Online courses for homeschoolers
My kids go to a fantastic school called The Socratic Experience. In addition, I work with my kids on what we call “School of dad.” In the spirit of School of dad, I plan to offer five elective courses to Socratic Experience kids from September to May. I am also offering these once-a-week classes for homeschool kids. These classes meet for 90 minutes once a week. There are assignments, but they shouldn’t take more than an hour or two each week. These are not lectures, they are conversations. Kids are encouraged to come prepared!
General information
These Zoom classes are for home-school students age 15+. They begin August 28th. The days and times are proposed - if you want a different day/time, let me know. I can also teach private lessons for those interested (or for younger students). Each class must have at least 15 students and will be limited to around 20. If a group wants one of these courses for their students, I’m happy to discuss how we could make that happen.
Courses begin the week of August 15th and run until mid-December (no courses Thanksgiving week). That’s 15 weeks of courses. Each course costs $450 per child ($30 per class).
These classes are for motivated kids only. It’s not a babysitting service. Kids need to show up prepared to participate. If they don’t, I’ll drop them rather than try to motivate them. That’s better for the class as a whole.
Please note these classes are not accredited. We can set up accreditation through the Socratic Experience, but it will probably double the price. My suggestion is to take the courses for the first year and worry about accreditation if we decide to do more classes next year. I’m also not accredited. Explore this website to learn more about me. Sign up for my newsletter to get more homeschooling recommendations.
For online STEM courses, I highly recommend Brilliant.org.
Here are my five courses, sign-up is at the bottom of the page:
1. Build your personal online brain system
Mondays at 2pm EST
I use Notion all day to organize my thoughts, writing, to-do lists, databases, and more. I use spreadsheets to build models. You can learn more about Notion on my Notion page. In this class, kids will build skills using Notion, Google calendar, and Google sheets.
How to use Notion to do all kinds of amazing things.
Do projects in Notion to get good at building. An example is building a money system, like the one I describe in the third class. Another example is to create a database of every trip each person in the family has ever taken. Another example is a dashboard for running your podcast, or whatever your hobby/passion may be.
This course will also teach spreadsheet basics. We’ll be building calculators, simulators, and models. We’ll be learning to think in models, build models, and evaluate models. We’ll model businesses, populations, factories, projects, math problems, and much more.
We’ll also learn to use Google Calendar to make the most of our time-management and to-do lists. Using a calendar is part of your online brain. We want to integrate the tools and the practices so everything works together.
We will learn:
How to do research.
How to take notes.
How to manage your schedule.
How to prioritize and manage your commitments.
How to get others in your family using Notion and collaborating.
How to run and evaluate scenarios using spreadsheets.
This class is about building systems. Students do not need familiarity with Notion or spreadsheets, but they should be eager to dive into these projects and build. If kids are unmotivated, I will remove them.
2. Future of work to 2060
Tuesdays at noon EST
In this class we will research, learn, and create a vision for how work will change over the next 35 years - the years that will form the majority of most graduates’ careers. The goal is not to help students choose a career but rather understand the work environment as it evolves. Over the nine months of this class, we will explore the main themes of change - in parallel, not in series:
Medical advancement
Energy
Economics
Education
Food production
War, conflict, and world order
Technology
Demographics
Lifespan
Urbanization
Transportation
Government and regulation
Today’s graduates will live through a unique period in human history - a brief few decades when humans will interact with machines and machines will interact with humans. After that, humans will forever live in a world of machine-to-machine communication and work. The world’s economic systems will be designed around machines first, humans second. During this transition period, our children will make their mark on the world.
The driving force of this class is the concept that it’s amazing how little changes in one year, but it’s unbelievable how much changes in ten years. The world 30 years from now has no relation to the world 30 years ago — because of exponential growth, these two time periods are not comparable.
We’ll be making assumptions and building a model of how the future might play out. Think of it like setting each of those areas on a dial and trying to project how the dials will turn as the next 35 years unfold. Each person will build his/her own model (they may be different, based on different assumptions). We’ll be discussing scenarios, likely outcomes, uncertainties, and what large or small things could have big effects. We won’t, for example, talk about space travel, but we will learn how transportation or manufacturing will change, the impact of self-driving cars, drones, flying taxis, lab-grown food, 3d printing, gene editing, etc. We’ll be looking for inflection points and destabilizing factors. We won’t talk much about AI alignment, but we will talk about the technology singularity and how that will impact jobs. How agile will people have to be to navigate the most critical years of your career? How will people learn and change? Again, this isn’t to help students choose what they want to do; it’s to help students understand what the playing field will look like. This model is a tool they will later use to craft their careers.
The model will start in Notion but probably end up on a spreadsheet. Most of the value of this course is not in the model but in the conversations and presentations students make.
