“Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”     No, we are not; as the author of this wonderful article in the New York Times states: “ The contemporary American ...

    The will is infinite and the execution confined. The desire is boundless and the act is a slave to limit (Shakespeare) Every year, in France, there is an increase in the number of single teen mothers. England has the biggest problem in Europe with 30 pregnancies per 1,000 teen girls, while France has 15/1000, Germany shows 20/1000, Holland, on ...

Deutsch: Lage von XY (siehe Dateiname) in den Vereinigten Staaten. English: Location of state of XY (see filename) in the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Just finished another round of testing, this time with the new state assessment for the state of Texas dreamed up by idle bureaucrats; the last one was perfectly O.K. It gave me however a ...

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions (Sigmund Freud) The word normal, I would much rather use the adjective ‘innocent’,  has been abused and misunderstood ever since the “science” of psychology took off with Sigmund Freud. I place the word ‘science’ in quotation marks because, ...

Bust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC; the alabaster mantle is a modern addition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences (Aristotle) No, I am not talking about any of the three musketeers (i.e.  ...

We cannot motivate students; we can only create the conditions in which students can motivate themselves (Chris Wejr, elementary school principal in British Columbia, Canada) There is an interesting concept and I wonder how many of my teacher-colleagues agree with the statement. The idea that we have the duty to motivate our students is always ...

Literacy is a vague term that is often misapplied by politicians and academic pundits, without forgetting students who falsely believe that the ability to decode letters on a written page is the equivalent skill. We teachers often criticize the new generation’s reluctance to read “good” books; or any book for that  matter, for I have visited ...

Do neighborhoods dictate what kind of public school our kids go to? Of course, students are zoned in order to avoid lengthy and costly bus trips as well as contributing to traffic snarls in large urban areas.  Do poor urban areas signify poor public schools? As a rule, yes. Some cities have tried to forcibly mix economic and social levels to ...

Give me 20 handpicked kids and by the time they graduate from high school they’ll go to college and gravitate to a successful career (JCS) Alright, I made this quote based on an article that showed that IDEA’s students were selected from the cream of the crop. A neighbor’s daughter, who excels at all academic topics, was quickly accepted for a ...

Thank you again for your numerous comments on my last post “A Great Change is Needed”. True, as some of you mentioned quite wisely, this little phrase has been used on various occasions in the past; nothing new under the sun except change, the only constant. But if we stop asking for it, if we stop signalling the faults and vices of the present ...