I read this article by Jay Mathews in the Washington Post about education and sorting, and I have various problems with it. There’s been a huge to do about it on one of the homeschooling lists I read, because, frankly, homeschoolers are the ultimate expression of what he’s angry about. He writes about schools “sorting”…

Comparing my experiences in school classrooms and homeschooling is interesting to me. All of the schools and programs we’ve been involved with have things to recommend them to almost any child, yet in each instance the children seemed to learn differently based on the mix of kids, the teachers, and the subject matter. As I’ve…

More thoughts about food. (Can you tell it’s one of my favorite subjects? Too bad wine doesn’t have much to do with parenting, unless you overuse it!) I was talking to some moms the other day, all identities not to be revealed so as not to incriminate the innocent…or the guilty. We were talking about…

Last night some other homeschooling moms and I were talking about educational theories. Someone said, “Waldorf says…” and another said, “Well, Montessori says…” And then we started talking about teachers who were trained in one discipline who start to go renegade. For example, a Waldorf-trained teacher who practices handwriting with her kindergarteners. What it comes…

Yesterday I took my kids to the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair. This is an annual excursion for us and apparently thousands of other people. It’s in the Louden Nelson Center and is very, very crowded. Despite that, it’s a great experience for kids and parents alike. The life cycle of fungus is fascinating. Kids learn…