My 13 year old and I sat down to play around with ChatGPT today. We decided to see how well it could do writing one of his recent essays. His virtual English 8 class required a 5 paragraph essay explaining how the character of Jonas in The Giver was relatable. Peter had found this essay easy to crank out, but also told me that he felt like an automaton while writing because he was cranking out grammatical prose that he didn't actually believe. Peter has autism and has a very hard time relating to anyone on more than the most superficial level. Also, his utilitarianism made him react to some of the dystopian elements of Jonas' society much less strongly than Jonas did. ChatGPT produced an essay very similar to Peter's. They both highlighted vague, stereotypical "relatable" traits between Jonas and a 13 year old boy: "growing sense of individuality", "growing understanding of love and family", and "journey of self-discovery". We had asked it to include support from the text, and it adequately did so. It, like Peter's essay, was incredibly formulaic, generic and boring, but those are exactly the traits that score well in his virtual class which is a showcase of apathy and mediocrity (from students and teachers). I hope that teachers do not go to a model of in-class, by-hand essay writing. I think standardized test essays show us that essays written in those conditions wildly favor certain students over others, and almost always sacrifice depth and creative for speed and safety. What I would like to see is a lot more short, slow, deliberate, collaborative writing in elementary. A lot more analyzing really well-written sentences and then paragraphs. A lot more working together as a class to model/write/edit sentences, then paragraphs, then short essays. At that point, I would shift focus almost entirely to creating strong outlines. It is the ideas, organization and support that I care about way more than the actual writing of prose in high school. In the long run, a poor writer who thinks deeply, organizes clearly, and supports strongly will go much farther than a good, fluent, grammatical writer who cranks out the essay equivalent of elevator music. In the workplace, an employee who produces a deeply nuanced argument for why their company should make a certain choice is going to go far...even if they "wrote" the actual text by learning how to input their outline point by point into ChatGPT. I also think this is a rallying cry for teachers to start really honing essay topics. "Explain how Jonas is relatable" is a horrible prompt. 1) Some kids are not going to find him relatable. 2) It lends itself to super generic answers that can easily be produced by AI. and 3) It is busywork, with value only in practicing writing, not in actually communicating anything interesting. If the goal was character analysis - what about a three way Venn diagram of Jonas, Fiona and the student. If the goal is pulling support from a novel - give the students several varied theses and have them provide three pieces of textual support for each. If the goal is organizing an essay - have them take one of the provided theses and the textual support they found and expand it into a full outline. And if the goal is just producing grammatical prose - provide a strong essay with various sentences missing and have them write 2-3 options for each missing sentence. (Though, even this ChatGPT can handle pretty adeptly. All the more reason to focus less on the actual writing and more on the idea generation.)

World History: Prehistory - 1450 Build Your Library 10 + Great Courses + Reading Like a Historian English 9 Build Your Library 10 + Lantern + WWS 2 + MCT Magic Lens Biology Many resources including the living books from Build Your Library 10 Calculus MIT OCW Spanish Dual Enrollment in Spanish 301 + Private Tutoring + Being a teaching assistant Mythology and World Religions Build Your Library 10 + Great Courses Art Pottery Classes + Art Classes + Sketchbox Another Elective Peter is currently asking for Cryptozoology in Legends around the World, but he might also decide on Game Theory or Egyptology and Hieroglyphs or something else entirely. **I'm writing a new post with our revised plan, but leaving this one here in case it is of use to someone in the future.**

Well, Duolingo finally got around to switching me to the new format...and I HATE it. I don't like the lack of flexibility. I also don't like that if I want to hand my phone to Audrey to practice the first few levels, we have to switch to a whole different "course" instead of just scrolling up the tree. Duolingo is slowly losing me as a loyal user. I have a streak of 2382 days, and spent over a year in the Diamond League, but now I just don't care. I still do a lesson a day, but that is it. I have now dropped down to the Amethyst League, and will probably continue to free fall until I decide the whole thing isn't worth it anymore.

