This will be the last Homeschool Wednesday post for quite some time. Not just because we will be going away on a trip to Africa but when we come back I will switch Continuations around a bit. I will use it (almost) exclusively to expand the ideas from my “Are We The Horse?” talk. Now I can make that change without asking anyone for permission because I am my own publisher. That is an example of “permission-less innovation” and is one of the key messages we are trying to convey to our children...

I became a US citizen in the mid 2000s (I have forgotten the exact year) and recently got called for the first time for jury duty. I am very excited about this as it is both a central part of the functioning of the judicial system (and hence civil society overall), as well as a great personal and family learning opportunity. I am writing this blog post in the waiting room seeing if I will be called for a jury selection. Germany, where I grew up, doesn’t have a jury system. Instead, judges not...

One crucial impact of homeschooling is that you spend way more time with your children (even when you use quite a few tutors as we do). This will test your relationship with your children in new and unexpected ways and in turn becomes one of the ultimate learning opportunities for yourself. Seeing your children as a mirror of yourself is one of the fundamental tenets of the two books on parenting by Dr. Shefali Tsabary. I highly recommend both The Conscious Parent and Out of Control and wish ...

Today we will be filing our quarterly reports with the New York City Department of Education. In addition to the Individualized Home Instruction Plan (or IHIP), quarterly reports are one of the legal requirements for homeschooling in New York. The report that we actually send in to the DOE is the minimal one possible by law – essentially an affirmation that the children are progressing well. But for ourselves and for the kids we pull together a detailed report from all their tutors. So just l...

One of the many benefits of homeschooling is that it allows for fine grained quality control. With a school you are getting a complete bundle and if the math teacher is no good in a particular grade you are basically out of luck. In homeschooling on the other hand you can switch to a new method, try a different course, add or remove a tutor, etc. This is incredibly empowering not just for us as parents but also for our kids as we involve them deeply in this process. One might at first suspect...

One of the great opportunities in homeschooling is the amazing access that now exists to classes online. Whether it is EdX, Coursera or Skillshare, there is a wealth of classes and it is growing seemingly by the hour. One advantage of this emerging system that I had not considered before is that they are largely age agnostic. Two of our children are taking courses right now where I suspect that they are on the younger end of the range of participants. But nobody knows that and as a result the...

At the end of last year before going away for the holidays, I laid out a miniature program for learning / teaching about rates of change. The first step was to appreciate the tremendous difference between linear and exponential change. It is easy to write down the relevant definitions: in linear growth we take the previous value and add a constant to it, whereas in exponential growth we take the previous value and multiply with a constant (that’s greater than 1 – for a constant less than 1 yo...

In case you come here only on Wednesdays when I write about homeschooling, you might also want to check out Tech Tuesdays (a series that goes back several years). In yesterday’s Tech Tuesday I wrote about computational complexity and gave an example of a program that would take hundreds of thousands of years to run. It turns out to have been an example of exponential growth which happens to, well, grow a lot! That reminded me that I have been meaning to write about rates of change more genera...

There is an amazing tool out there for teaching and learning about Math (and the world) and not enough people know about it. If you have never tried it out before, you should head over to Wolfram Alpha right now. Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a computational knowledge engine which may not mean much to people and the sparse home page with just a search box doesn’t help if you have never heard of it before. But as a starter you could think of it as the intersection of the world’s best graph...

The biggest challenge of homeschooling is letting go of push and waiting for pull. It is really hard to remain patient when kids are goofing off. The instinct is to push more things at them in the hope that they will pick one of these up and run with them. And it is easy to be afraid that without push they will never discover the thing that unlocks their intrinsic motivation. Yet the reverse may very well be true – anything pushed at them they will wind up not liking even if it would have bee...