A new bill has reportedly been pre-filed in South Carolina that would require high school students in the state to take a personal finance class.
Under the legislation from Republican state Sen. Luke Rankin, high school students would be required to take at least one half-credit personal finance course and pass a test at the end of the school year in order to graduate, a local ABC station recently reported. Continue reading
Today’s students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.
Teachers, parents and policymakers certainly acknowledge the growing influence of technology and have responded in kind. We’ve seen more investment in classroom technologies, with students now equipped with school-issued iPads and access to e-textbooks. Continue reading
A number of teachers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have pledged to withhold more than 2,000 grades in protest over the university’s plans to house “Silent Sam” in a separate on-campus building. Silent Sam is a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood in the quad at the university until students illegally toppled it earlier this year. Continue reading
This is the big issue in education that nobody is talking about. I wrote this Post for Scary Mommy in September of 2017 about public school teachers losing professional autonomy. ~ K.A.
Like most endangered creatures, their habitat is threatened. When you were a child they were present in every city and town in the United States, but now their world has changed. They can be found only in rare, hospitable environments.
I’m not talking about polar bears, the red wolf, or the pygmy rabbit. The endangered ones I speak of here are not four-legged animals, but an important category of educators: teachers with a high level of professional freedom. Continue reading
According to studies and parents themselves, parenting can make you tired, overwhelmed and anxious. And no wonder. The parent zone includes marinara drizzled onto your new beige carpet, more hours in the car than in your bed and entire mountain ranges of laundry. Plus you are responsible for the health and well being of someone who means more to you than joy itself. My sense is that researchers who study parenting are finding nothing new; exhaustion, occasional (or perpetual) feelings of being overwhelmed and chronic anxiety have plagued parents since basically forever. Continue reading
Just 24 percent of millennials demonstrated a basic understanding of financial concepts, according to a recent PwC study.
Flickr-MIKI Yoshihito | CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
Finance is hard to see. And as a result, finance can be hard to understand – especially for kids! Let me explain. My sister goes to the grocery store with her debit card. She swipes the card and leaves the grocery store with the card and a bag of groceries.
From her son’s perspective, it seems like a sweet deal! It doesn’t look like my sister gave anything up to get the groceries. Her son doesn’t see the exchange; he doesn’t see that money left my sister’s bank account and went into the shopkeeper’s bank account. He doesn’t see that my sister first earned the money after she provided services to hospital patients. If my sister used a credit card instead of a debit card, the exchange would have been even more confusing! Now a credit card company is lending money to my sister? Continue reading
They sit in front of a screen for five hours a day, hundreds of people at desks moving through the programs, step by step. Once a week they meet with a person for fifteen minutes. Occasionally they join a group listening briefly to a speaker. But mostly they interact with a screen, reading and giving answers. They try to keep on task, but sometimes they can’t resist the lure of a computer game. When the wi-fi is down they just sit, waiting. One day, fed up with the eerie quiet, with eye strain, with boredom, they walk out in protest.
Who are these people? Continue reading
Violent attacks on teachers in secondary schools are epidemic and clearly a product of liberalism in education. We need some “old time religion” as proper training makes such behavior unthinkable.
If you are a senior citizen when you were in elementary school your teachers were women that used paddles about once a week to keep an orderly learning environment. Now 31 states have outlawed the paddle in schools and all are having trouble with attacks on female teachers. Continue reading
…and do NOT let them use the cell phones, computers or pads as an excuse that they are “reading.” But on the other hand – if you are watching the news… those who do the caption work for television can’t spell – so just be careful.
Hey – read a book with the kids. Hmmmmmmmm….
Whenever people gather to discuss problems in education, we hear the same list of issues and solutions.
We hear about poverty and the need for bigger budgets at all levels, more self-esteem, professional teacher corps, charter schools, vouchers, tutoring and remediation, new literacies, better assessment, year-round schools, pre-K, schools that are more permissive or more strict, the effects of drugs, the impact of violent sports, and the perpetual need for more and more money. Continue reading
A different way of looking at life – the way it used to be. Although the following was written several years ago, I just came across it on Facebook tonight. Learn the lessons of life. pass this along to your children and grandchildren – have them READ it out loud to you, and then talk WITH them about it. ~ Ed.
