Just a few thoughts for home-schooling parents as a parent who has had a 12-13 year old daughter out of mainstream school for most of the last 18 months. I appreciate that this won't help everyone (maybe just one person) but hope it brings comfort.

Our daughter has been in and out of mainstream school since October 2018 due to an ongoing medical condition she’s being treated for. The first few months were hard as she completely fell between the cracks of education and health care. She had no education for about 3-4 months
Her condition is not aided by extra anxiety and therefore we have had to take a soft approach to her education. Since sorting things out through various services, she was back at school part time for the last semester. Things were taken day by day
Although she is only studying certain subjects, she soon made up ground in those areas, and though she may not be top of her class, she is doing OK. Her mental well being remains most important to us.
Remember that the school system was very anxiety inducing for some of our kids. Some have thrived more under lockdown without peer pressure, constant testing and anxiety/expectations. As adults we can better coping skills to deal with anxiety and we can share them with our kids
Even though kids might be at school 6 hours a day, they do not actively learn for 6 hours, so don’t feel that they have to be in front of a screen all day. They are also dealing with this, it’s scary for them, if you are stressed about their education, it will make them anxious
You don’t have to be a perfect teacher, you are not qualified to do this. I know teachers who admit that they struggle to home school their own kids. The dynamics have changed. Things will get better.
If you are lucky to live in a stable, loving household that values education, your kids have a good foundation Learning just does not happen exclusively behind the school gates. If they are watching an instructional art video on YouTube or Horrible Histories, that’s education
I feel for the kids less fortunate than mine, where no life long learning takes place at home. Where there are no laptops, books, games and most importantly no love and assurance. What your kids need most right now are the last two things
I don’t pretend to know enough about secondary education and it’s easy to say what another profession should be doing to improve. But we have to remember that the system our children are in does not fit all, testing and exams is not great for all kids.
Home learning can be flexible, and less regimental. Watching a documentary as a family & talking about it has value. I know not one size fits all. Kids are different ages with different vulnerabilities, demands, families have pressures, workloads and caring responsibilities.
So I don’t mean this advice in any demeaning way. We are resilient, we are entitled to offload and complain, it’s important to communicate. Don’t feel bad about all of the things and don’t beat yourself up if you think you’re failing at home schooling.
It’s not a competition, focus on love and learning will come easier once you start to relax a bit. Forcing it all is just not going to help any of us, especially the kids. x

More from Education

Working on a newsletter edition about deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is crucial if you want to reach expert level in any skill, but what is it, and how can it help you learn more precisely?

A thread based on @augustbradley's conversation with the late Anders Ericsson.

You can find my complete notes from the conversation in my public Roam graph:
https://t.co/Z5bXHsg3oc

The entire conversation is on

The 10,000-hour 'rule' was based on Ericsson's research, but simple practice is not enough for mastery.

We need teachers and coaches to give us feedback on how we're doing to adjust our actions effectively. Technology can help us by providing short feedback loops.

There's purposeful and deliberate practice.

In purposeful practice, you gain breakthroughs by trying out different techniques you find on your own.

In deliberate practice, an expert tells you what to improve on and how to do it, and then you do that (while getting feedback).

It's possible to come to powerful techniques through purposeful practice, but it's always a gamble.

Deliberate practice is possible with a map of the domain and a recommended way to move through it. This makes success more likely.
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
OK I am going to be tackling this as surveillance/open source intel gathering exercise, because that is my background. I blew away 3 years of my life doing site acquisition/reconnaissance for a certain industry that shall remain unnamed and believe there is significant carryover.


This is NOT going to be zillow "here is how to google school districts and find walmart" we are not concerned with this malarkey, we are homeschooling and planting victory gardens and having gigantic happy families.

With that said, for my frog and frog-adjacent bros and sisters:

CHOICE SITES:

Zillow is obvious one, but there are many good sites like Billy Land, Classic Country Land, Landwatch, etc. and many of these specialize in owner financing (more on that later.) Do NOT treat these as authoritative sources - trust plat maps and parcel viewers.

TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND EVALUATION:

Okay, everyone knows how to google "raw land in x state" but there are other resources out there, including state Departments of Natural Resources, foreclosure auctions, etc. Finding the land you like is the easy part. Let's do a case study.

I'm going to target using an "off-grid but not" algorithm. This is a good piece in my book - middle of nowhere but still trekkable to civilization.

Note: visible power, power/fiber pedestal, utility corridor, nearby commercial enterprise(s), and utility pole shadows visible.

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https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.