Avalon Hill is a company that developed and marketed a series of historical war and other board games, including games that simulated historical military conflicts in World War II, the US Civil and Revolutionary Wars. When I was 10 years old I bought their “D-Day” game, which covered the Allied invasion of France through the defeat of Nazi Germany. (more…)

My mom had always said that, “Kids will tell you what they need”. That was her way of saying she respected a young person’s ability to know what was best for them. But when our pre-teen son started telling us with his behavior that his middle school was not what he needed, we were not listening, and that failure led to what I recall as the darkest period of my parenting experience. (more…)

I was reading just now on the Education Week “Curriculum Matters” blog about how the cuts in the federal “Reading First” program and presumably the general bad economy are leading to reduced state spending for schools (including textbooks) had led to a 5.4 percent decline in revenues for the McGraw-Hill School division. The “Reading First” program, which is being cut back because studies are showing it has not helping kids with their reading comprehension, was one of the centerpieces of the Rod Paige/George W. Bush education approach, spending over $1 billion yearly to pay for instructional materials and teacher training. Despite the decline, the McGraw-Hill School division still had yearly sales of $1.4 billion. Likewise, other school book publishers are suffering. (more…)

My dad taught me that life, at its best, is an adventure. A lot of our adventures with our dad were in the back seat of one of a series of old Ford and Mercury station wagons we owned. These were vehicles with a third row (bench actually) of seats in the very back, and in the case of our Mercury, even (exotically) facing backward. Since the second row of car seats was generally referred to as the “back”, my brother and I came to dub the third row as the “wayback”, which also riffed on the wonderfully creative “Rocky & Bullwinkle Show” and the history travelling machine of Mr. Peabody (the talking professorial dog) “and his boy Sherman”. (more…)

Starting with learning the multiplication tables in third grade, our son became more and more phobic about studying math (and later academics in general), or more specifically, doing math problems for homework or on tests. By eighth grade this storyline climaxed with an incident that shocked his parents and the school staff and sent a strong signal that he needed to chart a different educational course than the one he was on.

He had had a particularly old school math teacher in fifth grade who believed strongly in the “drill and kill” approach to learning the subject, and our son had gotten so frustrated with her and how she ran the class that he had circulated a petition among his classmates and others to ask the school to fire her. After that experience, I think he entered his middle school math classes with great anxiety but managed to barely pass 6th and 7th grade math due to more sympathetic teachers. Our son has been one to sink or swim based on the quality of his relationships with others, an area where he has always shown great aptitude and skill. (more…)

Responding to Evie Montoya’s comment about the John Taylor Gatto video…here is the YouTube video introducing the Gatto piece I mentioned and presenting the first three of the fourteen things that they teach kids in elite prep schools that are generally not taught in public schools….

It is an interesting list, including… (more…)

So on the AERO (Alternative Education Resource Organization) list I participate in, we have been going back and forth on why have none of the attempts to craft more humanistic educational alternatives caught hold with the public. That said, we may be getting close to a “tipping point” where we somehow achieve a critical mass for real educational transformation, rather than the ever present “reform”. (more…)

I’ve been doing this blog for a couple months now and I thought it appropriate to stop and reflect today on how its going so far. So here are some thoughts…

First of all, I want to acknowledge all of you have posted comments on my posts, including: Adam Fletcher, Bob Bruech, Caroline D, Cheri Isett, David Wolinsky, Emily Haraldan, Ida Hurt, Jim Strickland, John Thompson, Katie L, Kim Moreas, Leo Fahey, Nancy Shriver, Noreen Ringlein, Sally Rosloff, Blanche & Reuben Rosloff and Tom Kennedy (I think that’s everybody!) Some of you I know from my life in Los Angeles (my U-U Congregation and my partner Sally’s alternative energy and healing community), others from online communities I participate in (AERO, IDEA, EfHG, Ed Week Forums, etc.), and maybe others beyond all that. It is hard to write when you don’t have an audience, so your comments have been critical in keeping me going. (more…)

Responding to my recent post on “Duck & Cover…”, my U-U friend Emily, who has posted several comments on my blog, recalled as a kid living next door to her elementary school and its playground. She recalls fondly having the playground so close, and being able to spend so much time playing there. I had a similar circumstance in my youth…

My mom and dad made a concerted effort when my brother and I were kids to live next to a park, so we had that great close by venue to play. During my early elementary years, we lived in our little house across the street from Almendinger Park in Ann Arbor. Not a big park, but it had a playground, big lilac bushes to hide in and do imagination play, a couple baseball diamonds, a tennis court and picnic tables under a stand of maple trees. The parks and recreation department also had a person on site in the summer to let kids in the neighborhood check out sports equipment – soccer balls, baseballs and bats, tether balls, etc. – and organize some activities. (more…)

Play was always a critical part of my own youthful development, so I worked hard to try and give my kids the same opportunity. When my two kids were young, they were always pestering me to spend time with them, above and beyond all the activities with them that I initiated. So I worked out a deal that I would allot a half-hour of time each day (which realistically often stretched to an hour) where I would do whatever activity with them they wanted me to. If they could not agree on what to do on a given day we would do each of their activities (with the other participating) for fifteen minutes. (more…)