It’s that time of year. We are well into autumn, and your plans and schedule are making plain that you are either: Totally on track to finish your autumn term well. Waving a complete goodbye to the idea of a ‘strong finish’ and hoping that you can limp across the finish line and somehow find…
The second lecture in my class on natural law is about metaphysics – one of those big words that comes up reasonably often, yet I would struggle to tell you what it really means. A simple google search tells me that it’s the study of the first principles of things – the nature of things….
What I desire to set before the reader is a method of education based upon natural law. Charlotte Mason, Home Education There is something about Charlotte Mason’s ideas that is extremely intuitive. I don’t think it’s just me, either. Plenty of people find that her principles speak to something that they’ve known, but couldn’t articulate….
Ambleside Online (the curriculum we follow) has posted their folk song choices for 2022-2023. They are good. It always feels a little funny to wrap up school the same week that a lot of things are launching in preparation for the next school year (and when a lot of people are coming to the end…
A few thoughts on Freddie deBoer’s updated article on why education doesn’t lead to educational mobility (children moving from one level of educational attainment to another, over the course of their formal education). First, people failing to appreciate how percentiles work always causes me to languish. I have a son who is over the 99th…
I appreciate this post from Nancy Kelly, which is a transcription of Charlotte Mason’s notes on her trainee teachers’ teaching. There is no one around to observe a homeschool mom when she teachers her children (unless your husband is working from home upstairs), but I imagine I’m not the only one who finishes a lesson,…
I think that school’s terrible. It’s not a great fit for human nature. Some people like to sit in a chair, and be talked at for a long time, and then go off and read a lot, and so forth. But, we, generally, are not creating a very curious, fun, even intellectually-engaging place for young…
I mentioned that I barely read anything over my family vacation last week. It’s too easy to fall away from a good habit – reading before bed, reading in spare time, etc – and the reading rut followed me home. I can only justify reading so many detective novels, as good as they are at…
Food for thought in this article by Eric Hoel in March. While school choice makes little difference to a child’s outcomes, individual tutoring does. The traditional line for why essentially all intellectuals used to be aristocrats is that they were the only people with the leisure time to pursue the life of the mind. But…
Last week my husband and I took a six day/five night trip to Kentucky – without the kids. One could be forgiven for thinking we took it easy, rested, and relaxed. Instead, we hiked about 23 miles over three days, in hot and humid weather. We drank lots of water. Despite all the sweat and…