I heard some version of the same thing from parents over and over in eleven years of teaching. Their kid was doing fine in my class, their grades were fine, and at home they were falling apart. Headaches. Stomach aches. Refusing to go in the morning. Snapping at everyone the second they walked in the…
It was always the same kids. A few students who needed the bathroom, and then needed it again, and then needed to see the nurse, and came back, and asked again the next day. I taught high school for eleven years, and I can tell you that by the time a kid is asking for…
Sometimes there’s nothing hidden underneath it. Parents go looking for the secret reason, the bully, the teacher, the diagnosis, and sometimes the answer is exactly what your kid is telling you. They hate school. They don’t enjoy it, they don’t see the point of it, and they’ve been doing it for years. I spent eleven…
Most kids who say they hate learning have never actually been asked to learn anything they cared about. They’ve been asked to do school. Those aren’t the same thing, and the confusion between them is one of the most expensive mistakes we make with children. I taught high school for eleven years, and by ninth…
The first thing almost every family does when they decide to homeschool is buy curriculum. I’ve helped a lot of families pull their kids out of school mid-year through one-to-one consultations, and I can tell you that’s almost always the wrong first move. Curriculum matters, but on day one you don’t know yet what your…
People say it to me all the time. “Well, you were a teacher, so homeschooling must be easy for you.” And I have to laugh, because it’s the opposite. It’s harder for me, because I have to unlearn so much of what I was trained to do. I spent eleven years inside a school building,…
My son takes a few classes a week at a local secular microschool, and finding it took real work. Microschools aren’t rare anymore (they’re popping up everywhere), but I’m very, very selective about who teaches my kids and what’s allowed in the room while they learn (phones out during class, for example, is a dealbreaker…
When we first started planning to travel full time, the idea was never to homeschool from a hotel room. The plan was to find schools. Specifically, I wanted Montessori-style programs, alternative programs, places that would take my kids for a few weeks or a few months and let them learn alongside local kids and other…
When TikTok first took off, every girl in one of my high school classes was on it, and any spare minute, the end of class, the gap between bells, they were up out of their seats filming dances together. Then they’d walk down the hallway still doing them, the same dances they’d been watching on…
I didn’t find out I had ADHD until my forties, and when I look back at school now, I understand exactly why nobody noticed. I was labeled gifted in third grade and pulled out into a gifted program, which as far as I can remember meant some project-based activities that were maybe fun and never…