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Educational Philosophy, Home Education
An Elemental Relationship

(on Charlotte Mason, sensory integration, and things seen at the dentist’s office…) Recently, during our biannual exposure to children’s television at the pediatric dentist, I saw a commercial that’s stuck with me. As I recall, the commercial introduces us to four-year-old Antonio, who is running around playing happily. We then meet his mother, a former kindergarten teacher who laments how difficult it is to get her son to take any interest in learning. We see little Antonio slumped despondently over Continue Reading…
June 28, 2018
Home Education
Out to the Back Forty

My mom grew up on a wheat farm outside a small town in north Texas. She’s got a store of tall tales about killing rattlesnakes and pulling calves, our own family mythology. My siblings and I are city kids, raised in suburbia, but we spent lots of time at my grandparents’ farm growing up. It was a kind of dual citizenship: we were just countrified enough to be venturesome, just citified enough to be easily unnerved by this rugged, beautiful Continue Reading…
May 7, 2018
Educational Philosophy, Home Education, Mother's Education
The Stones Cry Out

I ’ve been thinking lately about a story told me by one of my favorite teachers, a professor from England who wore tweed hats and occasionally teared up while reading poetry aloud to his classes. It was the story of his first encounter with the divine as a child raised in an atheistic household. His parents were researchers in a remote, rural area, and one day he was riding in the back of his parents’ vehicle across a wide expanse Continue Reading…
April 3, 2018
Educational Philosophy, Mother's Education
The Power of Story; or, That Thing Charlotte Said About Picture Books

First, another creek anecdote, if you’ll pardon me. My oldest child tends to be fearful, the way imaginative children often are. She’s also a city kid, used to a landscape of eight-foot privacy fences and sidewalks, so anything resembling wilderness makes her uneasy (I realize this is a deduction of at least 15 CM points from my total; we’re working on it). For a long time, she even acted clingy and cautious at our familiar, tame neighborhood creek. Then, from Continue Reading…
February 20, 2018