Homeschooling my boys: calculus in the morning, whatever this is in the afternoon.

At the local college, waiting for my older boy to finish the AMC10, explaining Math Academy to the other parents waiting around

In 2010 Larry Sanger published his essay on toddler reading: larrysanger.org/2010/12/baby-r… Today his approach: using fun and low-pressure phonics-based instruction with very young children, seems to be going mainstream in SV. It's so interesting to see.  Not everyone knows that Larry

Last year I read to my kids what was probably the most mind-bending book they’ve ever heard: "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" by Edwin A. Abbott, written in 1884. (The Victorian English makes it doubly entertaining.) I credit this book for at least some of my younger

Typical homeschool day. Absolutely no one: Me, listening to my older boy play "My Funny Valentine" on the piano while my younger one learns a new integration technique on Math Academy:

[little kid poast alert, skip if allergic] "Mommy, do you remember de Moivre's Theorem?"  Uh... I should. I really should. It was in Precalculus. Where's my coffee again?  "Tell me again what it said." "Look. Do you know that I derived double angle formulas from it?" "No

So I asked chatGPT for an epistemic status on its replies to me

80% done with Calc BC (first time touching calculus in 20 years!) and it finally feels like I’m out of the woods. (Don't get me wrong, I did love the woods.) Everyone’s path through the knowledge graph is different, but mine has felt a lot like this picture. My kids are still

I was going to post something wholesome today about how well-behaved homeschooled kids are, but then I caught my boys sending each other hidden bad words using Conway’s Game of Life.

Happy to report that one of the most widely-used elementary homeschool history curricula does cover many of those details. In fact, I literally read these pages to my kids over lunch yesterday.

Integration by parts in cyclic cases is one of my favorite things, but I missed a question on it on a recent quiz because it takes me too long. Enter my older kid and his Half Table Method (TM). This boy writes very little down, and MA problems that take me a whole page elicit

Read your kids poems. Whenever a conversation or a read-aloud makes you think of a good poem you know, take a break from whatever you’re doing and read it to them. Lines from these poems enter your shared vocabulary, become inside jokes, accumulate context, and gain meaning over

So what do little boys need high school math for anyway?  To draw cute polar bears in Desmos that go full angry fluff mode when you tickle their nose. Apparently.

Hi, guys, me again. My older boy, a sixth grader, finished his Calc BC course today! So proud of him! He likes math but doesn't want to do more than 40-50 XP a day. If left to his own devices, he would probably do 30, and then just play with friends or read all day. Maybe