Continuations

I am super excited to be backing our daughter Katie’s film project on Kickstarter. She is making a horror movie about what it’s like to be a teenager. Which sounds about right. Joking aside, here’s the premise:At sixteen, Amelia is almost free of the torment of her cutthroat New York City private high school. To her little group of friends, she’s the perfect student, bound for a prestigious Ivy League college, but beneath the surface things are bubbling over. Since her mother’s death, Amelia’...

I happened to be listening to some back to school coverage on TV this morning and of course the Common Core standard was brought up along with the question of college readiness. As we have been homeschooling now for two years and our twins are entering 10th grade we have been thinking a lot about these two related but separate questions: (1) how do we help our kids get ready for college (they both want to go) and (2) how do we convince colleges that they are in fact ready. So this past summer...

School is supposed to help children learn how to form good habits. Since we are homeschooling that raises a bunch of questions. What are habits supposed to be good for to begin with? How do you form them? Or get rid of bad ones for that matter? And what, if anything, is the relationship between habits and willpower? To dig into this we all decided to read a bunch of books on this topic including some famous ones, such as Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Walter Mi...

I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be today, David answered “vocational schools.” Now as it turns out my Dad was a teacher at a vocational school in Germany where the apprenticeship system has been maintained throughout the Industrial Age. I learned a ton from my Dad about technical dr...

When we invested in Shapeways at USV, one of the trends we liked was that 3D design tools were getting cheaper and more accessible. I am happy to report that Tinkercad is now an amazing entry level and free tool that runs right in your browser. This Sunday afternoon from a standing start all five of us (Susan, myself and our three kids), each took the excellent Tinkercad tutorials and then designed a model, uploaded it to Shapeways and ordered it. All of that in under two hours and you could ...

When we moved back to the city at the beginning of 2012 we experimented for 6 months with homeschooling our kids. They then spent last year at Avenues, a new school in Manhattan. Avenues is a startup (and of course I love startups). The Avenues team did an impressive job coming out of the gate and are building a great school. But as it turns out our kids all concluded that homeschooling was better yet and so we are going back to it. I will be blogging extensively about the experience most lik...

Whenever you are doing something out of the norm – and homeschooling is still that – it is good to find other people who are doing the same and connect with them. A great place to do that is our portfolio company Meetup. So when I looked today I was thrilled to find this Homeschool New York City meetup. I was even more thrilled to see who had joined it just days before: Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström. I am not sure how much time either of them will be spending in New York but seeing people ...

One of the many things I love about homeschooling is the ability to use current affairs to motivate the study of history and civics and more. And it is hard to imagine a richer quarry than NSA surveillance and spying. It has everything! Civil rights. Government balance of power. International relations. Computer security. Data analysis. History of spying. And so much more. We took the kids to see the Fifth Estate and have We Steal Secrets and Mediastan on the to watch list. Our son is in a de...