Audrey's 2nd grade year will be a hybrid of virtual public school (so they pay for extra curriculars) and homeschooling (so she actually learns something). It will also be a hybrid of 2nd and 3rd (and 4th) grade because she is very asynchronous. ELA: BookShark Level 3 ELA plus probably All About Spelling and Daily Grams History: BookShark B - First year of world history Math: Math U See Delta plus Mammoth 4 Science: Classes at a nature center plus lots of reading and videos Spanish: Immersion Class which includes art, music and dancing Memorization: Anki Music: Piano using Playground Sessions Gymnastics: Joining her gym's artistic team, about 4 hours of training a week, plus competitions Another elective...Pottery, Drumming, Horseback Riding? Extras: Fun group elective classes...this year they are doing Circus School, Art based on picture book illustrations, and nature/science/geography based on the Who Would Win? book series. I don't know what will be offered next year.

For 95% of the house, faster would be easier in some ways, because the less time the kids had to be in limbo (a state that is very incompatible with their mental health) the better. So, if I had a POD in my driveway, I could declutter and stage 95% of the house in a couple weeks. That would still leave some minor damage - peeled paint where a poster was hung, a couple faded stains on the master bedroom carpet, etc - but no worse condition than when we bought the house. It also really needs new windows throughout, but rather than rush that job, I would just expect to kick back a reasonable amount to the buyer for them to get that done. The other 5% of the house would be the sticking point. Elliot's room doesn't have electricity. All the outlets, switches and ceiling fixture have been closed over. All the walls are boarded up with plywood, and there is almost no drywall, insulation or wiring left behind the plywood. The ceiling has huge gashes and gouges from things being hurled at it. The window is boarded over. The shelved have been ripped off the walls in the closet. The heating vent has protective gratings screwed down over it. And the carpet is hopelessly (and gruesomely) stained from years of Elliot self-injuring and bleeding all over. In a short time frame, I think the best I could do was strip Elliot's room all the way down to the studs. It is beyond repair at this point, so that would at least give the buyer a clean slate.

Spencer's 5th grade year will be a hybrid of virtual public school (so they pay for extra curriculars) and homeschooling (so he actually learns something). Language Arts: BookShark level G plus some WWS lessons History: BookShark - First year of world history Math: AOPS Algebra Science: Classes at a nature center plus lots of reading and videos Spanish: Immersion Class (which includes art) plus private lessons Memorization: Anki, so many Anki cards!! Music: Piano, Piano, and more Piano. Three lessons a week + ~20 hours of (voluntary) practice. Plus now violin as well. One lesson a week + 30-45 minutes of practice a day Ear Training, Performances and Competitions, Coursera/EdX Music Theory Courses Extras: Fun group elective classes...this year they are doing Circus School, Art based on picture book illustrations, and nature/science/geography based on the Who Would Win? book series. I don't know what will be offered next year.

I was having a lot of trouble switching between gmail accounts. It was just a PITA. I would log into one, go about my business reading emails and opening various Google docs...then I would log into another, and all the Google docs I had open would crash because "my account" no longer had permissions to view them. Ugh. So, I completely segregated Google accounts by internet browser. My personal account is always open in Chrome. My kids' personal accounts are always open in Firefox. My kids' school accounts are always open in Edge. Problem solved. I can have multiple open at the same time, and switch between them seamlessly without logging in or out.

I always emphasize with my kids how vague and nebulous (and largely unhelpful) all those types of labels are. I stress that our focus needs to be on researching and interpreting how a given person/organization is using the label so we can determine if an opportunity would be a good fit for the child in question. As an example, we talk about the fact that locally we have four different music camps for gifted/advanced/talented piano players. Two of them would be wildly below Spencer's level; one would be at Spencer's level, but won't let him in because they only admit high schoolers; and one would be a huge challenge for Spencer and honestly is probably aimed at kids more exceptional than him. So instead of ever telling my kids "you are gifted" (implying that "giftedness" falls along a straightforward, bimodal distribution), I use phrases like "your brain seems to process X easily", "you are accelerated in Y compared to many kids your age", and "your interested in Z has led to you being very skilled". In your case, I might explore what interested your son about the camp idea - I think that would be very telling. Is it just sleep away camp of any type that he find intriguing? Is it the giftedness aspect? Is it that his cousin is going? I would also probably offer to administer a practice PSAT/SAT test if he wanted to have an idea of what his score might be.

