Nature Deficit Disorder: Is It the New Black?

“What was your favorite thing today at school?” I’d always ask them at 3:30. “Recess!” they’d say. Or “Lunch! ‘Cause after that, there’s recess!”

We all know to take such remarks with a grain of salt. Get enough grains of salt together, though, and you will have a salt shaker.

The Three R’s of Standardized Testing Season: Relentless, Remorseless, Regrettable

Look out, world!

If we don’t sharpen our #2 pencils and gear up for battle this spring, we’ll be in trouble.

Roadschooling: The 5-Month Mark

As our time in Central America draws to a close, we’re reflecting on our choice in 2010 to leave institutional schooling for a less structured, more relaxed life as an unschooling family.

What have been the benefits? What have been the drawbacks?

I find that my answers differ from the boys’ answers.

Northern California as Science and Math Teacher

We talked distance, elevation, heights and widths in our journey from the Lost Coast to the Sierras of Plumas and Lassen Counties. Thrown in a bit of geology, cartography, zoology, botany, and ecology, and you’ve got more than enough material for a month. The review is organic, consistent and constant.

So You Think You Can Homeschool?

I’m yanking my kids.

Yes, after being that parent—you know, the one who helped with the PTA and volunteered in classrooms, the one who made sure her kids were as well adjusted in school as possible, and who read with bated breath every report card comment and district newsletter—something hit me like a 2’x4′.

What was it?

“I Can’t Do It Alone”

Teach my kids full time, all year long. Do it all alone. It’s been said that this is what I’ll be taking on by removing my kids from institutional schooling. Teach the two of them on my own? I fully believe that I can’t.

More importantly, I shouldn’t.

So I won’t.

Gifted My Ass.

Here we go again, labeling our children.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all sorts of different human qualities could be valued?

Some kids don’t show their real excellence during the school day.

What are we teaching children by making these distinctions?

No Man’s Land

Maybe the real reason for the absence of male teachers in preK-5 school settings is not the low pay. Maybe it’s that those men in fact simply know they wouldn’t be happy in a career on the front lines of a system that seeks to crush children’s souls.

What the Danish Guy Taught Me

The European man who came, saw, and challenged my world view: Why do people have their kids, only to warehouse them all week with strangers? And why are the children’s days so scheduled to death?

A History of High-Grade Fever

4, 3, A+, B…see ya!