Tag: education

Rules for Homeschooling

Posted on by Jeff Cassman
From a friend:
Your homeschool day doesn’t have to begin at 8am.
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You can let your kids sleep in and you can drink an extra cup of coffee in the quiet.
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You can do morning time in the afternoon.
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You can do your read alouds in bed at night.
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You can homeschool in the evenings, on the weekends, or during baby’s naptime.
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You can get all your homeschooling done before 10am if you are early risers.
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You can homeschool in the pockets of your day – when you’re in the car, waiting for an appointment, while you’re cooking dinner, or on the sidelines of a sibling’s at soccer practice.
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Your homeschool rhythm doesn’t have to look anything like a traditional school day.
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The beauty of homeschooling is that you get to decide what works for your family. The where, when, and how is up to you – there is no wrong way to do it.
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If your family doesn’t like mornings, don’t pressure yourselves to begin your day early. This is the freedom of homeschooling.
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You can build your homeschool rhythms around your work schedule, farm chores, the seasons, or sleep schedules. This is the freedom of homeschooling.
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You can homeschool year-round, take a break every six weeks, or take an entire month off in the middle of the year because of illness, a new baby is born, you move across the country, or you need to care for
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How to Learn Anything Faster and Retain It Longer

Posted on by Jeff Cassman

From a great article at Doist:

  1. Choose a concept to learn. Select a topic you’re interested in learning about and write it at the top of a blank page in a notebook.
  2. Teach it to yourself or someone else. Write everything you know about a topic out as if you were explaining it to yourself. Alternately, actually teach it to someone else.
  3. Return to the source material if you get stuck. Go back to whatever you’re learning from – a book, lecture notes, podcast – and fill the gaps in your knowledge.
  4. Simplify your explanations and create analogies. Streamline your notes and explanation, further clarifying the topic until it seems obvious. Additionally, think of analogies that feel intuitive.

A lot of the strategies are easily implemented with ToDoist.

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Failure to Communicate

Posted on by Jeff Cassman

My children’s teachers send notes home with the textbooks asking for my estimation of their books in several categories. The Wife was visibly relieved when I quickly volunteered to review, comment and sign on the 53 different forms brought home by the seven enrolled there. Now I suspect she intercepts the children before they bring the books to me. Here’s why:

I know that what the teachers want is my assessment of the physical condition of the book so that when my kid drops it in the kitty litter, runs over it with his bike, spills Ramen on it, leaves it at soccer practice when it starts raining, uses a corndog as a bookmark, or allows #11 to use it to write the one word he knows in 37 different crayon colors and then seal his work with his unique “day old chocolate milk” mark, that I’ll be on the hook for it’s degradation from “fair with binding that appears to have propped open the garage door in three different families” to “are you kidding me?”.

However, I use the forms to send my feedback on the curriculum itself. I comment on science books that teach modernist theories contrary to the Catholic faith, math books that fail to explain the theory of “zero” or “infinity”, or history books that regurgitate Yankee propaganda about the War of Northern Aggression. My expectations are not unreasonable; it’s not like I expect them to explain to 8th graders the travesty of the 17th Amendment, … Read the rest