I have long been a member of the Toastmasters’ organization, as many of you who know me well have heard. Toastmasters is an organization that was founded in the 1920’s to help people overcome the real — almost universal fear — of public speaking. To many people, myself included, this…
Learning a la carte
If you could design your own learning path, what would it be? Sounds easy enough, right? You just pick the best schools, best teachers, best buildings, resources, etc. But is that all there is to it? Today, there is a raging battle over charter schools vs. traditional public schools. On…
The Importance of Intuition
I often tell people the story of why I moved to Montana from Chicago in 2002. It started with a casual trip to Whitefish, Montana in October of 1999 to visit a childhood friend of my husband, who had also moved here — mostly because of the skiing. Well, Montana…
Improving Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an area that everyone is talking about these days. Kids need “social and emotional learning” in schools so they can thrive in real life. I’ve been mostly staying home lately, but I’ll share one event that occurred in the last two weeks to which I believe I…
Mentoring – learning what you didn’t know, you didn’t know
Mentoring is one of my favorite learning topics. I like it because it is a learning method that is not used as much as I believe it should be in our modern world. Mentoring is like learning through apprenticeship; it is learning as you are doing. Specifically, to me, it…
We Need Personalized Learning to Achieve the American Dream
What is the American Dream? Is it to be rich? Perhaps for some people. Or is it to be very successful, such as to be a CEO of a company? It could be that for some people. Lastly, perhaps, it is to be famous, like as a musician or an…
Will grade inflation do us in?
In my last post, I mentioned dropping out of college and being ill-prepared and requiring remedial coursework as problems in Higher Education. But, an equally large problem is grade inflation. There has been significantly higher grades given out over the last 3 decades as in the past. Higher grades are…
Higher Ed at the Crossroads
I recently read a great book: The Case Against Education – Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan. I would agree with him. College is becoming way too expensive. I’m a parent of two and I worry about this a lot. However, I don’t agree…
What I Learned from Two Years of Home-Schooling
I’ll probably tell people that the best two days of my life were the day I started homeschooling and the day I stopped homeschooling. Not because I didn’t enjoy the experience. It was just really really hard, and in different ways than I would have thought. My reasons for homeschooling…
What Educational App should you use?
A couple of years ago, I attended an International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. Being the largest organization in Educational Tech, the conference was massive. The exposition hall alone contained 540 vendor booths — I counted them, from their listings in the program guide. I wondered how anyone…