In her viral essay in 2014, Pippa Biddle tells a story from her time on a humanitarian trip to Tanzania as a teenager. In the story, she and other girls from her private school are building a library for an orphanage. They would spend six hours each day laying bricks for the library. Apparently they …
It’s curriculum time! Just about now teachers all over, including in the homeschooling community, are creating, updating, tweaking, and generally getting their curriculum ready for next year. In that vein, I have a suggestion that I hope will be helpful to those working on their curriculum. In college I learned a theory of interpersonal communication …
There is this very interesting dichotomy one can find in the research on education. That dichotomy becomes clear if one looks at the items that have the biggest positive impact on student outcomes and then looks at the items that have the biggest negative impacts on student outcomes. The dichotomy is that the issues that …
**I begin with the caveat that the following concepts are not equally important or applicable to every subject taught. But they are relevant in some ways for all, and particularly relevant in the humanities.** I pretty frequently have something like the following scenario play out in my classroom. Perhaps in this particular case we are …
A particular activity I did in school has always stuck with me. I was a teenager and we were learning about the effects of alcohol consumption. The teacher had a set of goggles that simulated the impairment to vision, balance, processing, etc. that one might expect for different blood alcohol levels. As you might expect, …
What would you give to ensure that a child’s brain is prepared to operate in the adult world? What would you sacrifice to ensure that it has all the knowledge and skills necessary for the child to live a happy and productive life? For the homeschooling community the answer to that question is “an awful …
It’s funny what students will tell you about their families. They often have less of a filter than their parents. I’ll bet that’s comforting to all the parents reading this article 🙂 As a debate teacher, one of the messages that I sometimes get through the teen grapevine is that one or both parents in …
Because of the flexibility offered by homeschooling, parents and teachers in the community get to spend more time than usual crafting curriculum. It’s an exciting prospect to imagine all the great things that you will teach and that students will learn. It can be very freeing to consider that you have the opportunity to teach …
This past summer I led an educational/humanitarian trip of students and parents to Guatemala. While there we spent some time playing in Lake Atitlan with the option to jump from a high platform into the lake. The platform delivered a thirty or forty foot drop into the water. Not terribly dangerous, but still intimidating for …
Over the years, I’ve asked a number of students who are struggling academically what they think is causing their academic struggles. The answers are often the same. “I keep putting my homework off until the end of the week instead of getting it done right when class gets out.” “Procrastination. I have a big problem …