Yesterday was Open House at Neil’s school. As part of their Open House presentation, his grade 4/5 class selected 5 scenes from Shakespeare plays and performed them. We saw Hamlet fight Laertes and die by Laertes’ poisoned sword; Romeo grieve and commit suicide when he finds Juliet, seemingly dead; and Neil, as Petruchio, ably teasing…
Category: Education
Random Friday Musings
Biking, reading and researching has taken up time I used to devote to blogging, but there are a few tidbit musings I thought I’d throw out to regular readings. First of all, my friend Shelly managed to get her mother, the guru of the “IHHEBY” philosophy to make a more in-depth appearance on her podcast….
Bible Study
Right now I have 8 Christian bibles in my house, and it’s kind of freaking me out because I’m not even Christian. Neil’s one day at the School of Choice convinced me that I should read and introduce the Bible to my son, given that Christian philosophy is the underpinning of Western Civilization, which is…
Three (Private) Schools for Smart Kids
When my frustration with Neil’s current school year had reached a high level, Peter encouraged me to look at some private schools. In Peter’s opinion, it doesn’t hurt to look and see what else is out there. As we already knew, public schools have the advantage in resources and range. Whenever I volunteer in a…
How A Private School Made Us Face Our Personal Prejudice
I’ve been frustrated with Neil’s public school education this year, so Peter suggested I look at a few private schools. We can’t really afford private school, but we can look, like starving people looking into a restaurant. I was particularly impressed and intrigued by a new, small private secondary school in Sunnyvale, and the headmaster…
The Mystery of the Questionable Statistic
A few weeks ago I mentioned my doubts as to the veracity of a statistic posted on my son’s classroom door, namely “The US produces 50% of the world’s garbage.” But I was relying on my gut instinct; I figured with a little effort, I should be able to find out for sure whether it…
Criminal Mom Update
Last year, I wrote about my son’s school’s new asinine policy to require all volunteers to be fingerprinted and get a background check by both local and federal authorities, at the volunteer’s expense, in money, convenience, and time. Joanne Jacobs, an education writer and blogger, as well as a few other blogs, linked to the…
How Sedna Punked Pluto
A few years ago, Neil was excited to find out that our solar system might have a new planet. Orbiting the earth, sometimes closer in and sometimes further out than Pluto, the new would-be planet was named Sedna. Since the name didn’t come out of Hamilton’s Mythology like the rest of the planets’ names, I…
Public School Gaia Worship
Likewise, religion is firmly banned in our public schools, but that doesn’t mean they’re not religious. Neil goes to an environmental science magnet school, but there is a frighteningly clear undercurrent of Gaia worship. For the past several years, I’ve gone to the schoolwide Earth Day presentation, which usually takes place in the morning. One year, several students came out as various animals: a deer, a banana slug, a squirrel, a bird and spoke about their habitats. A teacher came out as Mother Earth and all the “animals” knelt around her as she spoke about how important it was for man to stop destroying the world the wild animals lived in. I love nature, animals and my environment, but on a certain level, that made me uncomfortable.
Teaching Children to Lie for the Right Cause
Yesterday, Neil came home from school, eager to create an informative flyer for the school’s annual No-Trash Lunch Week. I allowed him on my computer and being an analytical sort of a guy, he quickly came up with a flyer with three statistics about waste, and an admonishment to stop the process and lower the…