We’ll spend the first two weeks looking back 30 years at what has changed. Then we’ll use Notion to create a knowledge system that lets each student explore all the themes, do research, and contribute to the group discussion. Kids will break into groups to do research and create presentations. I am big on presentations! Kids will make presentations.
This class is aimed at high-school students.
Resources include research papers, books, blogs, videos, and more. It’s based on a talk I gave 4 years ago:
3. Thinking in bets
In this class, we’ll learn to use a money system to help kids perform better around the house, use betting to predict the future, settle differences, and learn about the world. I’ll create a Notion betting system, and we’ll use Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets, as a textbook. We’ll be building three systems, all in Notion:
A home money system that helps parents and kids do what needs to be done at home and live together more peacefully. It will help if Parents are involved in this part, because they will be setting the rules and giving out the money. Before you continue, read my previous post on how a home money system works.
A peer-to-peer betting system that lets kids bet on anything they like. This is for siblings and also for kids in the class. It will help kids learn to resolve differences with betting, rather than arguments.
A prediction market, similar to Metaculus, that lets kids bet on future events.
We will discuss and explore why these things work, how to use them, and how to apply game mechanics to life in general. More advanced students may learn about Futarchy and Henry George.
Mostly, we’ll be learning how to think in bets, how to use odds to calculate the future. There will be many exercises, especially counter-intuitive examples like the Monty Hall problem, Bayesian reasoning, and others.
4. Humans and the natural world
This class looks at common misconceptions people and journalists have about the natural world. Our goal is to create an evidence-based view of how humans and nature coexist — what problems there are, what the causes might be, and what solutions may work. This is not an easy class. Most textbooks and news media are wrong about most of these concepts. We will look for ourselves and ask:
What does the word “sustainable” mean?
Does recycling work?
How much plastic is really in the oceans? Is it a problem?
Are there too many people?
Are we taking too much sand?
Are we polluting rivers?
What about air pollution?
What about pesticides?
What are the tradeoffs with farming and nature? What is the future of farming?
Which fisheries are in a “race to the bottom” and which are in equilibrium?
Are electric vehicles good for the environment?
What is climate change? What effect do humans have on the climate?
How can renewable energy help?
What is environmental stewardship? Is capitalism good or bad for the environment?
This is a very challenging class with a lot of data, charts, and graphs. There are many misconceptions. Parents are welcome to pay for and take this class as well! It’s at a high school level if kids are already familiar with the scientific method and have had a reasonable amount of training in science and critical thinking. Much of it is based on my weekly blog and research on climate science. My goal is not to lecture students but to ask hard questions, lead research and discussions, and let them draw their own conclusions.
5. Virtual Kilimanjaro climb
This spring, I tried to find families who would like to take off the month of February 2024 and go climb Mt Kilimanjaro, followed by a 2-week safari in Kenya and Uganda. The goal was to get families to bond over a difficult challenge, spend months preparing, and get the payoff by spending a month on the road. You can read the itenerary and goals of the trip on my travel page.
Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to find enough families.
So I thought - why don’t we do a virtual trip instead? Why don’t we find families who want to do everything to prepare for a trip to Africa, including getting in shape to hike to the top of Kilimanjaro, and have weekly meetings to research, discuss, and teach what we’ve learned about the animals, ecosystems, and societies in East Africa? It’s all the benefit of travel therapy without the expense. So here’s the deal:
This is the class we would have started in September anyway. We’re going to learn about the mountain, the gear, the animals, ecosystems, and cultures of East Africa. Kids will do research, break into groups, and make presentations. We’re also going to enroll parents to join us, so they also learn.
And everyone will get in shape to climb the mountain. That means 15-20 miles a week starting in the first week of September. Everyone will have an exercise log. Everyone will do the miles. Plus we’ll work on actual hiking and vertical feet wherever you live or have access to. We’ll even have some night hikes and a few summit-day exercises, where we get up at 1am and hike all night until dawn. We’ll do some cold-weather hiking in December and January. Hey - do you want to climb Kilimanjaro or not?
Finally, we get to the big event. All month of February 2024 we will walk, run, do stairs, and hike our way into the record books. Whichever family gets in the most miles and vertical feet will be our winner and will get a special prize. Any family that climbs at least 19,341 vertical feet in February will get a prize — that’s the height of Mt Kilimanjaro. Even families in Florida will be able to compete, since it’s more about miles than vertical.
This is for families with teens only. Children must be 12+. You only pay for the number of children in the class, but at least one parent must commit to doing the physical work.
Sign up
Use the form below to sign up for any of these classes. I’ll get back to you and let you know if the class has enough people. Classes cost $450 per child for the 15 weeks of the first quarter and will be priced similarly next year. Payment by credit card or PayPal. We need a minimum of 15 kids for any class to start (or a group that pays the same amount). This form is not a commitment. I assume some of these classes won’t meet the minimum, so please check off any classes you’d be willing to pay for, and I’ll get back to you once I have some idea which will fill.