Summer is officially here, and many parents–after homeschooling their kids for the last three months–are wondering whether they should keep schooling their kids to make up for a potential ”summer slide” or just let them enjoy the summer.  I come down strongly on the side of enjoying summer, but that doesn’t mean learning need not...Read More

I’ve been reading a lot of posts on Twitter from parents who are not happy campers. They didn’t plan on serving as ad hoc teachers for their out-of-school students during this pandemic.  Some are discouraged, others are exhausted, still others don’t know where to start.  For those parents who have these burn-out symptoms and can manage...Read More

Millions of parents around the U.S. are wringing their hands and racking their brains about what to do with their kids being at home from school until the coronavirus curve flattens out.  For many, the idea of losing crucial academic skills is keen, and parents fear that their kids will fall behind in their studies...Read More

Homework is considered to be part of the natural order of things in school.  But in the past twenty years or so there’s been an increasing amount of criticism about its function and use (see for example, Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing).  I too believe...Read More

Educator and media critic Neil Postman once remarked that:  ”children enter school as question marks and leave school as periods.”  In other words, kindergarteners and first graders are full of enthusiasm, raise their hands high when asked a question, and respond favorably to new learning activities, but by high school, the zip is gone and...Read More