Public spending on high school athletics has grown extreme, exemplified by a public school in Allen, Texas that built a $60 million football stadium in 2011. Equipped with a three-dimensional scoreboard and an 18,000 seating capacity, this is not the most expensive in Texas, according to The Center for Education Policy and Development. 

Logan LaPlante is a homeschooler and he gave a speech at TedX University of Nevada where he talks about the purpose of homeschooling. The first thing I notice about Logan is that he does not have the regular fear that kids have in a roomful of adults. And he has a surprising self-assuredness. These are…

I wrote today about how Obama's proposal for universal pre-K is stunningly out of touch with the realities of today's society. It's clear that most mothers do not want to work full-time when they have kids, and it's clear that Obama is advocating school as a daycare system rather than an educational system. You can…

When I lived in New York City, I saw a lot of amazing school stuff going on. Gorgeous gardens tucked between skyscrapers. Tall cast iron gates helping children feel important and special. Tons of details that were too expensive for the lifestyle we could afford. I spent a lot of time wishing I could get…

There are no blue ribbons for parenting, so it's hard to know what to aim for. I have talked about grit, perseverance, and expertise. But as I read more about what people need as adults, I see that we completely underestimate usefulness. I am starting to focus more on that for my own kids, and…

By now you must realize that I have a huge bias about the purpose of homeschooling: I think we should be raising kids to go out in the world and figure out what they want to do with themselves. It's a skill that I see so many people missing because they spent their life being…

I can see that books are becoming retro. People don't have stacks of them in their home anymore. And lately I'm seeing books as artifacts, like a globe that shows Africa smaller than the US. But I am convinced that it's important for me to leave books laying around because I see, in hindsight, that…

It's recital time. My youngest son just had his cello recital. While I was sitting in my seat, watching eighty kids run around eighty cellos and hopefully not crushing them, I thought about the last meeting I had with my son's psychiatrist. We go to a child psychiatrist so I can have someone keeping tabs…

There's a reason that you see so many photos of the same activities on this blog. Because I'm not a big fan of dabbling. I want the kids to find what they are great at and focus on that. There is a wide body of research to show that being great at something feels a…

I'm looking for some way to decide if I should make my son go into Madison tomorrow for gymnastics. And swimming. He loves both of them, but he hates to leave the house. I can understand: I hate to leave the house, too.  I think most people who have Asperger's hate to leave their house….

The demise of the college education is coming fast. It's clear that college is largely a rip off. At this point, Generation Y is the most in-debt generation in American history largely because of the over-inflated price of a college education. To illustrate this situation, Sannah Kvist took photos of Generation Y with everything they…

We were registering my son's pigs for the county fair. He has done it one year already (it's one of my all-time favorite posts) and this year he was an ace at reporting the breed, class, weight, and ear notching. But when it came time to give his last name, he said, "Rodriguez." The woman…

I am watching how other people homeschool. I am noticing that while moms mostly say they try to pay attention to who their kids are and what their individual needs are, I think each family has their own homeschool style. And I think homeschooler parents can be divided into five groups according to their core…

Here is what I'm going to work on this year, as a homeschooling parent: 1. Spend less time trying to control outcomes. Someone recently recommended to me the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan. It's a terrible title, but the gist of the book is that in the nature vs. nurture…

I am realizing that I have a specific goal for my kids. I want them to understand what it is like to work hard at something and be good at it. I want them to know how to find what they like and then figure out how to accommodate that passion in their life. This…

Suddenly, so many traditional school subjects look totally insane to me. Here is a list. Language Arts. Kids learn languages themselves if you just put them among a bunch of kids that speak the language. The only reason we don’t do that is because classrooms are like antiquated, face-time-oriented  9-to-5 jobs where if you are…

We do a lot of driving. The largest city within four hours of us is Madison, WI, so we drive there three days a week for swimming, soccer, violin , dance and social skills lessons for my kids. We drive to Chicago once a week for cello lessons. So one of my biggest worries is…

Before I knew how to write, I would dictate stories about my life to my dad. Then, slowly, I started writing myself. I remember when I learned how to spell the word S-A-I-D. I remember saying to my dad, "Really? Really that's the way?" I remember feeling a sense of excitement that the spelling was…

The recent New York Times magazine features an article about what New York City private schools are teaching kids. They are teaching optimism, resilience and grit – three traits found to be most important to adult success. I left New York City in 2006, just as I had paid $10,000 to a consultant to get…