Do I always say, “Good game”?
On that great list of things I think I don’t want to be, near the top is “glib.” I don’t want to be all back slappy, all here’s-a-trophy-even-though-you-didn’t-do-much, all smiling and treacly.
Entries Tagged as 'family & parenting'
Opting out of standardized tests
Part 6 (of 874) in an occasional series about how standardized tests are destroying education.
One frustration with standardized testing is its seeming inevitability. The bureaucratic, Kafkaesque testing structure. Your disagreements don’t matter. Your arguments and pleas don’t matter. You will be tested. But what if you didn’t have to take a standardized test? A growing number of parents and students are exploring that: Opting out of standardized tests. [Read more →]
Top ten things your mother doesn’t want to hear on Mother’s Day
10. “No Mother’s Day card this year, but I did send you a tweet!”
9. “I’m taking you out to dinner, but you have to hurry; Taco Bell closes at nine.”
8. “The word ‘love’ seems a little strong. I can ‘tolerate’ you.”
[Read more →]
TAs are richer than college presidents: Standardized tests are destroying education, part 5 (of 874)
What does it mean to write well? That the writing is clear? Eloquent? Powerful? Emotion-inducing? Connected? Ah, but there we get into it: Your writing’s value is connected, linked, intertwined with an audience. A reader. Someone who might think about what you’re saying. Someone who might, of all things, care. [Read more →]
What are facts, and how many of them do you really need to know?
We have a peculiar relationship to facts. Dickens’ Prof. Gradgrind and his love of facts. Star Trek characters Spock, Data. “Just the facts ma’am.” We like facts. We’re nervous about facts. We believe in facts. [Read more →]
My kid plays on that team — my jacket says so
There was a time when kids played organized sports and enjoyed the experience in whatever form it took. They didn’t have much perspective on a bigger youth sports picture. Now, we turn them into little joiners. We want them connected to the best team possible. We want them to experience heightened competition at the ripe old age of nine. But is it for them and their athletic hopes, or is it just so we can look good at neighborhood gatherings? [Read more →]
Where do you keep your hoes?: Standardized tests are destroying education, part 4 (of 874)
So where do you keep your hoes, if you are lucky enough to have any in the first place or you have a living environment that requires (or at least facilitates the use of) them? [Read more →]
Goodbye to wrestling?: Another pitiful modern sports story
Anybody who knows me at all knew this one was coming. The IOC board voted to dump wrestling from the Olympics starting in 2020. [Read more →]
BurnYourTickets.com
Like many a sports-crazed lad, I grew up thinking about what it would be like to take my kids to a ball game. We’d be sitting in a colorful arena, watching our team, in the midst of a pleasantly churning crowd, cracking nuts, smiling at the ease and joy of it all. But it’s not like that anymore. Big-time sports at all levels are hopelessly corrupt, egocentric, decadent. You have to be willfully ignorant to look past it all and soak in the simple joys of a game. But we are lollipop heads,so we keep fueling it with our interest. [Read more →]
Lessons of the heart from a secret policeman
Iron Felix: a tender soul
When I lived in Moscow I regularly frequented an antique shop on Malaya Nikitskaya Street that had a small selection of English books. A lot of the stuff was awful, but they had a good selection of volumes from “Progress”, the USSR’s foreign language publishing house. Progress specialized in works by soviet authors and bad translations of the Russian classics. My favorite Progress book however (which I found in the shop) was Words from the Wise, a selection of Russian and Soviet quotations.
Some of the words within are wise, others are banal while many are flat-out lies. My favorite quotes however come from Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish Bolshevik who founded the Cheka, embraced Lenin’s policy of terror and established Russia’s first concentration camps. A bad man? Certainly. But he knew the human heart.
I discovered this while searching for quotes from Stalin on love. Nothing doing, but Felix, he had a lot to say. For instance:
“Love is the maker of all that is kind, exalted, strong, warm, and bright.” [Read more →]
The most powerful kids in the universe
I’ll be straightforward: I was not told I would spend most of my dad life turning off lights that my kids had left on. I never knew it was going to be like this.
