I know it sounds radical, but I believe grades do more harm than good. This is not the first time this thought has crossed my mind but recently my kid, who attends our local public high school, had a writing assignment due. The assignment was met with annoyance and eye rolls. It was something to “just get done.” As someone … Read More
Maybe It’s the Environment
What should we do when a child doesn’t want to go to school…ever? The standard approach is to assume something is wrong with the child and to use a combination of incentives and disincentives to get them to go. It feels like there is no other choice–go even if it’s distressing and even at great cost to mental health, well-being, … Read More
It Depends
“It Depends.” I say this alot. I’m the staff member at Princeton Learning Cooperative who initially meets with interested families. They come with lots of questions about PLC and I almost always respond with some variation of, “it depends.” The reactions families have to hearing this over and over again range from mild amusement as they start to understand how … Read More
Why Learn Anything?
I’ve been teaching English-ish classes for eighteen years…and that statement pretty much sums up the sort of English teacher I am: the type who gets a kick out of adding the suffix “ish” to a word that already ends in “ish,” not the type who corrects your grammar at dinner parties. That’s also probably why I had such a hard … Read More
Let’s Not Force Our Kids Into Early Retirement
Several years ago, when I was a high school teacher, one of my students was seriously injured in a field hockey game. She was a star player and would probably have earned a scholarship to play field hockey. Her season, and possibly her entire field hockey career, was over. Right around the same time, I read an article, I think … Read More
Boy, You’re Gonna Carry that Weight
We just went through a wild year. And that is putting it lightly. A pandemic, everything that goes with the pandemic, civil unrest, a riling election, climate disasters, you name it. Weren’t there also aliens at some point? And here we are now, in 2021, still going through it. We’ve all been going through it in our own individual ways … Read More
The Conveyor Belt to Success
Around this time of year twenty-three years ago, I was a senior in high school fretting about applying to college. The whole process was intimidating, but what plagued me the most was that I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I didn’t know that because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t … Read More
Going Down the Rabbit Hole of Learning
When I describe the Learning Cooperatives as a self-directed education center, it’s not uncommon for people to need more of an explanation. Truthfully though, it’s as simple as it sounds. We are a center that encourages self-direction in education. But what does that look like? I’ve been attending some of the Black Lives Matter protests, where we are asked to … Read More
Weaning Teens (Off Dependency)
We all know someone whose maturity, for no apparent medical reason, is stunted somewhere in adolescence. It may be a friend, a coworker, maybe even a parent. This person may be attention-seeking, self-centered, irresponsible, people-pleasing, prone to tantrums, or simply unrealized. How is it that the body matures without a hiccup, but the mind doesn’t always follow? The body grows … Read More
What Do You Do When You Don’t Know What to Do with Your Life? Start Doing Stuff.
If you are one of those people who knew as a teen what they wanted to do for the rest of their life, you are a rarity. But for most of us, we had to try things out.