Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died on Friday. This essay regarding her influence on American educational standards originally ran on May 12, 2011, but today it may be more timely than ever. Specific temporal references (e.g., “seven or eight years ago,” “last week,” “the current”) remain the same as in the original post. […]
Education
My work has become opening digital files to search for signs of life. The biggest thing I do, the midday ritual of checking emails. Refresh, refresh. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! I’m a saint. I miss you, Ms. Dusto. I’m dad, away on business. Can I please have an extension? This morning we got my Auntie’s […]
I pulled my 6th grader out of school for a week to hit the road. I adore his public school teachers. They work their hearts out. But an oversized shoebox of a classroom is not enough to contain the curiosity or educational needs of kids who know there’s a real world out there that you […]
In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to […]
When Kentwood Wells was 12 years old, he and his parents stumbled across a magic lantern in an antique shop during a Maine vacation. The instrument, an old image projector that used a kerosene lamp for illumination, came with beautiful German glass slides depicting scenes of hunters, soldiers, and children. Wells’ family became fascinated by […]
Some years ago I attended a beach barbecue in Juneau, Alaska on a gray summer day. The adults drank beer in a ring around a fire where salmon collars sizzled and talked about the price of boats and politics. The kids ran in a mixed-age herd closer to the surf, clambering over driftwood and getting […]
My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and […]
If it is still freezing hard during the night where you live, you can try this easy and fun art project. Find some paper plates, cups, tupperware containers, anything with an interesting shape that you can get ice out of in one piece pretty easily. I like the paper plates because you can kind of […]