Why I’m a Public-School Teacher but a Private-School Parent. Last week, I observed a high-school English class on a campus without bells. The school didn’t need them: Every student showed up for class promptly, and they remained attentive until the last minute—without packing their books early or lining up at the door. San Luis Obispo Classical Academy (SLOCA) is a private school in Central California that promotes "personal character" and "love of learning," and the tangible difference between this environment and that at the public high school in the area was stunning to me—even though I'm a veteran public-school teacher. And even though my own daughter is in her second year of preschool at SLOCA. I’ve also spent the last four decades exclusively at public schools—either attending them, coaching at them, or teaching at them. I have dedicated my life to them, as have all of my good friends. I even superficially loathe the local Catholic school for its elitist attitudes and alleged recruiting techniques.
I was once one of those students. Técnicas para dormir a un bebé. Barcelona. (Redacción).- ¿Por qué llora? ¿Habrá comido suficiente? ¿Lo hago bien? ¿Qué le pasa? Muchas son las técnicas usadas para tratar que un bebé se duerma, algunas de ellas muy ingeniosas, ayudando así a los primerizos a que un recién nacido deje de llorar y descanse. Pese a que, en cuanto a la paternidad, las ideas preconcebidas o las teorías no son nunca universales, probar diferentes maneras para lograr dormir a un hijo puede ayudar a más de uno. Alguno de los métodos parecen absurdos, otros ridículos y otros hasta perturbadores, pero parece que a los padres que los han colgado a la red les ha funcionado.
El método Oompa Loompa El método del pañuelo El método de la magia en las manos El método del lobo aullando El método del secador de pelo El método del sonido relajante constante. Baby Geniuses: How Surprises Help Infants Learn — The Atlantic. Health A new study explores how 11-month-olds expand their knowledge by playing with unpredictable objects. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > When babies encounter a new object, their method of making its acquaintance tends to involve banging it against the nearest hard surface or shoving as much of it in their mouths as possible.
While this is slightly less adorable when the object in question is, say, a brand-new iPhone, adults can take solace in the fact that it might mean the kid is learning something new. According to a study published Thursday in Science, babies learn by being surprised by the objects around them. For this totally cute research endeavor, scientists showed a group of 11-month-olds a series of objects behaving in surprising and predictable ways.
(Awwwww.) "Our research suggests that infants use what they already know about the world to form predictions. Should You Bring Your Unborn Baby to Work? Last year, as my wife and I prepared for the arrival of our second child, I began to worry. My wife is a mid-level manager at an advertising agency with offices around the world. She heads a team, and she’s ferociously dedicated to her work—which translated, late in her pregnancy, to a couple of 80-hour weeks and chronic sleep deprivation. When she came home from work at 2 a.m. for the second time in as many weeks, I started to fear that her grueling schedule might affect her health, and that of our unborn son.
As a science journalist, I’ve become familiar with a burgeoning area of research called the fetal origins of disease. My wife’s salary keeps the lights on and a roof over our heads, and funds our 3-year-old daughter’s adventures in preschool. I knew that my wife wouldn’t take well to a conversation about her working too much. So what did I do when she came home at two in the morning? Today, some 70 percent of mothers work outside the home. What was I to think? ‘Time-Outs’ Are Hurting Your Child. The Problem With History Classes — The Atlantic. Before the release of Selma, I wonder how many people ever reflected on President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s attitude toward the 1965 marches in Selma. I wonder if anybody thought that conventional wisdom afforded him either too much or too little credit for the Voting Rights Act. I imagine that Johnson’s legacy was not on the average American’s radar until Selma ripped it into the public consciousness. The movie compelled many Americans to reconsider their perceptions of Johnson. The curators of his legacy lambasted the film for portraying the 35th president as a prickly antagonist to Martin Luther King Jr., asserting that the film unfairly reduces Johnson to an irascible politician who was forced by King into advancing the Voting Rights Act. How can subjects such as this remain dormant for long periods of time, only to be awakened by a critically acclaimed film? These partisans have not been hiding; they are only drawn into the public realm when fear is evoked. When I took AP U.S. ¿Hay que obligar a los niños a besar a desconocidos?
Ana Hanssen caminaba con su hija de 3 años por Miami cuando se encontró con una amiga acompañada por un grupo de mujeres a las que no conocía. Una de ellas agarró la mano de su "chiquita", como ella dice, y le pidió un beso. La niña se negó aunque la amiga de Hanssen intentó forzar la situación hasta que la madre intervino: "Lo siento, pero ella no da besos a personas que no conoce". El grupo se quedó asombrado y ella decidió compartir esta situación en un blog en la plataforma babycenter especializada en temas sobre la maternidad. Desde el pasado 27 de febrero más de 600.000 personas lo han compartido en Facebook, por el momento. Lo primero que hizo Hanssen, como sus lectores, fue plantearse qué había sucedido.
