Sally Cole

Most leisure publications cover expensive travel, which has limited value to me because I love my hometown and don't travel much. So, I'm using Grok Bot to produce an online publication all about the leisure you can pursue without traveling. See it at leisurestacking.com and follow @leisureeditor to keep up on new articles.

Dear @WithOdyssey_ and @DanielM_Warner, Please fix the search feature in the Texas Education Freedom Accounts marketplace. It can’t currently put the most popular book for teaching reading on a page one result using an exact title.

The biggest cost of homeschooling is the absence of one parent's income, not the materials you need to buy. Homes with a stay-at-home parent should strongly consider homeschooling since they have already made the main financial sacrifice.

I feed my Grok Bot topics my kids struggle with to make them helpful printables. Here's the prompt I'm using for my middle schooler. "Attached are problems and topics my middle schooler is struggling with. Make a one-page printable for each. Make the top two thirds the lesson, written as explicit direct instruction. Make the bottom third a single practice problem. Put the answer at the very bottom of the page, since I'll fold it under before I give it to my child. Keep the design minimal, and match how the curriculum the problems come from teaches the topic." My hypothesis is that he doesn't need more work to do. Instead, he needs documented, clear, direct explanations of the topics he's scored low on in a format that we can review together.

I had the naive assumption that publicly funded Texas schools hired only American citizens. Boy, was I wrong!

The education unlock: pretest -> micro lessons and practice -> mastery test This should work with phonics instruction. I published the tests you'll need here: storyhouracademy.org/tests

Here's a big unlock in education. A student takes a pretest, a parent feeds the wrong answers into AI, AI builds micro lessons and practice questions for what was missed, the student uses the new study materials, and then the student retakes the test. Repeat to mastery. Here's the prompt to use: "I'm attaching questions my [grade]-grader missed (or a list of skills they're struggling with). For each one: 1. Figure out the skill being tested and why my child likely got it wrong. 2. Make a printable 2-page worksheet: - Top half of page 1: a short, kid-friendly lesson with one example that fixes that mistake. - The rest: new practice problems (don't copy the test), easy to harder. - Bottom right of page 2: a small dot-to-dot as a fun reward. 3. Make a separate answer key. Use big print, lots of writing space, soft colors, and a blank Name line."

Hey @WithOdyssey_ and @txcomptroller. Did you know the TEFA marketplace search feature barely works? Full write up below. Please fix this for Texan homeschooling families.