Having an overarching plan for the year is something that I have never quite managed. I can never be sure how long my kids ‘passion of the moment’ will last …a hour, a day. a week, a month or longer.
As a result I tend to have overarching goals rather than exact plans – and I’ll try and put them here in some kind of logical order!
Continue reading “Asynchronous Homeschool Central: Curriculum”
Using Bayesien Logic to Decide if You Should Homeschool
“I can’t homeschool”
“It’s too difficult”
“I have to work”
“I don’t have the patience, smarts, fill-in-the-blank“
So, you’ve thought about homeschooling . . . back and forth, pulling hair out until there are little bald patches appearing that can’t be easily covered with a comb-over. You’ve read too many books and articles, and you still can’t decide.
Have you thought about applying a bit of Bayesian thinking to the problem? What? Huh? It’s OK, I’ll walk you though it.
Continue reading “Using Bayesien Logic to Decide if You Should Homeschool”
Homeschool Diary: Politics and Statistics
Last week, I mentioned that C had paused in his desire to understand democracy and law. Well, the pause in learning about democracy never materialised. Partly because my DH brought him an awesome book on how one of the original Magna Carta’s ended up in Canberra which we have been slowly reading through it together. And partly because we just had a state election on the weekend.
Continue reading “Homeschool Diary: Politics and Statistics”
Community
When you’re staring at the far side of the bell curve of statistical probability, ‘normal’ in many ways ceases to have much meaning.
Let me run through a few basic numbers with you and I’ll explain how improbable our life is, from a statistical perspective.
Continue reading “Community”
Fun With Thinking
In our house, we’ve been having a bit of fun over the last few weeks thinking about thinking. Now I’m not talking about Socratic argument-type ideas. I’m talking quite literally about ‘how’ we think.
If you’ve been reading about education for a while now, you would have run into the idea that people are either visual/spatial or auditory/sequential thinkers. Now, I’m not going to agree with these – nor really disagree. But I am going to separate them out and include a new category – pattern thinking. BTW This is explained in Temple Grandin’s book – The Autistic Brain*, which is an awesome read.
As well as adding pattern thinking, I’m also not terribly happy with attaching sequential to auditory. That’s because I am an auditory thinker – but I am not sequential. I jump around and make intuitive leaps that do not always follow a logical sequence and tend to hold multiple contradictory ideas in my head in a kind of symbolic stew.
I’m also not keen on the idea of spatial being attached to visual (but they go together, don’t they? – not necessarily). What huh? You might say. Let me explain.
*This is a link to but this book – because if you want to read this awesome book, I want to make it easier for you – I am a book-enabler. But you can always hop over to your local library instead – libraries are cool.