All Entries in the "Children" Category

Things I Have Learned From Having A Child With Special Needs

Let me start by telling you a bit about myself before I had my daughter. I was your classic, Type-A overachiever who desperately wanted everyone around her to be pleased with her at all times. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I went to law school to make other people happy. Not the brightest idea, to [...]

Can You Imagine An Education System That Is Academically Rigorous While Emotionally And Socially Supportive? Susan Kaiser Greenland

Our education system is in crisis. A crisis that is so severe it’s tough to imagine a way out. Just ask anyone working in the trenches and they’ll tell you how difficult it is to picture a system of education that is academically rigorous while emotionally and socially supportive. But one thing we know for sure, if that’s the educational system that we dream of, we won’t be able to create it unless we can envision it first.

Education’s Emphasis on Delivery Rather than Teaching

Taking us back to consider the big question - “what is education for?” - may seem like an academic frippery compared to the day-to-day hard questions about the curriculum and testing.

LAUSD needs a pit bull PTA mom - Sandra Tsing Loh

The LA Times op-ed page this week rocks with yesterday’s piece on MOCA by Heather Dundas and today’s on PTA moms by Sandra Tsing Loh.

PTA moms are the very opposite of the $500,000-golden-parachute bureaucrats Brewer has come to represent. PTA moms draw no salary. We work nights, weekends, holidays. We bring our kids’ schools new resources every day — whatever we can load into our minivans. (Binders, colored pencils, toilet paper, snacks, basketball hoops and musical instruments are but some of the items I’ve seen moms deliver.) We know not just how to make a dollar stretch but how to make no dollars stretch. (Look how handy we are with scrip, Chuck E. Cheese fundraisers, Vons give-back-to-school cards.) So thrifty are we, it shocks us when our snickerdoodle-baking world meets the LAUSD money-hosing world.

The candidates’ positions on education

This morning’s edition of Education week outlines John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s positions with respect to education. The candidates views on critical policy issues differ significantly.

Click HERE for a Voter’s Guide that digests McCain and Obama’s positions on No Child Left Behind, Teacher Quality, School Choice, Early Childcare and Education, and Higher Education.

Click HERE for a running TWITTER feed on Obama and McCain’s positions on education.

Multitasking May Be Muddling Our Brains

From a series on NPR’s morning edition about multitasking:

Multitasking causes a kind of brownout in the brain. Meyer says all the lights go dim because there just isn’t enough power to go around. So, the brain starts shutting things down — things like neural connections to important information.

Building Emotional Intelligence and Fostering Resilience in Children — Linda Lantieri

What are some of your hopes for the important children in your life? Whether they will be successful at realizing those hopes is dependent on whether we, the adults in their lives, have equipped them with the inner strength they will need to approach their day-to-day challenges as well as the big challenges life may throw them.

Why can’t all children have what we do? Trudy Goodman

I had seen raggedy five year olds taking care of skinny babies and blind babies and begging children crippled from polio and moms with TB and, and, and…

Just the facts m’am . . . . .

• By 12th grade, our children score lower on math and science tests than most other kids in the world.
• We now have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation.
• Six million students are reading below their grade level.

The New Elitism In Education Reform - Susan Kaiser Greenland

Obama again offered a nuanced approach. . . for those watching education he did something very interesting. He took the national stage to support a specific philosophy of learning – an integrative curriculum.

When you raise children . . . Amy Spies

As I watch my 20 year old daughter on the cusp, leaping off into her adulthood—I find myself uncharacteristically tongue-tied when the time comes to respond to her occasional questions about how she should navigate her future

Teach your children well: they’ll be gone before you know it. Sue Smalley

At 53, I play the game of life from an ‘infinite’ perspective, where the only goal is to keep the game going and engage as many players as possible.

To Vaccinate or Not Vaccinate? That’s Not the Question - Susan Kaiser Greenland

It is downright terrifying to acknowledge that we do not know everything there is to know about the interrelationship between toxins, environment, vaccines and autism. . .

Women Rule, Even at Harvard - Amy Spies

President Faust could talk the Type A achievement/career talk but also walk the take charge, multi-tasking, nurturing, administrative, overseeing walk. . .

Mindfulness, Mothering, Politics and Me - Susan Kaiser Greenland

I stopped blogging a few years back . . . but, after watching the Democratic debate in Ohio, I realized there were still some things I would like to say.