We know – and I don’t think anyone disputes at this point – that preschool age children learn through play. Playing – exploring, discovering, manipulating – is their work. But what about middle schoolers? Can gaming be a mechanism for “systems learning” at school? What do you think?
Category Archives: Parenting
Gaming as Learning: Keeping children plugged in at school
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Have you seen Waiting for Superman? Wanna talk about it?
Join with other parents and interested parties to talk about David Guggenheim’s provocative new documentary Waiting For Superman that brings forth many issues on education reform. It’s a movie parents and educators across the nation are discussing in small groups. We welcome you to be part of the conversation in this informal meeting. Refreshments provided. [...]
Is being a parent relevant to running a state?
Lisa Belkin posts in Motherlode that gubernatorial campaigns in Oklahoma and California are citing “parenting experience” as a distinguishing qualification (or not, if the kids seem to be bad seeds). What do you think? Is being a parent relevant to running a state? Here’s my take: Yes and no. On the one hand, being married [...]
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Changing Education Paradigms
Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert gave the following talk at the RSA (Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). [Thanks, Simon, for this tip!] Are we trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past? Could ADHD be (in-part) a byproduct of our (boring, “production line”) education [...]
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Wendy Mogel @ Stanford
Wendy Mogel, brilliant author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children and recently The Blessing of a B Minus, is coming to speak at Stanford in a week (on October 14th, to be exact) as part of Stanford’s annual Challenge Success conference. The purpose of Mogel’s visit is [...]
5 Tips for Taking Better Pictures of Your Kids
These are amazing, both the tips and the photos. Lilia Schwartz of Babymoon Photography, has given us permission to reprint the following tips from her blog. We’re taking notes. Boy, is she right about light… So, it has come to my attention that not every parent in the world is (or lives with) a professional child [...]
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Why our schools suck: Waiting for Superman movie
Provocative new documentary distills a few very-wrong, very-fixable things about our school system: 1) pay great teachers well, 2) fire bad ones, 3) don’t settle for less. For more about this upcoming documentary, “Waiting for Superman“, see Sarah Lacy’s (no relation) post on TechCrunch. The movie is opening in selected cities this week. (We’ll be [...]
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George Carlin “Over Parenting”
Some choice quotes here, and good insights too. Who knew Carlin was a parenting genius? :)
Also posted in video Tagged child-worship, free play, leadership camp, over parenting, play dates, ruining childhood, self-esteem movement Leave a comment
Parenting, and the Meaning of Life
A response to Lisa Belkin’s provocative New York Times Magazine piece: Living to be a Parent. Belkin cites a psychologist, Douglas T. Kenrick at Arizona State University who is undertaking to update Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. Read Belkin’s full article, it’s not long. The upshot is that Kenrick is apparently “redefining ‘self-actualization’ as an [...]
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Ethics on the Internet
Maybe it’s because it’s the Jewish new year (that link notwithstanding) a time for reflection. Maybe it’s because of the stuff we’ve been reading online. Whatever it is, I find myself noodling on ethical questions today. Questions like: Is it ethical for WebMD and Babble.com to have formula makers sponsor their breastfeeding content? I posted [...]
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