We need to talk about the school bus. In other cultures, people admit that school starts when you get on the bus. In The Netherlands, for example, the kids pedal themselves to school on the bus. Absurd, yes, but the fundamental acknowledgement that the schoolday begins on the bus seems positive to me. Read more
It’s unbelievable to me how slow and stupid school reform is. Our public schools are too large and diverse to solve any problems in a centralized way. We already know that money will not solve problems (we spend more per pupil than tons of countries that have higher test scores). And we already know that success in our current curriculum has no correlation to success in work – for example, Princeton economist Alan Krueger found that having the gumption to apply to Harvard or Princeton is a sign of future success—whether or not you get in doesn’t matter. Read more
The media is constantly reporting that it’s harder for girls to get into college than boys. Because girls do better in high school, and more girls apply to college. So, even though 60% of the bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women, it’s still harder for girls to get into college. Read more
Quora is a fascinating site because good questions are so hard to ask, and Quora is an aggregator of good questions.
In the past I have loved questions like, What does it feel like to have a trophy wife?. Recently, Victoria Kirk sent me the link to the question: What’s the single most unfair advantage? Read more
I was waiting for my son’s dress rehearsal, sitting next to a mom who was talking to the babysitter on the phone. On a Saturday. She said, “Tell Alex he can only have one hour on his DS and after that he should watch a movie or something. I don’t want him doing the DS for too long.” Read more
If you give a parent the choice between having eight hours a day of freedom from their kids, or spending eight hours a day forcing their kids to learn to read and do math at home, no parent will chose the latter. It doesn’t matter that homeschooling isn’t really like that. Non-homeschoolers think it is. So the key is to reframe the choice. Read more
So much of parenting advice is what you should be doing. But the hardest advice to take is what you shouldn’t be doing. Because it is actually more difficult to just sit on your hands and wait than to insert yourself where you think you can make a difference. Here are three areas where inserting yourself will just waste time and cause trouble: Read more