At Considerable Cost

A long read from The Guardian this week has been on my mind since I first read it.   It was on my mind before I read it, as I've been thinking so many of these same thoughts and working them out loud with friends for a while now.      I like the author's tone because he includes himself as he ponders these questions.   The piece is based on his book, also linked below. This piece is definitely worth a read, as it applies to so many adults.   If I were still a middle school teacher, I would read this article with my students and discuss it.   These issues need to be addressed, right alongside those of internet safety for the mental and emotional health of our children.   Children today know nothing else.   We must protect their senses of memory and self.   We must encourage them to develop into real people, not just accumulations on social media. ...

“Look, she’s still playing school,” my mother told my father the first time they visited the seventh grade classroom of my first teaching job.   As a little girl, I played school nearly every day, even sending friends home with homework and decorating the door of my room with holiday themes for each month.   I taught elementary and middle school for nine years before I stayed home after the birth of my oldest child.   As part of my training in college, I was trained to analyze each lesson after it was taught and figure out what worked and what did not work.   It became a habit that I maintained throughout my teaching years.    I was a successful teacher, with an organized classroom and I could handle some of the toughest students, but I was barely keeping my head afloat as a mother.    I finally went back to school for all the lessons my teaching years could offer.   Most often, when I see my...

I've seen some posts recently on Facebook and Pinterest of the "cute," "amazing," and "fun" things being done in order to teach classroom and home school students about plant and animal cells.   The fact that I've just used three sets of apostrophes does not bode well for my opinions of these cell activities. Here are a few well-intended examples: Candies placed atop a gelatin "cell" Poster board model Pizza "cells" and then there's the cake "cell" When I was in seventh grade, we were given the assignment of making a model of a plant cell and an animal cell.   The normal completed project in our class consisted of poster board models.   The more elaborate ones were formed with play dough.   The teacher showed us best examples from past years of both poster board and play dough versions.   I was all set to make a stunning play dough one as I sat down at our kitchen bar.   Then, my dad walked ...

As a parent, I've changed so much since my first child was born.   She never watched television until after she was two years old.   She didn't have her first potato chip until after she was two and she said, "Water" whenever she saw a McDonald's sign because that was all she had ever had there.   When Child 2 came along, I told the pediatrician, "I've done everything wrong with this one." "No," he answered.   "You did what you had to do to survive!"   I really love our pediatrician. When we moved into this house a year ago, the kids started having real problems sleeping through the night--or even falling asleep--because they were accustomed to our bedroom being right down the hall from theirs.  Now, our room is on the other side of the house.   I became even more protective of what I considered their "sensitive" natures. Recently, I discovered  BBC's Desert Island Disc s podcasts.    This radio program has be...