What is it like being a kid in the standardized testing labyrinth of American education? I wonder if those of us who aren’t kids ask that question enough. I also wonder if kids themselves understand their own feelings about being tested, understand that it isn’t an inevitable aspect of being educated. [Read more →]
I have been a volunteer New Jersey school board member since 2004. This year, I was informed that a new law requires all New Jersey board of ed members to undergo background checks. Then I learned that included fingerprinting. Then I learned the process would cost $81. [Read more →]
If you have talented, dedicated, interested older children, I recognize the value of getting them to someone who knows things about sports that you and/or their coaches don’t. But it strikes me that there is an epidemic of personal trainers out there, a horde of people charging parents for drilling little kids in one-on-one practice sessions. Many of the little kids would rather be, well, doing something else, and this explosion of personal trainers is another sign of our era of sports-obsessed parenting.
This is not an anti-Michael Vick diatribe. You’ve read that before. Dog fighting does disgust and disturb me. It’s evident Vick took the inherent cruelty of it to another level. He was caught. He served a prison sentence prescribed by our legal system. He was released. Since his release, he’s been active denouncing dog fighting, even working with some members of animal humane societies. He has spent time building himself back into condition to play at the highest level in a professional sport I enjoy a lot for a team I root for. [Read more →]
(From wire reports)
RIVERTON, NJ–Annoyed authorities have confirmed that a NJ family, in defiance of modern rules of common sense and maybe some real rules as well, took their three children on a driving vacation of 2,137 miles without an in-car DVD player or TV. [Read more →]
Ah, summer. For kids, this was once a time of extended days. Of doing nothing. Of internal adventure. Well, my friend, you can forget all that. This is 2011, and if you think your children are going to spend the summer To Kill a Mockingbird-style, hanging around and imagining the great world out there, you are behind the times. If you think of it that way, you, my friend, are a neglecter of your children. [Read more →]
While people are scrambling and plotting about how to pay for their children’s education, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has offered up a different idea: He is offering 24 people $100,000 not to go to college.
I have this ongoing belief that most of the woes we deal with as a nation, as a species are because we just haven’t paid enough attention; I think, I guess in what is an unshakable optimism about human potential (and you may read this as “delusion”), that once we are shocked awake to stupidity and injustice, we will fix it. In that regard, I am convinced that if we stepped back and thought hard — with real clarity and attention — about the amount of time U.S. students now spend preparing for the filling in of little bubbles and then filling in those bubbles, overnight we would have a massive education revolution. [Read more →]
Maybe I’m just a linguistic sponge, but I find myself falling into the discourse of those around me. A northeastern boy, I’ve felt that if I moved to say, the south, that I’d pick up not only the vernacular but the accent within weeks.
This brings me to adverbs. [Read more →]
If you attend youth sporting events, you’ll see a familiar sight: A red-faced parent or coach shaking his head, frustrated, after a child competitor fell short. “She knows all the [insert things that one can know about sports],” the befuddled adult says. “But if only she’d listen!” [Read more →]
I don’t know how you even count such things, but one prediction states that in 2011 the world will send seven trillion—nope, I have to write it out: 7,000,000,000,000—text messages. [Read more →]
The Gulf full of oil. Radiation seepage in Japan. War in petroleum-rich countries. Mines collapsing. And the incessant, blow-by-blow, steady-drip news about all of it. [Read more →]
If only I had vision, I would have bought stock in some company manufacturing anything that holds or displays athletic awards. Because even years ago the writing was on the wall that ten-year-olds from Trophy Club, TX to Silver City, CA would be assembling piles of competition-based bling, and they would need some way to store it. [Read more →]
While once we may have contemplated the merits of the philosopher king in human society, now we focus on a humbler, but quite common role: The parent coach. So many of us spend hours coaching our own kids, and I will start by stating the embarrassingly obvious: It is challenging. [Read more →]
In New Jersey, times are desperate for the public schools. Well, you say, things are tough all over. There’s just no money, you say. You’re broke. We’re all broke. So when those budgets come up for vote — because in Jersey the only budget you get to vote directly for is your local public school budget — you’re voting ’em down.
Sure. I want you to tell me the one again about the crisis we’re facing supporting and financing public schools in our culture. Tell me how we’re all stretched and suffering and we have to vote “no” on these budgets. [Read more →]
One trait of being a “screenager” is the love of upgrades. In a bit-based world governed by the never-ending promise of Moore’s Law, they live for the next best device. My daughter has been campaigning for a new cell phone to add to her growing list of devices, including a one-year old cell phone that she has lost… no, more on that in a moment. [Read more →]
This may seem so apparent that it need not be said, but yet I must say it, however quietly: Screaming is not coaching.
Despite how obvious this may appear, people in that most important of coaching places, youth sports, sometimes find screaming as a primary communication method.
During the past month, people across the western world have banded together to build and sustain a powerful mythical structure. If you could peer down on humanity and see highlighted, like you had infrared glasses, markers of the beliefs that connect us, that are intangible yet exist strongly in our communications and ideas, this time of year you would note a glowing red haze of lore maintained by a sea of good will and snowy pile of white lies. Since I too am a participant in the proliferation of this myth and would be crushed if a young believer who stumbled across this article (despite the opaque title) bit into the Christmas cookie of knowledge because of me, I’ll veil my language: Let’s say I’m speaking of Kringleism. [Read more →]
Dear NFL,
I write you as a friend to express some concerns. I may be writing only from my own pure — and perhaps misguided — nostalgia, but I worry about the future of my great game. (I apologize in advance for moments of incoherence and inconsistency, but like many long-standing passions, the one I have for you defies articulation — and reason.) [Read more →]
So a month ago my wife, in one of those heroic moves toward permanent marital stability, bought us tickets to the Jason Bonham Led Zeppelin Experience. The show tapped directly into my untouchable love of Zeppelin. I was awed not just by the talent of Bonham and his band but the emotion driving this tribute. Meandering home afterward, thinking about the grainy videos of Jason as a child that were part of the show, I wondered what if Zeppelin had tried to launch today, in the age of helicopter parents. [Read more →]
