The bulk of our homeschooling years are spent in the elementary phase, and I believe the books and curriculum we choose is critical to our own longevity as homeschoolers. If we choose curriculum that feels official but sucks the life out of learning, we will not have the stamina or confidence to homeschool into the teen years. However, if we pick living books and read them well, alongside our children, we will be excited to enter the next phase with them, as well. I remember when my oldest turned 8 in August of 2011. I felt the weight of responsibility sink in even deeper. “Now,” I thought, “things need to get serious. Now it needs to count.” I wasn’t sure...
Reading for kids is a fundamental job of parenting. But few probably understand that reading for kids is a way to get kids to learn to read. There’s a tendency for parents to believe the task is best left to experts who know how to teach a kid to read. But the problem is that learning to read is more than just educational mechanics. Sure kids need to know some phonics and sight words, but they also need to develop a love of reading and books. The good news is that by reading for kids the battle is half won. The bad news is that 66 percent of fourth graders in this country are reading below the basic level, which...
Police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and East 38th Street in Minneapolis, but the protests that have erupted in response to his death have rippled worldwide. From Riverton, Wyoming, to Flatbush, Brooklyn — and now in Paris, London, and other European capitals — communities have risen up in a shared rage that speaks to the universality of police violence and the inequities that feed it.Minneapolis, however, stands out as the site where it all began. The city’s history of disparate policing, and the ways racism and division molded its physical landscape, might help us understand why.Minneapolis is at once considered one of the most livable cities in the country, and the one with...
We’re two friends who each got technically sober in our own separate, rinky-dink, two-steps-forward-one-step-back eccentric ways. We were identical in realizing, early in sobriety, that we wanted more than just abstinence—more than just giving something up. We wanted a lush, beautiful, occasionally transgressive, frequently delicious sober life. Is that too much to ask? Sobriety didn’t mean we retired from living—rather the opposite, in fact. We agreed that it wasn’t working to put on the same outfit and go to the same party on the same block and expect to have the same fun we’d had in days of yore—fun which, because of how we both drank, came with a giant price tag. To try to do all the same things...
I used to live in Alabama. Why did I not know about him? Or even just a single example of the several hundred who were executed by mob in my state. Where were the memorials? “You ask anybody in this country to name one African-American lynched between 1877 and 1950, and they can’t give a single name,” EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson said. “We have no consciousness about this history. None.” What I offer here below — a thumbnail history in ten parts— was assembled as a response to an overheard comment which I will refrain from repeating, but which powered me through the compiling of this piece at a wild (and perhaps not very artful) pace. For those...
