We had a funeral for our goat. The goat was our favorite goat. For those of you who don't know, in the goat cheese industry, which is very prominent in our area, the goat farmers kill the baby boy goats when they are born. The US imports goat meat, so there is no market for the farmers to raise boy goats for a profit. The boys are left to freeze in January. (more…)

Most of us were not raised to think kids can learn on their own. But even if you were raised to think kids can teach themselves, you will be shocked to hear about the kids in Ethiopia. MIT chose a remote, illiterate community to send some first-graders a box of iPads. Unopened. One person in the community was taught how to recharge the iPads. That's all anyone knew about the iPads. Within a month, the kids could read English and within three months, the kids had hacked the iPad to make the camera work even though someone at MIT had disabled the cameras. (more…)

Here's an email I received last week:

I began homeschooling in the 8th grade.

Right now, it's my junior year (I'm 15), and I realize that I'm doing something severely wrong. I'm doing the college shuffle now (I still want to go to college), and it's stressful and not how I want to learn. It's frustrating. I'm a homeschooler, people who are known for being unique and different, and my application is starting to look like every other kid in public school who does the SAT's, AP's (I take AP online courses), and whatnot.  (more…)

School is designed to help kids succeed in the workplace. The genesis of compulsory education was to create effective factory workers. Today, enlightened schools realize they are creating knowledge workers rather than factory workers. But here's the problem: most women don't want to work full-time. Which means it's overkill that school focuses so heavily on the workplace. What about home life? Why don't we educate girls for home life as well? (more…)

Time magazine did a cover package on the end of college. I tell you this because Time magazine is the pulse of American ideas. Something is mainstream when it gets into Time. Because those journalists don't aim to frame public discussion so much a summarize it in a way to reflect the discussion back to us. (more…)

The kids were really excited to go with us to vote today because they have watched approximately 40 campaign ads each day for months. If you live in a swing state, all YouTube ads are campaign ads.

So the kids are conversant on a wide range of political topics. For example, “Mom, do we have gay friends?"

Me: "What?"

"Barack Obama says we need to vote because our gay friends can't get married or serve in the military." (more…)

I hated school. And I often wonder if homeschoolers self-select because they wish they had not gone to school. So I want to tell you about the day in school that I would not have missed for any homeschooling agenda. Except it wasn't regular school. It was Hebrew school. (more…)

What is the point of parenting if you don't get to force your own agenda? We start doing this early, by picking a mate. I picked smart, good looking, and Jewish. I didn't pick good social skills. Believe me, I would have, if I had understood their importance at the time. But one result of not having social skills is you don't know why anyone else needs them, either. (more…)

I am not an expert on child rearing, but I am an expert in career planning, so it seems to me that I should be pretty good at helping my kids find careers. Here are things I'm doing:

1. Exposing them to the idea that career is important.
I do a lot of career coaching, and I do most of it in the car, while I'm driving the kids long distances. The coaching makes the drive better for me, and an unplanned offshoot is that the kids are learning about how to focus on issues surrounding a career. The best quote from the back seat: "Mom! Tell him to take the Myers Briggs test!" (more…)

Penelope Trunk