Tanto Hanssen como su colega rechazan esa idea que aparece en tantos comentarios a su post: "No estamos convirtiendo a nuestros hijos en personas ariscas, de hecho la mía es muy cariñosa y provengo de un país donde se saluda con un beso", apunta la periodista colombiana. Let's Talk About Sex—in English Class. High school educators often get in trouble for teaching "promiscuous" literature, but conversations about these texts come with lifelong lessons about relationships and attraction.
I imagine that many parents of teenagers may envision their kids’ school classrooms as refuges from the hormones that hurtle through the hallways outside. Students may watch racy movies, enjoy soft-porn music videos, and post revealing photos on Instagram, but for the time he or she has their attention, the teacher acts as the surrogate guardian of virtue. Parents may balk at the prospect of their 16-year-olds, seemingly only a few years removed from Legos and stuffed animals, talking about relationships, abuse, and body image with a mysterious adult who shook their hand at Back to School Night.
The classroom should be one place where teenagers are forced to have something besides sex on the brain. Yet, these books, despite their fantastical elements, represent reality. High school students have sex lives. City versus country childhoods. Our local playground is a bit like Disneyland. From the curved metal slide that vomits out excited preschoolers every 20 seconds, to the tunnel, the Saharan sandpit, the fountain and the zip wire, there is everything a child could want. Which is good, because we go there almost every day. After all, what else can you do with small children in central London?
There are endless birthday parties, of course, playdates, the odd foray to the Science Museum. But what you really do, almost every interminable, occasionally transcendent, day, is go to the swings. And sometimes, as I wheel the empty Bugaboo around after my children, loaded down with scooter, sippy cups and emergency rice cakes, I reflect on just how different their childhood is going to be to mine. Growing up in Hackney, east London, Isobel, four, and Felix, 17 months, spend their lives being ferried around – in car seats and expensive buggies. It was the fresh-air-and-pink-cheeks childhood that we all dream of our children having. A CUP OF JO: Motherhood Monday: Home as a haven. Oh, these little boys.
Be still my heart. One of the most heartwrenching parts of motherhood, I've come to realize this fall, is watching your child go to school. With other kids. Who will be sweet sometimes, tease sometimes, play nicely sometimes, hurt feelings sometimes. How hard to think that all those little ones will feel lonely or left out or embarrassed or sad sometimes. I know those are good emotions, too (we're striving for wholeness, right?) But maybe not for him. Toby has had a somewhat tough time adjusting to a new school with new kids, many of whom have known each other for years. Well, as usual, the brilliant Jenny Rosenstrach must have read my mind because she recently wrote a Real Simple essay about her seventh-grade daughter, who was having a tricky time with some school friendships. She told me what I already knew: I’d have to sit this one out, as well as the next one and the one after that and the one after that, too.
P.S. Woman Posts Heartwarming Letter Before Abortion: "I Love You, Little Thing, and I Wish the Circumstances Were Different" A woman preparing for an abortion next Friday chose to say goodbye to her "little life I won't get to meet" via this open letter posted on Reddit [via Jezebel]. Little Thing:I can feel you in there. I've got twice the appetite and half the energy. It breaks my heart that I don't feel the enchantment that I'm supposed to feel. I am both sorry and not sorry.I am sorry that this is goodbye.
I'm sad that I'll never get to meet you. You could have your father's eyes and my nose and we could make our own traditions, be a family. But, Little Thing, we will meet again. People who are pro-life often accuse women who choose to have abortions of being emotionless robots who have not given any thought to the decision they are making (something anyone with half a brain knows that is untrue). There’s Now a Sequel to Go the Fuck to Sleep -- Science of Us. Adam Mansbach, the author of Go the Fuck to Sleep, apparently has strong feelings about another aspect of parenting besides bedtime: dinnertime. In a sort of sequel to the 2011 best seller beloved by all the cool parents you know, Mansbach's new book is titled You Have to Fucking Eat, and it's out next month. Maybe even more so than sleeping, the mealtime battleground can be especially incomprehensible to parents like Mansbach, who describes himself as a lifelong "highly enthusiastic" eater.
“My parents would probably say it was the only thing I did willingly as a child,” he told Science of Us. Hence, the need to express one's frustration in expletives. Here's a preview from the new book, with illustrations by Owen Brozman. (Click the image to expand.) My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me - Karl Taro Greenfeld. What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week My daughter has the misfortune of living through a period of peak homework. It turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more.