We have used the Oxford University Press books for Ancient and Medieval & Early Modern World. I read them aloud to all my kids (K - 6th). At the same time, my 6th grade did Choose Your Own Adventure history. Each week DS read a page or two of Kingfisher as the spine (I just decided how much I want to cover over the year and divided it by the number of weeks). He also completed a MapTrek map if there was an applicable one. Then, he was expected to spend an hour, split up however he wanted, reading/watching associated supplementary materials. I pulled together a wide variety of choices: SOTW, A History of the World in 100 Objects, TedEd videos, Letters of Note, Mapping World History, Timeline of Everything, Great Courses lectures, Mammoth book of How it Happened, Visual History of the World, and Human Odyssey. This put the onus of finding related materials on him; he had to figure out how the books were organized, use the index, think about what terms to search for, etc. It also gave him a lot of freedom to learn more about his particular areas of interest...be it warfare, art, technology, etc. At the end of the week, he added events and people he read about to his timeline, and made Anki flashcards of all the main ideas he learned (this growing deck of cards gets continually reviews along with all his other Anki cards on a daily basis). Every few weeks we paused and he completed a Reading Like a Historian Lesson.

There are actually two other siblings as well, but they hit the road long ago. One at the age of 20 to become a missionary around the world, only coming home every five years since. And the other to marry a man very much like Gramps, who just needs and deserves so much of her time that he has entirely cut her off from her family.

I expect he probably had autism...though clearly would not have been diagnosed in the '30s or '40s. His rigidity, fixation, self-centeredness, etc. He never had it in him to adult - went directly from his parents, to his wife, to his second wife, to relying entirely on his children even though he was still only middle aged. But through it all he never saw a problem with not carrying even his own weigh, much less putting effort into wives, children, grandchildren, maintaining his home, etc. He expected everyone to put effort into him (because he was so "deserving"), but could not find it in himself to care at all about anyone else. When Peter was 5 he prepared a poem to recite at Thanksgiving, and Gramps interrupted him twice to ask if it was almost time to eat. My greatest fear is that my autistic children will end up like him.

My aunt is planning a funeral for Gramps. She was only 18 when her mom died, and I think she has spend the last 40 years waiting for Gramps to show any inkling that he could take his children's feelings into account. Since he failed her in life, she now seems determined to seek closure from his death. My mom and dad, on the other hand, are planning to skip the funeral and go to a brew pub to raise a glass to Gramps. Gramps, who would come to my parents' house as a guest, and would call my dad "an alcoholic who will go to hell" if he drank a beer in the evening after spending the day filing Gramps' taxes for him. A brew pub toast seems like a fitting tribute.

He wasn't an easy guy to like. Well, that's not exactly true - he was very easy for strangers to like. He would chat about their dogs and where their accents were from and if they had visited the local lighthouse. What they didn't know is that he had promised to watch the children at the campsite, and his blissful self-involvement meant there was a 9 year old trying to care for her panicked 4 year old brother as the picnic table caught fire because my grandfather had started water boiling on a camp stove and wandered away long enough for it to boil dry and start the stove on fire. He was 60 at the time. He would watch toddlers meander into roads, unrepentantly cause traffic accidents, and allow his roof to collapse around him when he had more than adequate funds to pay for repairs and multiple adult children begging him to let them hire a crew...all because he was convinced that God's plan was preordained and therefore it didn't matter what he did. He felt his piety entitled him to whatever he wanted, and that there was no reason to consider the rights or feelings of the "less deserving". He kicked my father out of the house at 16 because my father questioned where in the Bible it said they weren't allowed to dance or play with playing cards or watch movies. My grandfather changed his tune a decade later, when I was born, and his wife died, and his house started falling apart from complete lack of maintenance or upkeep. Suddenly my dad was allowed to come over...more as a servant than anything. And that is how the last 40 years have gone. It started with demands that my dad clean and fix and keep up my grandfather's house...sprinkled with comments about how my parents and their children would go to hell. Things just got worse over the years. My grandfather was never self-sufficient (he was too "deserving" to clean up after himself, buy his own clothing, pay his own bills, etc.), but he also refused to move out of his house. So for 20 years he set the house on fire, ate rotten food, had carpet crusted with feces, and called up my father day and night because his sink overflowed...after leaving the faucet on for three days while filling the sink with dirty dishes, or he didn't have heat...because he had failed to mention his basement had been flooded with two feet of water for a week, or his computer wasn't working...because the mice he was purposefully feeding in the house had gnawed through the cord. Last year the court granted my father guardianship of my grandfather and he was moved into a nursing home. Since then he has been nothing but nasty and hostile. They had to take away his room phone because he kept calling 911 and the FBI to report that he had been kidnapped by his despotic son. He has said the most vile and malicious things to my father. Right up until the end he was just as self-centered, thoughtless and intolerant as he was when he was 60 and 40 and 20 years old. And today he died...and a whole family breathes a sigh of relief that it is over and that hopefully the afterlife treats him as he believes he "deserves".

