Note: November 20, 2011
This is the first post that I am migrating over from the old blog. More will follow. Tonight I am just going to post a few to test out the system.
Democracy In Distress: 5 Things Our Kids Won't Have In School | Cracked.com
Originally posted on Live Journal: Suburban Eschatology Part Two
Cross-posted from: www.democracyindistress.com
Okay, I think the phrase "No-Fail Zone" just got added to my lexicon. This is not a good zone for a kid to be in. Sometimes life comes with disappointments, and the time to learn how to deal with them is when you are young, not when you are out in the world on your own. Kids need to fail sometimes just so they can build some coping skills, and they need to succeed, hopefully much more often, to build confidence.
More so, they also need to learn that things like grades are rewards for work well done. If they don't do the work, failure must be an option.
Blah.
Here's the post from DinD and some article excerpts from Cracked.com:
Recess, p.e. class, textbooks, summer breaks, Valedictorians and other honors, and failing grades. Some of these, for parents with kids in school these days, well... We've seen the writing on the wall. Others, like the end of summer breaks, I've been hearing about since I was in school twenty years ago and it doesn't seem any closer than it did twenty years ago.
Using tablets and e-readers seems inevitable, but most of the other changes predicted by this writer do not, to me, feel like improvements.
The thing that is really killing us in our district is the budget cuts. Already, the boys have nearly as many weeks with four school days as they do with five, and the district is having to cut five more days because of budget short falls. We'll these dates will be announced when the district finished negotiating the timing with the teacher's union.
And these sorts of cuts are not recent. At the end of the 2004-2005 school year, the Portland School District elementary school sent a survey around asking which staff member to lay off, the librarian, the p.p. teacher or the music teacher. The school was already without a counselor.
At the end of the 2009-2010 school year, Gresham-Barlow S. D. was where Portland was five years earlier.
I don't think summer vacations are going away any time soon. If anything, they are getting longer. But it might be time to look at how all this down time is organized, though having all those long breaks would be murder on working, single parents.
Anyway, this article is not too deep, but it does have some entertaining food for thought...
Getty 
Getty 
Not entirely all the way to the teen years with my kids, but I've got under a year now before the first one hits 13. Should be a... ahem... fun ten years as my boys move through their teen years... These are some excerpts from a really great National Geographic article.
Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine: 
...our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years. The brain doesn't actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.
For starters, the brain's axons—the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons—become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin (the brain's white matter), eventually boosting the axons' transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile, dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses—the little chemical junctures across which axons and dendrites pass notes—grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning, as it is called, causes the brain's cortex—the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking—to become thinner but more efficient. Taken together, these changes make the entire brain a much faster and more sophisticated organ.
This process of maturation, once thought to be largely finished by elementary school, continues throughout adolescence...
...
Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result, we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. At the same time, the frontal areas develop greater speed and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variables and agendas than before.
When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It's hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.
As Steinberg's driving game suggests, teens respond strongly to social rewards. Physiology and evolutionary theory alike offer explanations for this tendency. Physiologically, adolescence brings a peak in the brain's sensitivity to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that appears to prime and fire reward circuits and aids in learning patterns and making decisions. This helps explain the teen's quickness of learning and extraordinary receptivity to reward—and his keen, sometimes melodramatic reaction to success as well as defeat.
The teen brain is similarly attuned to oxytocin, another neural hormone, which (among other things) makes social connections in particular more rewarding. The neural networks and dynamics associated with general reward and social interactions overlap heavily. Engage one, and you often engage the other. Engage them during adolescence, and you light a fire.
Yet we can and do help. We can ward off some of the world's worst hazards and nudge adolescents toward appropriate responses to the rest. Studies show that when parents engage and guide their teens with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence, their kids generally do much better in life. Adolescents want to learn primarily, but not entirely, from their friends. At some level and at some times (and it's the parent's job to spot when), the teen recognizes that the parent can offer certain kernels of wisdom—knowledge valued not because it comes from parental authority but because it comes from the parent's own struggles to learn how the world turns. The teen rightly perceives that she must understand not just her parents' world but also the one she is entering. Yet if allowed to, she can appreciate that her parents once faced the same problems and may remember a few things worth knowing.
...This delayed completion—a withholding of readiness—heightens flexibility just as we confront and enter the world that we will face as adults.
This long, slow, back-to-front developmental wave, completed only in the mid-20s, appears to be a uniquely human adaptation. It may be one of our most consequential. It can seem a bit crazy that we humans don't wise up a bit earlier in life. But if we smartened up sooner, we'd end up dumber.
Originally posted on Live Journal: Suburban Eschatology Part Two
Repost from Rubble...
10 fascinating Facebook facts -- and what they say about us - CNN.com
From the article:
Parents were also asked about the minimum age at which their children should be allowed to sign up for Facebook or MySpace. Twenty-six percent of parents replied "over 18," 36% said "16 to 18," 30% said "13 to 15" and 8% said "under 13."
This was interesting to me, it's an issue in my house. My 11 year old wants an account. I am not ready to go there yet.