So You Wanna Visit a New Parent?
During the dot-com boom and bust of 2001, I was working as a freelance writer for SoYouWanna.com, which offered breezy, informative articles about everything from visiting Vegas to renting a moving van. How the founders expected to make money was through Amazon affiliate sales and advertising. How they actually did end up making money was that they didn’t. I had a pretty good run, though, so in honor of my old job, here’s a (mini) “SYW”:
So You Wanna Visit a New Parent?
As we get into our thirties, more and more of our high-school and college friends become husbands, wives and parents, and maintaining relationships becomes difficult. For the unmarried and childless survivors, maintaining a relationship with a New Parent (NP) is an especially daunting task. After all, why would someone want to hang out with a friend when he could be home taping up a package of poop? But socializing with a NP can be done—if you know what to expect.
Planning
New Parents perceive themselves to be rather busy. President Obama? He’s on vacation compared to a NP. So scheduling a visit requires a high degree of flexibility and sacrifice. A drink? A cafe? Dinner? You may as well suggest throwing a beer in their baby’s face.
Why not try the foyer option? Ask the NP for a five-minute block of time that you can stand in the foyer for a chat, keeping your voice to a whisper and fleeing should the baby stir or the spouse text. If five minutes is too taxing for the NP, offer a 3-minute option, or perhaps simply a wave to each other as you jog by the window.
[Read more →]
Battling through Jackson’s “The Hobbit”
I grew up with hobbits and trolls thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien. So, although I had read and heard some polarizing views of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, I was eager to see it, which I did. I liked it a lot. [Read more →]
Christmas tradition futility and those darn elves
I enjoy the holidays. Years ago I vowed to resist letting any of the hoopla get to me, as I know can happen. But oh there’s pressure, tinsel-draped, gift-wrapped pressure. [Read more →]
Kevin Turner’s “American Man”: Concussions, ALS, and fandom
I recently attended a fundraising event for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). This event was sponsored by the Kevin Turner Foundation. Turner, a former Philadelphia Eagle, has ALS, and through his foundation he supports research about the disease. The Foundation also seeks to raise awareness about how brain trauma is related to contact sports. [Read more →]
AP everywhere
In a recent article in The Atlantic John Tierney took a hard, unsubtle look at AP courses, straightfowardly titled, “AP Classes are a Scam.” [Read more →]
Friends and “Friends”
“Friend” is a suggestive word, loaded as it is with warmth, intimacy, harmlessness. Having a friend is always a good thing. The word was a shrewd choice to represent Facebook connections, because the word itself lulls you past any critical perspective about the relationships you clickably create.
The character of an injury
If you read between the lines in this space — or sometimes just read the lines themselves — you know that my now teenage daughter is not always the easiest person to get along with. [Read more →]
Topless pictures and the culture of shame
I don’t know if you guys have been following the story of Canadian teenager Amanda Todd, but for those who haven’t I will give a brief summary.
Just about a month ago, Amanda posted this video explaining in detail what happened to her. When she was twelve years old, Amanda exposed her breasts to a man she was chatting with online via webcam. A year later he (or another man, it is unclear) threatened to send a topless screenshot of her to everyone she knew if she didn’t put on a private show for him. She refused and he made good on his threat. He sent the topless picture of Amanda to her parents, teachers, friends, and neighbors. She was humiliated and depressed, began using drugs and alcohol, and attempted suicide several times. This past Wednesday, October 10th, she finally succeeded in taking her own life.
The reaction to Amanda’s death seems to be focused on two themes: 1. we should make sure children never use the internet unsupervised, and 2. we have to impress upon our kids the permanence of the internet and make sure our girls value their bodies enough to be more selective about displaying them.
I think they are missing the point.
If you don’t know what grammar is, then texting may be bad for it
You don’t need research (although it’s easy to find) to tell you that children are sending thousands of texts per month, sometimes hundreds per day. And you don’t need to be a news hound to know that, communications-wise, this has widely been viewed as a sign that all that we know of as good is coming to an end. [Read more →]
