Picking pumpkins.

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Halloween pumpkins! #fb

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Crime-fighting by day, sleeping cozily under the covers by night. #kidchat

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Waiting For Superman: A Review Essay

It’s a question that parents keep echoing as they search for the right school for their children: Why can’t every school be good? Why isn’t this as easy as sending my kid to the neighborhood school?

I could read it achingly vividly in the parents’ faces in Waiting for Superman. It was painfully clear in their hopeful optimism as the families of five likeable children underwent a lottery to enable their kids to attend various charter schools, and in the faces of weeping kids who didn’t get into a school that could help them fulfill their dreams.

And here’s the biggest trouble I have with in-demand charters, especially ones that have a high rate of success in helping kids from poor backgrounds: how do you get rid of the lottery when the scarcity of a good “free” school is what undergirds the free-market demand for the scarce resource (a successful school)? A wait-list means desirability/demand, and a wait-list ensures that the public charter school won’t “go out of business,” so to speak. Despite the immense good that’s done by these schools, inequality is baked into the selection process in a way that it’s not for public schools, which must accept all within its district borders. Why can’t the successful charters take what they’ve learned and convert back to or import it back to public schools, where all are accepted? Do you see the logic of what I’m saying?

My Hippie Education, Or, Somehow I Survived My Gen X Childhood

Education is a hot topic currently, coinciding with the fact that we have an over-achieving president (of whom I’m proud). I am convinced he’s secretly Asian American despite an outer bearing that’s African American in appearance.

It’s also a topic of huge interest to me now that Hiro Protagonist is officially a first-grader.

Recently I’ve had to come to grips (somewhat reluctantly) that my son has a strong sense of numeracy. When he was about 3 years old, he asked me what odd and even numbers were. I showed him with my tented fingers how ‘odd’ means one left over from a double, and ‘even’ means a double. He had a period at four years old where he was enchanted with the idea of ‘googolplex.’ One time he asked me to draw out all the zeroes in googolplex, and we got pretty far before I had to quit and say it was time to go to bed. Then, just to make my life harder, I showed him what googolplex was written as an exponent.