Guerilla math

Underground teaching at home, a.k.a. homeschooling.

Let's orchestrate metacognitive systems!

Gitcher edumacation jargon here!

We'll envision process-based manipulatives in order to effectively exploit impactful scaffolding and morph interactive life-long learning into strategic infrastructures.

Now we need some grants to apply for.

A look at public-school abuse of students

Take a look at Hidden Violations by the Illinois-based Small Newspaper Group. As Mark Shea might say, it's reason #345234234 to homeschool.

free-reading.net

This looks interesting - free-reading.net, a mediawiki-based website for teachers:

Free-Reading is an "open source" instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it's open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It's designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical "core" or "basal" program.

Reason number 355468453 to homeschool

Award-winning books as required reading. The big national children's book awards are typically awarded to oppressive poorly-written crap that's completely inappropriate for children. Naturally, that's what government educators like to assign to kids. In our family they start with the usual toddler's books, move on through the decent pabulum of the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, then on to history, well-written fiction and encyclopedias.

Nine-year-old Sarah is a wikipedia maven. She's reading about chess at the moment after spending the morning with bears, cats and kittens.

On bringing back the Great Books

Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, argues in favor of the Great Books in his book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

From the blurb:

Kronman sees a readiness for change—a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

Here's a short interview with him at Inside Higher Ed, along with comments of varying quality.