful for it.

It's unbelievable to me how slow and stupid school reform is. Our public schools are too large and diverse to solve any problems in a centralized way. We already know that money will not solve problems (we spend more per pupil than tons of countries that have higher test scores). And we already know that…

I was waiting for my son's dress rehearsal, sitting next to a mom who was talking to the babysitter on the phone. On a Saturday. She said, "Tell Alex he can only have one hour on his DS and after that he should watch a movie or something. I don't want him doing the DS…

A few months back Katherine Williams asked me to send a photo of myself holding a sign that gives advice to parents about homeschooling. What advice would I have wanted to hear as a new homeschooler? She said she was going to make a video, and look, here it is.

My son is obsessed with fashion. He wakes up in the morning, tries on ten outfits, and when I laugh, he says, "Mom! Don't laugh! You know fashion is really important to me!" Just the fact that he talks about it like this blows me away. The rest of us barely even change our clothes….

A lot of people think they want to homeschool but they don't think they can afford it. So they ask me: How much does it cost to homeschool? I think it's more instructive to ask the question the other way around: How much does it cost to send your kids to school? Because the answer…

  This is an interview I did with Smatoos, a site that reviews educational technology for kids.  SMATOOS: Could you give our readers a bit of background on why you decided to start homeschooling? Penelope Trunk (PT): It was in the back of my mind even before I had kids, but my first kid was…

It turns out that August is Kindergarten Readiness month. To protest the absurdity of this, I am including in this post a photo of my son turning cartwheels in Las Vegas, which is what he did last year instead of going to school. Here are some totally annoying links on the topic:

Our farm is magical right now. All the animals are having babies. My husband is giving the animals more and more freedom. This year he took the pigs out of farrowing crates and let them farrow in a big, open building full of sunlight and hay. He was worried that the moms would lie on the…

Before I was a homeschooler, before I even had kids, my friend, Lisa Nielsen was running literacy programs in the New York City public schools. The first time I can remember thinking that schools were really messed up was when she told me that teaching reading in school is controversial among reading specialists. Today Nielsen's…

I started writing this blog to figure out if I should homeschool or not. It took me only about a month of blogging to realize that there is overwhelming agreement in the education reform movement that a customized education is best for kids. The issue with homeschooling is not whether it's best for kids. The…

During my last business trip I bought my son a phone. I try to say yes to what they want to buy. I try to trust that they'll use it for something interesting. Sometimes it ends up being a waste of money, but usually not. So the big surprise about the phone is not that he…

Here's my son, in a hotel room, practicing. I forgot the chair he usually sits on to play, and the only thing short enough for sitting was the toilet. It turns out that there are interesting acoustics in a bathroom, so it was fun to play in there. But you can be certain that it…