Beyond us and them

Lately I’ve been recommending Lisa Rivero’s Gifted Education Comes Home to lots of people.  Not just people who think of their kids as gifted, and not just people whose children are not in school or are considering that as an option.  In the course of making her case for self-directed education for her child and [...]

A New Book about Play!

Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, by Stuart Brown, M.D., and Christopher Vaughan. I haven’t read it yet, but it came out this week and it’s next up on my list. I can’t wait – what an amazing subtitle! Amazon has an excerpt posted. More soon…

School or Homeschool

I picked up a copy of a local parenting magazine yesterday and found this refreshingly unbiased article about the choice to school or homeschool.  The magazine is published in and about Maine, so the specifics about guidelines don’t apply elsewhere, but I wanted to pass along the article anyway.  I don’t often encounter a piece [...]

Why are they called numerators and denominators?

I’ve been doing fractions for several decades, and only yesterday did I find out how the numerator (the number on the top) and the denominator (the one on the bottom) got their names. I’m not sure that knowing why they’re called what they’re called will help too many folks who struggle with fractions, but I’m [...]

Gladwell Does it Again

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (subtitle The Story of Success). I found myself reading it breathlessly – I couldn’t get to the next part fast enough. If you haven’t read any of his work, here’s what it’s like: Gladwell takes a social phenomenon he’s noticed and offers up examples of it. (And it [...]

On sensitivity

I know several parents who find their children more sensitive to a myriad of things (making mistakes, loud noises, groups of people) than they expect or think is normal. What parents often find helpful when they find themselves noticing profound differences between the way their children function and they way they themselves function is to [...]