Conversations on Twice Exceptional Homeschooling
It is hard to live through dark times. When the world narrows. If all you see are the horrors outside. Feeling trapped. When the only place you can go is . . . your home.
Continue reading “How to Survive Dark Times: A Letter to Friends”
In the last few weeks there have been ‘shocking’ headline articles [1] in my state of Victoria about a gifted education provider used by at least 30 schools. The ‘shock’ is due to the founder’s unusual non-mainstream, non-scientific (and pretty out-there) ideas which were taught without either their parents or the school’s knowledge.
There were a lot of very upset people – both in the medical establishment, in the schools and in the general public – pulling their hair and wailing about standards, speculating about the ‘reasons’ [2] and generally lamenting about ‘woo’ being taught without reflecting on how this incident revealed and illustrated some of the deeper issues that currently plague gifted education in most Victorian schools [3].
Sadly, that this happened isn’t really a surprise. It was almost inevitable. Because, when it comes to gifted education, almost all schools already deal in woo.
Continue reading “Gifted Education and ‘Woo’”
It all started rather innocently. A friend who runs one of the gifted support groups I’m involved with had a mum inquire about home education, so she asked me to have a chat and offer some advice. It was awesome, talking to someone local who was also home educating. And then another group asked if I could be the gifted/2e contact for their home education group – they didn’t get many inquiries, but in case they did . . . So I thought, hey, I could write up an article for them on some of the basics of getting started.
But then I thought – maybe I could organise a group meetup for parents and kids of gifted families who are home educating in Melbourne. (“If you build it, they will come.“) So I contacted the lovely people at GHF to ask them about how to go about organising a group.
And then it snowballed . . .
Continue reading “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes”