Here in New Jersey, education is a front-and-center topic. Public schools are under pressure. I live in Riverton, a small town with its own K8 grammar school that sends its students to a high school in the town next to us, Palmyra. Palmyra and Riverton are in many ways a unified community of 3.5 total square miles, sharing activities and services, like our youth sports teams. [Read more →]
I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result. Hence, my decree:
Emperor’s Decree No. 3487: Henceforth, parents and coaches are no longer allowed — either enthusiastically or casually — to say “Good eye!” when a child leaps out of the batter’s box in order to escape the spiteful hiss of a four-seam fastball rocketing toward the bridge of his nose. One might as well compliment a person for giggling upon being tickled on the foot with a feather: “Good laugh! Well done!” [clap…clap…]. The Emperor has serious problems with anything that contributes to the creation of vapid mediocrities among his youngest subjects. He wishes, some day, to be able to stop writing these decrees and that will never happen if parents and coaches continue to produce knuckle-dragging foot-lickers who crave praise for instinctually diving to the ground in order to avoid having their frontal lobe impaled by a Rawlings-propelled septum.
The Punishment: Violators will be doused in a delicious garlic and herb sauce and dropped onto an island inhabited by cannibals (where they will quickly learn that the phrase “Good eye!” has quite a different, and rather intensely literal, meaning).
Now: Go forth and obey.
The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday.
The art of writing. The mysterious skill of writing. Writer Jack Dann once said, “For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.” Alas, for many of our children, writing will never be about exploration, discovery, art, or the challenge of learning complex technical skill. Instead, writing will be standardized, boxed-in, formulaic. It will be an obstacle they need to figure out strategies to get around. Lucky for me, a pre-teen who may or may not live in my home, bless her heart, always has it all figured out. More about that in a moment. [Read more →]
We were in an ice cream parlor the other day, and my son was looking at some old-time paintings on the wall. One was a decades-old picture of a sundae with a price tag: 10 cents. Despite my efforts, he couldn’t comprehend it — which may not be difficult to imagine since my grasp of macroeconomic issues is wanting . I had similar success explaining to him that gas, the stuff that makes our car go, was once a quarter.
Children today are barraged with messages about going green, about sustainability, about saving the environment. But if you are a parent, you still probably spend a lot of time walking around the house switching off lights. [Read more →]
On her birthday, the daughter of a friend of mine came to him in a tizzy. You see, she explained, so-and-so was disrespecting her on Facebook. My friend geared up for the worst as he went with her to view the offending post. And there he saw it. Someone had posted this on her homepage: “happy birthday.” [Read more →]
Today, Yahoo had a link on their main page to an alarming Time story about an alarming trend — actually, it’s more like an epidemic! — of children (who are our future and our most precious resource) asphyxiating themselves in an effort to achieve a “high,” to just feel something in this callously dull world. This deadly dangerous activity goes by many names, but the most alarming by far is “The Choking Game,” and only the most naive among you don’t believe it’s already infected your community.
Researchers at The Crime Victims’ Institute at Sam Houston State University surveyed 837 students at a Texas university and found that the behavior, which works by cutting off blood flow to the brain in order to induce a high, was frighteningly commonplace:
•16% of students said they’d played the game, and three-quarters more than once
•On average, students first played the game at age 14
•Males were more likely to have played than females
•90% of students who had played the game learned about it from friends, and most students said they first played in a group
16% of a group of 837 students at one Texas University might have choked or hyperventilated themselves at some point in the past. And three-quarters of those might have done it twice!
That is “frighteningly commonplace” (by the way, emphasis added, because, see below)! That’s practically everybody!
It turns out that The Choking Game is a crisis that media outlets have been trying to manufacture for some time. With limited success, because today was the first I’d ever heard of it — now, of course, I’m panicked. [Read more →]
As an alumnus of Rutgers Camden (BA, ’91; MA, ’95), I have received a lot of information through alumni channels and talked with many former classmates about Governor Chris Christie’s proposed “merger” of Rutgers University Camden with Rowan University. After digesting this information as best I could, I realize I am against this forced joining, for many reasons. But being faced with this issue has rekindled an embarrassing aspect of my thinking: My utter ignorance about educational branding. No, that’s being too generous: When it comes to educational branding, I’m stupid, naïve, and pathetically out of step with my fellow humans.
Has there ever been a time when there was such a hard-charging fury to be a great parent? Well, maybe it’s always been like this (see what Tolstoy thinks below), but many observers do see the rise of a stifling kid-centric worldview. Could it be that true greatness in raising kids is measured by a smaller yardstick than we realize?
Proposition 8 was a heartbreaker for those who loved Candidate Obama the second best. His greatest admirers were those like Samuel Jackson who saw in him an ethnic reflection of themselves. His “message” didn’t mean shit to them. But a close second in devotion is that other bulwark of Democratic politics, the gay community. Though they tended towards Hillary (a known fan of sensible shoes), like many other key groups they saw in Obama a champion of their cause. They were as disappointed as the young hemp enthusiasts but much sooner. They knew on Election Day that Prop 8 had passed adding an Amendment to the California Constitution defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
The dissappointment was to some extent their own fault. Candidate Obama had never publicly supported literal gay marriage any more than President Bush had. Rather, like those who took cannibis for medical reasons and hoped to be able to take it legally in any setting, the gay marriage advocates assumed that a President Obama would indeed be actively on their side though his stock response to questions always was, “My position is the same as the President’s (Bush), civil unions.) No one believed it. I don’t believe it. What are the odds that Obama TRULY does not favor absolute equality of gay marriage? As an issue it is uniformly supported by his demographic; elite university graduates/government bigwigs. But an alliance of gays and their more numerous allies is far from a majority; not even in a Democratic primary. It might be different if the balance of the electorate were, like me, flagrantly apathetic to marriage, gay or sullen. That is not the case. Mr. Hillary knew it although he clearly was hostile to all marriage. He made his accommodations with his own base on gay issues, recognizing two powerful blocks were and are opposed to “gay rights” as we know them. That would be the Catholics and the blacks. [Read more →]
