“When will I ever USE this?!” said every student ever! (This article was previously published in March 2023 on Substack, which I have chosen not to keep up. So, I’m republishing here.) We’ve all heard our children say this as we struggle to help them with their school work. If you’re in the position to be homeschooling, now you have to figure out how to counter their complaint, even while possibly bemoaning why you even have to teach those parallelograms, participles and Latin paradigms!  After all – It is true. Only in very specific scenarios will one ever actually use the knowledge of parallelograms in daily life.  Yet, when we evaluate a lesson…

When I was a child, I grew up on a very busy street, but our yard backed up to homes on a quiet street with no outlet. So my brother and I would hop the fence to our neighbors’ yard, ring doorbells or join the other kids who were already playing. We would play in the street until dark – kickball, wiffle ball, tag, whatever. In the summers, we visited the town pool almost every day, sometimes from open to close. There was always a friend who was also at the pool. We didn’t have to plan ahead. It was a given – someone was there. On Friday evenings the…