"Life... is a curious thing."
As a former product of home-schooling, let me hasten to say that I have great respect for home-schooling parents. That said, however, I still found this tongue-in-cheek cartoon to be one of the funniest I’ve read in a month. Here’s today’s “helpful” tip for all you home-schoolers out there. Enjoy! Read more »
A Finnish Education This fascinating article, recently published by the Smithsonian, is a very thought-provoking look at the Finnish system of education... Read more »
In case you wanted to know the (very interesting) history behind a recently-disappeared letter of our English alphabet, dictionary.com just published a brief obituary of it. Read more »
Would somebody please tell me I fell asleep and woke up in the wrong country? You know, one of those places where females are lucky to learn how to spell their name, let alone learn anything else in written or traditional academic form? Sadly, no. I didn’t wake up in the wrong country after all. Excuse me for thinking so, however, as J.C. Penney seems to be espousing values for elementary-age and tween girls that would cause them to fit in really, really well in such a place. Take a look at the horrid tee below that J.C. Penney described [...] Read more »
I adore Wikipedia. Let me just say that for those of us who weren’t blessed with a photographic memory for every single fact, detail, and situation we have ever encountered or will ever encounter in our life’s sojourn here, Wikipedia exists as a most beautiful back-up. Can’t remember the capital city of India? Check. Can’t seem to find much source material on a much-maligned, scarcely-footnoted female of the early alcohol temperance movement in the United States? Check. Don’t have housing the size of a 4-story library to house all the knowledge (aka, books) you are convinced you need access to? [...] Read more »
I love Derek Sivers’ informative video talk on “Why You Need to Fail.” (Thanks to Daniel S. for first drawing my attention to it.) As a teacher, I have long observed that children need the freedom to try, try, and try again educationally—with no fear of failing or not “getting it right.” But I have also observed that the adult world of Washington, D.C. has a horror of failure that appears more paralyzing than any other place I’ve ever lived or taught. I’ve been genuinely curious, then, how the paramount importance placed on image and finished result can peacefully co-exist [...] Read more »
With the upcoming school year right around the corner, I ran across this helpful article for parents last week titled “Does My Kid Have ADHD?” This article does a good job of pointing out some of the basic factors that might point to a possibility of ADHD. And I appreciate that the author stresses that all children will engage in some of these behaviors on occasion or even often. However, children with ADHD will usually engage in most of the behaviors most of the time. As a classroom teacher, it’s usually pretty easy to see within just a couple weeks [...] Read more »
Thanks to Kurt Anders Richardson, a former professor of mine, for drawing my attention to this article. As a master’s degree graduate in the humanities myself (religion), I concur with everything this writer says and much more besides. But the problems William Pannapacker addresses aren’t only in the humanities departments in academe—most of these issues are rampant across all disciplines in the entire U.S. university system. We can only hope that solutions will be found in time for the next generation, and awareness is the first step. You can find the Slate article here. Read more »
Donald Miller, a favorite author and blogger, recently posted about a disappointing Christmas Eve church service he experienced last year. His post spoke of religious leaders (in this case the church’s pastor and his spouse) who seemed sincere and kind, but who together presented a “sermon” that was greatly simplified, reducing the evening’s Christmas message into questions such as, “God sent the Wise Men a star. To each one of us He sends a star. Could this star be the person who brought you to church this evening?” Uh-oh. Miller, a Christian himself, questions the willingness of so many Christians [...] Read more »
I have been troubled for a long time now by the lopsided percentages of female teachers in comparison to male teachers across every age group of a child’s formal schooling experience in America. It has also been a puzzle to me that this has not seemed to bother most people—public, private, charter, or parochial adherents. If we had any other bureaucracy in America that utilized only male supervisors (93%) to oversee all boys and girls together for most of their day, every day, for the vast majority of 13 years, I know we would have heard about it by now. [...] Read more »
I am happy for you that you are fully at home in your sexuality. Really, I am. But I didn’t come here to get a free refresher course in Human Sexuality 101. You see, I came here to sit down in the corner of the craft aisle and enter that rare state of nirvana occasioned by the knitting, crochet, sewing, and quilting tomes scattered all around me while I bliss out in museum-quality silence. It is not my fault that the universe conspired against me on this one and that the powers-that-be at B & N chose to abut the [...] Read more »
Recently I was abruptly transported in a split second back to my childhood—and the seven years I spent trying not to think about how I, along with my seven siblings, could be taken away from my parents at any time and placed in foster homes. I flashed back to how we couldn’t answer the phone during particular times of day for years at a time. I remembered how we were not to directly respond to any strangers’ questions about where we went to school during the years I was elementary-age. I remembered the school year I was 12, when a [...] Read more »
I have often observed through the years that families with lots of children or with widely-spaced children (where the older children were actively involved in the care and nurture of their younger siblings) often seemed to produce children with higher-than-average empathy skills. This was only anecdotal observation on my part, so you can imagine my surprise when the New York Times recently published an absolutely fascinating article about the innate power babies have to teach empathy to children. A wonderful educator out of Canada took this concept into the school classroom, formally implementing the interaction of children with a baby [...] Read more »
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