A young man went to seek an important position at a large printing company. He passed the initial interview and was going to meet the director for the final interview. The director saw his resume, it was excellent. And asked, “Have you received a scholarship for school?”
The boy replied, “No”. Continue reading
“It must make similar changes in young brains as well. Teens I taught to read began to think better in more areas, their behaviors settled down, and their hyper reactiveness cooled.” ~ Linda Schrock-Taylor
Reading is such a new ability in human evolutionary history that the existence of a “reading area” could not be specified in our genes. A kind of recycling process has to take place in the brain while learning to read: Areas evolved for the recognition of complex objects, such as faces, become engaged in translating letters into language. Some regions of our visual system thereby turn into interfaces between the visual and language systems. Continue reading
William Yznaga just recently accepted a full-time job offer as a developer at Hyland. His hire was almost a decade in the making.
For Ohio-based software company Hyland, the recruiting process starts in middle school.
When the business first launched more than two decades ago, hiring was tough. It was hard to find local workers with the necessary skill sets to fill open positions. Continue reading
From everything I read you would think we were incapable of solving social problems.
In truth, we find matters only getting worse because the proposed solutions always involve the culprit, the state, taking more control over our lives.
The state is a box we desperately need to think outside of if we’re ever going to establish civil relations among people. We would do well to remember that the state is absolutely not in the business of making our lives better. It is an institution appended to the rest of society through force for the purpose of enriching the lives of its members. Continue reading
At the start of the school year teachers and homeschoolers plan out their year, listing fun math projects, great sweeps of history to share, music to sing and stories to tell. As we look ahead to the fall we anticipate the dimming of the light, perhaps an autumn gale or two and weather growing ever colder. This turning of the year is a time to summon the warmth of courage as the cold increases and the light of goodness as the sun grows dimmer.
Here is a story that I wrote a few years ago for Martinmas, a November festival of light and goodness celebrated in Waldorf Schools. It’s called The Children of the Light and it’s a back to school gift for anyone interested in it. It is a story about a family that tends a lighthouse and the goodness of children at a challenging time. Continue reading
Harper’s Magazine, 1933 ~ Glancing out of the window, I can see the subject–and eventual victim–of this inquiry, dangerously perched in the crotch of an old chestnut tree, about fifteen feet above the ground. Should I rush out and tell him to get down? Or should I let him be, hoping that he won’t climb any higher, or, if he does climb any higher, hoping that he will not fall?
It is probably all right, so I shall not bother him. Tree climbing is one of the things he has learned all by himself. There aren’t many things he will have the fun of learning all by himself. Most of the things he is going to learn will be hammered into him–Latin and history and grammar and mathematics up to the binomial theorem.
I’m not worried about this progress up the ladder from high school or boarding school to college and from college to law school or medical school. It seems incredible that the young biped now perched in the chestnut tree will someday, without stupendous effort on my part or on his, eventually graduate from college or even become a Ph.D.–but he will almost certainly. The strictly educational side of his life, once he gets his hands firmly on the lowest rung of that ancient ladder, will take care of itself. Continue reading
The report recommends that pediatricians take a more active role in explaining to parents the value of childhood play.
Kids need to play. It seems like an obvious statement, as central to childhood as eating peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and chasing fireflies. For generations, parents have known that a play-filled childhood is essential for healthy physical and mental development. They didn’t need to read the latest research findings on play. They didn’t need experts to tell them it’s important. They just knew it. Kids are designed by nature to play, and parents have generally let them. Continue reading
When given the opportunity to make choices about which school their child attends, parents are quite competent.
As back-to-school time approaches, parents are bracing for school-related trauma. The threat of bullying, violence, school shootings, and mental health maladies looms large as a new school year emerges. A 2018 PDK poll found that one-third of parents are concerned about their child’s safety at school, a sharp jump in recent years. And it’s not just peer harassment that worries parents. The Miami-Herald reported last month that an experienced teacher who was named “teacher of the year” this year in Florida, was caught on video calling a kindergartener a “loser.”
Some parents are fed up. They want options other than a mandatory, assigned district school. Continue reading
Here’s what I discoveredI spent the past week at a camp teaching teens about the legislative process. Among other things, the teens learned about American history, government, and worldview, while also role-playing as senators, representatives, and media. The week ended with a final debate on the house floor of the Minnesota Capitol. Here are five interesting things I noticed throughout the week.
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