education

The Upside Down World ~ The Blog

Smart Kids Being Dumb

If I had it to do all over again, I would never have put them in school. I would have gone straight to online schools once I could no...

The best of the week . . .

According to infalible me! Ha! I’ve done more writing than reading this week, so this is a bit light, but here goes: How children’s ...

Homework in kindergarten

An example of my 1st grader's homework So, I have my kids in the local public schools which has real drawbacks and benefits. One of the...

Let’s talk about sex, baby!

In the early ‘90s Salt-n-Peppa famously sang “Let’s talk about sex, baby” and boy, oh boy do we take their exhortations to heart. Sex is...

Today I’m thinking about school – Update

After thinking about it for a while and talking with the school principal to get his take on what the core of the issue might be, I...

Today I am thinking about school

Here’s the dilemma I am wrestling with: these are all normal parts of middle school, but are they acceptable? Is my son who is having a...

All Praise the Kids?

Interesting story in the NY Magazine this weekend about how praising kids harms and sometimes helps them. Much of the research about...

How being gifted means being different

First, the differences. I always figured that high intelligence was just about how a person learns new information and skills. What I...

The Platypus and Evolution

fascinating article in the Washington Post about the genetic code of the platypus. Scientists just finished mapping the odd animal’s DNA...

10 year old boys are right: word problems are evil!

New research seems to back up my decision to drop word problems. Researchers have conducted experiments which showed that students who...

What’s dumber than a gorilla with a bunch of bananas?

suspended 11 students for taking part in a senior prank where a kid dressed like a gorilla chased 10 classmates dressed like bananas...

Is college worth it?

here and here) as well as my extreme opposition to student loans and our current system of funding higher education (here, here and here)....

This is fantastic!

At any rate, a new program in Boston is working to teach low income parents to talk with their children from a very early age and to...

There are things I don’t understand

I know that my perspective is different because I do homeschool and it’s for reasons far less pressing than protecting my kids from...

Raising Christian Evolutionists

I wrote a post on why parents who teach their children creation science or intelligent design in a way which elevates those teachings to...