The first few months of homeschooling were terrifying to me. I have a very social son who had no one to play with.  And I had no idea how to fix that. You guys gave me tons of suggestions. And everything you told me turned out to be true. But the best advice I got…

I rarely tout my teaching abilities as a reason that I am homeschooling, which is probably why I have a homeschool blog full of beach resort photos instead of teaching tips. However I do think I'm qualified to teach writing. I've taught writing at Brown, Boston University, and the University of Paris. And having been…

Most of the time that I'm writing on this blog, I'm relaying to you the daily process I go through of reaffirming in my mind that there is no way I could send my kids to school. Because believe me, if I could somehow justify it in my head, I'd do it in a second….

I have spent most of my life surrounded by men. I was a high school debater, which is mostly men. I was a professional beach volleyball player, which you'd think would be mostly women, but when there's a group of athletic women in bikinis it turns out that the world feels like it's mostly men….

The best thing I did was stop worrying about homeschooling. First I worried every day that I was ruining my kids' lives. Then I decided that the first year would just be me trying things and if my kids didn't "learn" anything (whatever that means – I don't even know) then it's okay. One year of…

The most arrogant, out-of-control part of the homeschool movement is the idea that "homeschooling is not right for everyone." What does that mean? That you are special because you can homeschool but not everyone is as special as you? This week, Time magazine reports that US public schools are worse than any schools in the…

A post a few weeks back showed a photo of my sons drinking red Gatorade. The topic was whether or not a car is a homeschooling tool. The comments veered into the food debate, asking me, "What are you thinking feeding your kids red Gatorade?" So I did some research. There is pretty strong support…

Tyler Cowen linked to my blog last week. It was very exciting because not only does he have a great blog, but he's an economics professor at George Mason University, so I got a bunch of emails from economists about homeschooling. Like, Greg Rehmke, who teaches a course about the economics of space exploration for…

I'm pleased to announce the first really mean comment on this blog. Here it is, from the surely not-real email address: fdifudhjsjs@hotmailwsjwsiws.com: Poor, poor kids. I don't see how your husband approved of this — and, by the look of it, he makes no appearance whatsoever in this discussion or others. You may have to eventually admit to…

The cover article for last week's Time Magazine was about sibling rivalry. Specifically, how parents favor one kid over the others. According to Jeffrey Kluger, who just published a book on this topic, all parents have favorites. To illustrate this fact, he talks about how researchers went into a home specifically to observe if they could…

My husband physically assaulted me last week. For the second time. The first time, my six-year-old saw it. Here's the post about it. I've been talking about it all week. On my blog (there are 400 comments) in my family (calls from two of three brothers that I should leave) and among my friends (I'm…

The boys were cutting words out of magazines while I was sneaking in reading time. I landed on a piece in Harper's magazine called Juvenile Injustice – photos of the juvenile prisons. They made me ill. There is no way you can look at those photos and not feel sick. I think the sickness comes…