You could also lean into his close bonds to other male role models... "I've been thinking about your question about good parents. I think that Pops and Grandpa (and Uncle?) were, and are, good parents. Some of the things that make me think that are how they X, Y and Z. Those have also been some of the things I try to do to be a good parent." Where X, Y and Z are the exact opposite of some of the things his father has done.

Done

I agree. I think "less said" is good as long as it is taken to mean: Say your brief piece and then let it go unless he brings it up again. I don't think it is good if it is taken to mean: Sweep the truth of the situation under the rug and avoid talking about the very real ramifications of mental illness that the child is experiencing. Acknowledging that his father is mentally ill is not bad mouthing him. It is stating a fact (backed up by his prolonged stay at the hospital and the court ordered supervised visitation). Treating mental illness as something shameful that can't be mentioned lest it insult the person, is reinforcing a very harmful stigma. My kids deal with mental illness everyday. I don't have the luxury of ignoring it or protecting them from the worry that it might happen to them some day. They could very well become mentally ill someday to the point that they too make "bad" decisions. All I can do is model how we balance supporting and loving a mentally ill family member with enforcing boundaries to keep ourselves safe. I just hope they can take comfort in knowing that if they do become mentally ill, that is how we will treat them as well.

If it is true... "Your Dad used to be an amazing parent. I always admired how he X, Y and Zed with you and your brothers. Right now his brain is making it really hard for him to do that. Not because he doesn't want to - I really think he does want to be a good parent to you - but because parts of his brain are too sick right now for him to do that. I really hope, for him, and for you, and for all of us, that his brain heals over time and he can start parenting more like he used to."

I agree with BronzeTurtle. Peter started this school year off with reasonable screen limits (about an hour on weekday, 2-3 on weekends). It did not go well; it caused lying, sleep disruptions, school avoidance, aggression, etc. By the end of September he had lost screen time entirely. I told him that he needed to develop alternative hobbies, and that we would discuss reintroducing screens when he showed me that he could stay busy and productively engaged without screens for at least a month. He spent most of October pouting, and then most of November throwing himself wholeheartedly into D&D. He started playing, drawing, writing, planning and inventing D&D related things. It was great!! At the beginning of December, based on him holding up his end of the bargain, we started allowing very limited screens - none during the week, and 1-2 hours on weekends. The result was instantaneous...instantaneously bad!! For all of October and November he had been sleeping, doing school, staying regulated, etc. Those were good months. It only took two weekends of screens for things to entirely fall apart. He spent every hour of every day fixating on screens...or alternatively lying or sneaking screens. He started being physically and verbally aggressive. He started belligerently refusing to do school work...even subjects that up until the previous week he had enjoyed. He started stealing money and candy from family members. Overall, he became completely unregulated and unraveled. By the third week of December we had once again removed ALL screen time (not counting closely supervised Google docs and online classes). He bounced back pretty quickly, and now we have our kiddo back. Obviously I hope that Peter eventually develops the maturity to self-regulate around screens in a healthy way, but I am also discussing with him parallels to people recovering from alcohol or gambling addiction. There are recovering addicts who will always have to entirely avoid their addiction. Alcoholics who will never be able to hang out at a bar and still resist temptation. And Peter might end up in the category...he might never be able to regulate himself around video games and only ever have the self-control to avoid them entirely. For the time being, I am focusing on helping Peter learn to enjoy non-screen activities. Video game are certainly a fast, easy, reliable source of serotonin, but other activities can provide it as well if he gives them a chance. So I am finding ways to support him through the awkward, uncomfortable beginning stage of hobbies, when he feels uncertain and out of his depth, so he can reach the stage of the learning curve when the hobby start to feel familiar and enjoyable.

My kids have all liked the Fly Guy Presents books, like this one on castles. They have them on a lot of non-fiction topics. We also had Why, Fly Guy?: Answers to Kids' BIG Questions.

