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Quidditch as Self-Directed Sports Education
My daughter, who currently goes by the name Hermione Granger, has brought Harry Potter fandom to a fever pitch in our house. While reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to her, I was struck by how foreign many of the underlying concepts of quidditch at Hogwarts felt to me. If you haven’t engaged…
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On Watching Our Daughter Teach Herself to Read
One of the hardest mental hurdles in self-directed education is the idea that you don’t sit down with the purpose of teaching your kids to read– not unless they explicitly ask for it. You don’t require daily reading lessons, and you never ask the question, “Is my child reading at grade level yet?” Of course…
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Finding Yourself vs Creating Yourself
There’s a moment in Scorcese’s Bob Dylan docu-fantasy for Netflix, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, where Bob Dylan is asked about the idea of “finding yourself”. His answer, excerpted below, is probably the most insightful moment of the film, and if the film were an essay, would stand as its thesis statement. Life…
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How to send a support request to your developer
Whenever you see issues that look out of date from what you expect the website to look like, the first step is to make sure you’re actually seeing the most recent version of the webpage. Sometimes our browser loads portions of the website from a local ‘cache’ or locally stored version. Make sure you’re getting…
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Role Play
We’re outside in a queue, my family and I, about twenty people ahead of us, along an ancient rod-iron fence protecting one of those perfectly manicured Disneyland garden beds. Behind us come the occasional screams from the Matterhorn, a perfunctory sound that’s been added to my memory after the fact, like a laugh track on…
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Finding the Best vs Making the Best of It
It’s a typical scene, a husband and wife trying to choose a restaurant for dinner. I don’t remember what it was like before the smartphone. I assume my wife and I would’ve gone out with spears and stalked the nearest wooly mammoth. I can’t remember. These days it’s a little more exhausting. The paradox of…
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Insidious Nature of Push Notifications
The train is the common metaphor for the concept of thought- a speeding, shimmering train of thought that barrels through your mind day and night. And of course, because it’s my voice that sings this inner dialogue, I must be driving the train. Consistent meditation begins to alter your perception of how thought exists, what…
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The Anxiety of an Open Day
There is an immense comfort in being buried under a pile of work, completely smothered by a warm blanket of tasks to accomplish. Some latent desire for authoritarianism makes me want to point to my calendar and see it all spelled out- here’s sixteen hours of chores that people need from me. Things people need…
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