When I read stories like this, I despair:
PHILADELPHIA — A high school teacher was assaulted by two students and hospitalized with broken vertebrae after he took an iPod away from one of them during class, officials said.
I’m going to take a wild guess, and suggest that these two students weren’t models of behavior already. In […]
Some years ago, Adorable Child (AC) and I were driving around the teeny, remote village on the St. Lawrence River in which we lived. I can’t remember what we were doing, specifically, but when AC said, “Mommy, they have a museum here!”, I was surprised.
We loved living in that village; it was safe, friendly, and […]
Every time I approach the question of education or reform, I find that people respond from many different directions, with radically diverse assumptions. Thus, it appears to me that we don’t have a consensus on what, exactly, we’re trying to accomplish with our public education system.
Perhaps I missed the mission statement.
Is the goal a literate […]
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the problems in Los Angeles high schools, where they’re facing drop-out rates of around 50%. The LA Times ran an enormous education special about the crisis, and while they noted that there are problems for urban school districts all across the country, no-one seemed over-worried about Texas’ […]
I remember lots of things about being a teenager: braces, acne, boys (!), rebellious arguments with parents, and having entirely too much time on my hands. (Did I mention boys?) Of them all, though, it was “time” that impacted me the most. It wasn’t so much the lack of homework (although I had very little); […]