Public schools in the US are a living history lesson about social class. Grouping by age teaches kids to be sorted according to birth. Sounding bells teaches kids to become factory workers. Our high school math curricula teaches kids how to win the Cold War.
There’s an article in the New York Times about the relentlessness of modern parenting. Americans love hearing about how hard parenting is because we all know it’s over the top. This article had some good statistics, though. For example, mothers today who work outside the home spend as much time parenting as stay-at-home mothers in […]
My older son has ADD and OCD and if I leave him alone for more than 20 minutes he is likely to start staering into space. Or doing one of his million OCDism that he probably wouldn’t want me to write about even though I think his best bet at getting into college is doing […]
I get hopeful every time I see people pushing back on schools. I think schools have way too much power in our society and I’m shocked by how many parents put up with it. And right now the group of parents pushing back the hardest are football parents.
My new friend Amelia sounds like swift-footed Achilles or bright-eyed Athena or sensible Telemachus. I wonder how many of you recognize those epithets from the Odyssey.
I started unschooling when my younger son was 5 years old. I did not teach him math or reading. This is because my friend who is a teacher in New York City public schools, told me that everyone in the school system knows that you don’t have to teach most kids to read — they […]
When I was in high school I went to debate camp every summer. I distinctly remember thinking, when I arrived at debate camp at Bates College in Maine: wow, these kids are rich. They were from private school. I had never hung out with kids from private school. They were different. They had swagger.
Yesterday women all over the US did a walk out to support Kavanaugh’s accusers.There are pictures of men and women getting arrested for protesting in the Capitol. As women are chanting on the steps of the Capitol they are telling the press they want Christine Blasey Ford to know that if the Senate won’t keep […]
There’s a piece in Time magazine about how teachers are in a pay crisis. Most of the teachers in the article say they can’t make ends meet with their teaching job.
In high school, I took French and German, and in college I took Hebrew. I spent four months in Israel studying Hebrew and three months in France learning ten french words for chicken coop. So I’m coming to this conversation with a bias in favor of learning a second language.