rebelEducator
@rebelEducator
Corrupting the youth. Enthusiasts exploring the future of learning. Follow for ideas on how to improve your child’s education.
When kids leave traditional school, they have to go through a deschooling process. Deschooling = unlearning all the bad habits you picked up in school. Some of the biggest habits kids need to unlearn:
The problem with most school writing is that it’s written exclusively for the teacher. The student cares only about the teacher’s opinion and approval. No one else will ever read it. The goal is just the A. Most kids never learn the art of writing selfishly as a tool for…
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
States like Arizona and Texas are getting all the hype, but this is happening everywhere.
Iowa school choice program goes fully universal, approves nearly 44,000 scholarships (via @ReadTheLion) School choice is booming in Iowa as the program is now fully universal. The state’s education savings account (ESA) program has grown over 50% in just one year, with 43,784…
This energy embodied in the six-year-old should be alive and well in the thirteen-year-old, just redirected towards teenage pursuits: social groups, entrepreneurial ventures, making money. But school squashes that energy with a vengeance and burns our kids out with drudgery…
Observe any six‑year‑old carefully: • Building forts • Starting projects • Eyes full of wonder Observe that same child at thirteen: • Exhausted after school • Hours of homework • Scrolling social media to decompress The difference does not lie within the child. It…
School is not designed with your children in mind, and especially not your boys. It’s designed for the convenience of its administrators. For whom the natural proclivities of boys are particularly inconvenient. Your son’s energy is not the problem, the school is.
“Your child has depression and ADHD and exhibits signs of being suicidal, but the prisonlike school we force them into seven hours a day definitely has nothing to do with that at all.”
The ability for school and parental authorities to label pretty much anything they want in children as “mental illness” is a way to deflect responsibility for the misery they’re causing. Adult authorities bounce between blaming the biology of the kid and blaming the character of…
The following post is not about fifth grade, it’s about college. Brown University. Which is Ivy League.
When I started teaching, I’d ask students about favorite authors/books, and I got many answers. Before Covid, when I asked students this question I had to ban JK Rowling, because otherwise they all chose Harry Potter. Now when I ask them they don’t have any favorites at all.
Parents of entrepreneurial teens: 1517 is *awesome* and this is an amazing opportunity. @DStrachman and @William_Blake are good friends of mine. They’re the folks behind the Thiel Fellowship, and they were the earliest backers of the youngsters who went on to build Figma…
2E Teen Camp is BACK!!!! We are so excited to host again from Oct 9 - 13th in the Bay Area. Are you an irrationally passionate teen? Math, science, art -- we love it all! Previous 2Ers have gone on to become great friends, received the 1517 Medici grant, and participated in…
If your kid is struggling in school— Maybe it isn’t the kid that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the school.
The over-regulation of education is stupid and complicated and unintuitive and also it’s through the roof.
Enrolling in college early does not exempt you from truancy laws in Texas, apparently. You have to keep saying that you're also being homeschooled 🤡🌎
A milestone: just hired our first former Primer student. First of many!
> We are the only school in the world that takes a 740 [SAT] math student and puts them in third grade math lessons to raise their score.
What does teaching students to their levels mean? An illustrative story from Alpha School: One of their students was scoring 740 on the math SAT portion. School drilled in, noticed that she was making careless errors bc she had never memorized multiplication/division tables. No…
Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing that high schoolers no longer learn Latin and Greek?
"used to require that admitted students could read Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin and St. John’s Gospel in Greek" One of the few great advances in university education over the past 60 years has been the lessening of the importance of classical languages and literature.
If the top priority of the American public school system was actually to raise strong, articulate, skilled, intelligent citizens, it could do a whole lot with $15,591/student. Which is the average annual spending per American kid. The problem is that raising strong, articulate,…
Impossible to ask "deeper questions" about history, science, or literature when you... don't know any in the first place. Memorization is still necessary (if not sufficient).
Ex-OpenAI Peter Deng says AI may be rewiring how kids think, and education could shift with it. The skill won't be memorizing answers. It'll be learning how to ask better questions to unlock deeper thinking. “When the calculator was invented, people didn't stop doing math. They…
Learning is a normal and hardwired part of the human experience. School is not and is a human invention. It’s so unnatural it can lead to hating learning, the natural thing us humans are hardwired to do.