Custom Schooling Workshop in San Francisco
Everyone is welcome to the first workshop on “custom schooling“, an approach to schooling with class sizes from 1 to 4 that is surprisingly affordable, manageable, effective, and fun. Families and teachers that are doing this will discuss their experiences, but the emphasis will be on public Q&A.
Who might be interested? Families and kids that might want to try this, teachers and school administrators, and, well, just about anyone who is interested in new ideas in education. We are hoping about 40 people will come, but have room for more.
6-8:30pm Wednesday, January 11, 2012:
reception and tour at 6 then presentations and discussion at 6:30.
Presented by the Internet Archive and ISKME.org
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, SF CA (map) 415-561-6767
Donation: 5 bucks or 5 books, none for under those under 20
Presentations will available via video for free on the Internet Archive a few days after the event.
Sounds fun, but the commute’s a bit much for me! I’ll look for the video.
I like your Custom Schooling article, Brewster! I’m in the first year of homeschooling my 7 y.o. son, and I’m finding the same thing you are–that teaching one-to-one or one-to-few using a ~Socratic method is a great way to *quickly* notice and remedy incomplete understanding. (By the way, you are an alum of my living group in college, and I can tell you that two years into my Electrical Engineering major in college, I somehow still didn’t know what “phase” was–I thought it had no physical meaning because it always hung around with the imaginary number j. One-on-one or one-on-few ~Socratic teaching would have not have permitted that crazy gap in my knowledge to persist for years!) Anyhow, the rest of your article is awesome, too. It’s amazing to see that a small class size, in theory, should be achievable. (I didn’t read that part carefully enough to check your numbers, though.)
It is working very well for our kid– he is loving it. We are getting much more done and he is loving it.
Dont know how far it an go, but seems like a direction that would work for others.
It is somewhere in between homeschool and private school.
-brewster
Mr. Kahle,
I hope to make it there, and also to your event this Wednesday at Fort Mason. I would also love to interview you about your new initiative for the magazine FINE BOOKS AND COLLECTIONS—I have the assignment in hand. As you can imagine, attempting to get one of every extant book is something of great interest to our readers. I’ve tried to contact you via a couple of public email addresses to no avail, but I’m sure you receive a massive amount of email.
Let me know what you think.
Nick Mamatas