“It’s a response to this whole globalized, competitive process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming Homework. In the U.S., or at least in the schools my daughters have attended, there has been no sign of teachers’ letting up on homework. I’m not interested in No Child Left Behind. He disagreed, saying the teacher felt threatened. Yet something did change. Students Aren't Getting Enough Sleep—School Starts Too Early. As the lazy days of summer give way to the painful reality of pre-dawn alarms, many kids are beginning their descent into chronic school-year sleep deprivation. The median school start time in this country is 8 a.m. But this fall, some schools, including a handful of elementary schools in New York City, will ring their first bell up to 40 minutes earlier than they did last year in order to accommodate curricular demands.
These early school start times result in sleepy kids and frustrated parents. But, as of Monday, those kids and parents have the formidable weight of the American Academy of Pediatrics on their side. The organization released a new policy statement saying that “insufficient sleep in adolescents [is] an important public health issue that significantly affects the health and safety, as well as the academic success, of our nation’s middle and high school students.” According to the Academy, the solution is to delay school start times. Pretending to Understand What Babies Say Can Make Them Smarter.
New research suggests it’s how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. A few weeks ago, I was eating lunch with my family at a pancake house when a small blond head popped over the top of the booth next to ours. Somewhere in the ballpark of a year old, the boy said something unintelligible—maybe baby babbling, maybe real words muffled by pancake—and gave a high-pitched giggle. He waved a tiny-syrup smeared arm in my direction. “He’s such a flirt,” his mother said apologetically. “He is,” cooed my own mother, who can befriend anything that will stand still long enough.
“Oh—hi,” I said. The point of the story is not to say that a toddler was unimpressed by my flirtation skills, though I can’t say I haven’t considered the worrisome implications of this fact. That could be bad news for my future offspring. A month after their last session, the mothers filled out a survey assessing the progress their children had made towards speech. The Little Red Schoolbook - honest about sex and the need to challenge authority | Joanna Moorhead. More than four decades ago two educationalists wrote a book for teenagers that aimed to revolutionise their attitude to education, sex, drugs and alcohol. It was called The Little Red Schoolbook, and its permissiveness and liberal stance caused outrage around the world: the then British education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, was said to have been very worried by it. The Pope denounced it as sacrilegious, and morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse successfully campaigned to have it prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.
Later this month the full, unexpurgated Little Red Schoolbook will be available in Britain for the first time. And Soren Hansen, the teacher who wrote it (his co-author Jesper Jensen is now dead) says that, although the authoritarianism of the education system he was denouncing in the book is gone, he fears even more for children today under the competitive, dog-eat-dog culture that has taken its place.
"Education is no longer a personal process," he says. Walkie Talkie Films. Childhood in Jane Eyre. Dads Who Do Dishes Raise Ambitious Daughters -- Science of Us. El Parto es Nuestro presenta el informe final de su campaña “Stop Kristeller: cuestión de gravedad” Why Free Play Is the Best Summer School - Jessica Lahey. Dear Mr Gove: You are too unexpert to determine young people's reading | Michael Rosen. Dear Friends With Kids: Don't Drop Me Because I'm Childless.
10 places that would be better if kids were banned. Raising a Moral Child. Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework - Dana Goldstein. Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity - Robin J. Hayes. Schoolboy, 4, over the moon with Nasa's help on his homework. The Writing Revolution - Peg Tyre. Canal Digital: El tendre vídeo d'un nadó acabat de néixer que no vol separar-se de la seva mare dóna la volta al món.
French booksellers pose naked to support children's book on nudity. Bringing Men Back Into Families - Lois M. Collins & Marjorie Cortez. The Art of the College Recommendation Letter - Andrew Simmons. Why Middle-School Girls Sometimes Talk Like Babies - Jessica Lahey. Para estudiar, primero hay que aprender cómo hacerlo. Happier Couples Without Kids - Effects Of Parenthood. Dads and discipline: a modern dilemma. Learning Cursive Is a Basic Right - Abigail Walthausen. 2nd-Grader's Cure For Playground Loneliness: A Buddy Bench. Disney's Newest Princesses Aren't Afraid to Wear a Dress. Would You Rather Be Born Smart or Rich? - Jordan Weissmann. After-School Activities Make Educational Inequality Even Worse - Hilary Levey Friedman.
A man's wife was diagnosed with cancer, so he photographed the entire battle in unforgettable pictures. Overscheduled Children - How Big a Problem? Teach Kids to Daydream - Jessica Lahey. Why Do Teachers Quit? - Liz Riggs. Homemade Halloween Fashion Icons: Part 1. Father with Terminal Cancer Walks Unmarried Daughters Down the Aisle. Why Mothers Kiss Their Babies | Birthing Magazine | Birth Unlimited | Calgary Alberta. 500 menores de 16 y 17 años se quedarán en "tierra de nadie" con la nueva ley del aborto de Gallardón.
¿Qué debe saber un niño de cuatro años? | Alicia Bayer. 10 Surprising Things about Parenting in Japan.