I am at my favorite dance recital ever. There are 260 kids, and there are parents backstage all day to keep everything organized. I am in the boys room, where they all have a DS, and many have something else as well for video games. Read more
Some of my favorite statistics come from the 70-year Harvard study about what makes people happy. The first thing they found out is that going to Harvard has no bearing on whether someone is happy. Another conclusion the research supports is that kids who have warm relationships with their mother make more money. And kids who have close relationships with their father have less anxiety. Read more
In Florida, an 18-year-old girl named Kaitlyn Hunt engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. The parents of the younger girl are pressing charges of statutory rape. Hunt received an offer of a plea bargain that would have made her essentially unable to be with her sisters, who are underage. So she is fighting the case, and risking a 15-year prison sentence. Read more
I didn’t grow up on a farm. And it’s striking to me how much the seasons mark the passage of time.
This makes me think about how I marked the passage of time when I lived in the city and one of the first things that comes to mind is school graduation. It’s the end of a fall-winter progression. It’s the end of a cycle. And everyone graduates. Not for doing anything great. Just because. Read more
The end of the school year is recital time for cello kids, which means that we can’t just go to Chicago twice a week for cello lessons because my younger son has all different kinds of recitals throughout the month; orchestra recital and chamber music recital and individual recitals and the list goes on. So we ended up spending four days in a row in a hotel. Read more
My son outgrew his violin. It’s always a bittersweet time when we move up a size in violins. I saved his first violin. The whole thing is the size of an adult hand. At the time, it looked just right for him and it didn’t strike me as particularly small, but the teacher told me, “Save this one. It will be really precious to you later.” Read more
Eric Anderman, professor at education psychology at Ohio University, has studied cheating for decades, and he says that 85 percent of students admit to cheating. (The number is probably higher since some do it but don’t admit it.) Harvard recently had to have a public discussion about campus cheating, and Stuyvesant, a New York City magnet school that’s harder to get into than Harvard, had an incredibly organized cheating system that rivals best practices for productivity types in Fortune 500 organizations.
It’s completely ridiculous that schools are so uptight about cheating because what schools call cheating is what people in the work world call effective workplace behavior. For example:
All forced education is bad for kids because it tells them that they’re too stupid to pick out what they’re interested in, and too dull to depend on their curiosity.
But there’s a unique problem with forcing kids to go to gym class. It ruins kids’ self‑esteem in different ways than other types of forced education. Here are four ways: Read more
The conventional wisdom about the homeschooling community is that it’s all crazy right‑wing Christian fundamentalists. The truth is that lots of homeschool parents are just like you. They’re smart, curious, concerned about their kids, but also concerned that they don’t want their life to go to hell while they’re focusing on their kids.
Here are five trends among homeschooling parents that tell me I’m in the right place. Read more