#education

The Upside Down World ~ The Blog

Smart Kids Being Dumb

If I had it to do all over again, I would never have put them in school. I would have gone straight to online schools once I could no...

Homework in kindergarten

An example of my 1st grader's homework So, I have my kids in the local public schools which has real drawbacks and benefits. One of the...

Jiu-Jitsu for the Bullied

(It always kills me that “socialization” is seen as a potential problem for homeschooled kids. Like the barbarians that run the social...

All Praise the Kids?

Interesting story in the NY Magazine this weekend about how praising kids harms and sometimes helps them. Much of the research about...

Who me, gifted?

The first point which needs to be made is that contrary to the perception that unusually smart people are arrogant and think that they...

How being gifted means being different

First, the differences. I always figured that high intelligence was just about how a person learns new information and skills. What I...

In Search of the Perfect Curriculum – Help!

A Beka. For kids my sons’ age (particularly the older one), I like the approach of The Well Trained Mind. However, as much as I love my...

The Platypus and Evolution

fascinating article in the Washington Post about the genetic code of the platypus. Scientists just finished mapping the odd animal’s DNA...

10 year old boys are right: word problems are evil!

New research seems to back up my decision to drop word problems. Researchers have conducted experiments which showed that students who...

What’s dumber than a gorilla with a bunch of bananas?

suspended 11 students for taking part in a senior prank where a kid dressed like a gorilla chased 10 classmates dressed like bananas...

The Orioles Are Coming

We have a small deck off of our kitchen where I hang our bird feeders. This allows us to draw them in close enough to actually see them...

Is college worth it?

here and here) as well as my extreme opposition to student loans and our current system of funding higher education (here, here and here)....

This is fantastic!

At any rate, a new program in Boston is working to teach low income parents to talk with their children from a very early age and to...

There are things I don’t understand

I know that my perspective is different because I do homeschool and it’s for reasons far less pressing than protecting my kids from...

Spilled Kool-aid and Montessori Education

Many moons back, we had our oldest son, and for one year, our younger son enrolled in Montessori schools. When I began homeschooling,...