My 13 year old cannot recognize his own emotions. His goal is always neutrality - he feels safe and content there. He avoids anything that could provoke any real emotion in him, positive or negative. If he does have an emotion, he often does not even realize it is "happening" to him, much less be able to figure out what emotion it is. So, cause and effect doesn't work for him if the effect is an emotional response. Realistically, it doesn't even work if the effect is an extremal consequence...he just does not have the self-regulation to make himself change his behavior to aim toward or away from an effect.

How much time is he playing on his laptop, and how much free time does he have total? Right now my 13 year old (ASD, anxiety) has no screen time, but according to all metrics he was on the border of screen addiction and it was greatly impacting his sleep, grades, behavior, outlook, etc. But, before we reached the point that we felt we had to take screens away totally (for at least 3 months), we were allowing limited screens with the caveat that he had to "earn" them by doing non-screen activities. An hour of comic book drawing = an hour of screens, etc. I told him the purpose was constructive, not restrictive. I wanted to strengthen his brain pathways for doing "hard" non-screen recreation - activities that required creativity, problem solving, perseverance, cooperation, set up and clean up, etc. So putzing in the lego area biding his time or casually flipping through graphic novels did not count. We began by brainstorming a list of activities that would count: board games, drawing, D&D, biking/sports, outdoor skills, cooking, etc. He could add almost anything to that list as long as 1) it was not on a screen, and 2) he was not just a passive consumer.

In this thread, I wrote extensively about how Lantern works and what I see as the pros and cons. Let me know if you have any other questions. (If you do end up signing up and wanted to list me as a referral so my kids got a discount on their next class, it certainly wouldn't hurt my feelings!! 😄)

Just to clarify, Lantern isn't really an online class. It is more a correspondence class. Once a week you get a lesson emailed to you with an assignment at the end. You have a week to email back your work. The instructors promptly grade and give feedback, and the cycle repeats. The classes are only 8 weeks long, so not a huge commitment. Registration for Lantern's third session is still open, and classes start the week of the 15th.

For what it's worth, we have taken a lot of Lantern courses at all the levels, and have never had any issues like this. Any time I wanted my kids to deviate substantially from the assignment (typically due to their neurodiverse wiring), it just took a quick email, and the instructor would promptly approve whatever changes I proposed. But for small issues, like those you mentioned, I would not have even thought to run anything by them, and none of the Lantern teachers we have had experience with would have quibbled. One good feature of Lantern (which may be as feature of WAH as well) is a detailed grading rubric, so we could focus on the aspects of the grade we were interested in. During some phases with some kiddos, I just didn't care about spelling or grammar. So they would turn in work that was rough around the edges, they would get expected low grades in the mechanics sections of the rubric, but we could just disregard that and instead pay attention to their grade in the Ideas and Content category. One reason we stick with Lantern instead of WAH is the diversity of class options. We really like all the different academic writing, creative writing, and literature options.

I think this mindset seems foreign to me because this pedagogy and these goals are so far from mine. I expect "expertise with negative numbers" to take years, starting with a light introduction when kids are ~5 and slowly growing and solidifying through their study of algebra and beyond. Our local public schools definitely take a "cram it into three weeks" approach, and I see nothing to recommend it. They don't introduce negative numbers at all until 6th grade. In my experience that is about 5 years of missed opportunities when the kids could have been building their mental model through real life experiences. They do put the skills to use right away, but only for a short while, only on a rote algorithmic way, and only at a simple, surface level. They do have a separate unit of "problem solving" each year, but in the rest of the units they progress just as you outlined, and spend almost no time asking challenging questions about the new topic that would force the students to truly understand it. My goal, with all math concepts, it to introduce the topic early and often to the point that when it comes time to formalize it symbolically or algorithmically, the child already has a very intuitive understanding of how and why the numbers work that way. For example, with my 7 year old, just as I have with all of my kids, I very consciously ask questions, discuss problems, and introduce terminology that is preparing her for long division, for multiplying fractions, for finding volumes of solid shapes, etc. At this point it is just very basic conceptual ideas - you could split the M+Ms between your siblings by first splitting the reds, then the oranges, etc; if the recipe needs 1/3 cup oil, how much will we need if we triple it; if lines are measured in cm and areas of squares are measured in cm^2, what might we measure the volume of this box in? - but I firmly believe that this immersion approach will lead to stronger math students in the long run than waiting until they can tackle the whole idea at once and covering it as quickly as possible.