The New York Times
August 31, 2009

"For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.

But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.

But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: “I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own.”

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on."

Scientific American
August 31, 2009

"Discussions of breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding usually focus on the baby: What’s best in terms of nutrition? Or an infant’s future mental health?

But we’re going to take a different route. Let’s talk about the mother, and more specifically, the changes in her body as it readies itself to nourish a hungry newborn. With her breasts enlarged and hormones flowing, what happens if no newborn appears to suckle? How will her body—and brain—react? [...]

According to a new theory being proposed by University of Albany evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup and his colleagues, the decision to bottle-feed is tantamount, in the mother’s psyche, to mourning the loss of the child. At least, that’s how a woman’s body seems to respond to the absence of a suckling infant at its breasts in the wake of a successful childbirth. In a soon-to-be-published article in Medical Hypotheses, the authors argue that bottle-feeding simulates the unsettling ancestral condition of an infant’s death[.]"

Newsweek
August 31, 2009

"Give me five minutes of your time.

Imagine seven cards laid out on a table in front of you, each card two inches square, with vertical lines of different lengths in the middle of each card. [...]

Your task is to move the cards around and put them in order so that the longest line is on the left, and the shortest is on the right. If you do this fairly well, getting a majority in the right order, I’ll ask you to repeat the task with another set of seven cards, this time with lines even more similar in length.

Now I hand you three discs, each the exact same size but somewhat different in weight - more or less the weight of a tennis ball. You need to arrange them in order, heaviest to lightest. Again, if you sort them correctly, I’ll hand you three weights with less discernible differences.

In less than five minutes, we’re done.

Now what if I told you I wanted to use this simple test - and only this test - to screen all 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds to determine whether they should be enrolled in gifted programs or admitted to fancy private schools. Once into these programs, the kids would get to stay there through 8th grade."

The New York Times
August 31, 2009

"When I was a boy, I had to walk over to a friend’s house if I had something to tell him. Or I could write him a letter. With a pen.

O.K., that’s a slight exaggeration (there were phones, after all). But children today have a plethora of high-tech gadgets they can use to phone and — more commonly — text with one another. The question most parents have is what type of texting gadget is appropriate for which age group.

Some parents have a very simple answer to this query: None. Cellphones and smartphones are for grown-ups only. But if you feel differently about children and texting (or are finding resistance to youthful communication futile) there are some basics you should know about the devices out there, how they work and how they can be used."

NPR
August 28, 2009

"Even if you can't remember a specific Reading Rainbow episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head:

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it's in a book — Reading Rainbow ...

Remember now?

Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children's show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers.

The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don't know Burton from Reading Rainbow, he's also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots, or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)"

The Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2009

"A critical safety net for working parents is unraveling, and many are bracing to pay a hefty price.

As schools open their doors this month and next, closings and cutbacks at thousands of after-school programs nationwide have parents scrambling to make alternative arrangements. Some are forging new child-care alliances with neighbors, or turning their work or sleep schedules upside down to watch their children after school. A growing number will leave young schoolchildren home alone, or in the care of siblings.

Taken together, the trend will mark a significant shift this fall in the quality of family and neighborhood life in some locales, forcing parents to find new ways of coping."

USA Today
August 28, 2009

"Could there be two luckier tweens in all of America than Malia and Sasha Obama?

The Jonas Brothers and Beyoncé sing for them. They get to meet the pope, the queen and Harry Potter. They get personal tours of the Eiffel Tower, the Kremlin, the Sistine Chapel, the Tower of London. They go to the best ice-cream parlor in Rome and make their own gelato. They have visited Yellowstone's Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon, gone whitewater rafting and picked peaches in Colorado. This week, they're relaxing at Martha's Vineyard, where the rich and famous and presidential while away their summers.

They've been having a grand time since arriving in the White House, mostly out of the public eye. So far.

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are trying to make their daughters' experience in the White House as educational and broadening as possible, taking them along on trips this summer with expressly didactic intentions.

"I want to teach them that Italy isn't just pizza," Michelle remarked in Rome in July during an official visit in which she and the girls toured the Eternal City's ancient sites, such as the Pantheon, the Colisseum and the Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica."

Newsweek
August 28, 2009

"In late June the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched its LEAN Works Web site, a clearinghouse of information on the health costs of employing fat people replete with recommendations on how to prevent and control obesity. The site uses an "obesity cost calculator" to determine the added price of employing somebody with a body-mass index (BMI) of over 30, the threshold for obesity. The calculator asks employers to fill out a company profile including type of industry and location, employees' BMIs, and their wages and benefits. The software then estimates the "costs for medical expenditures and the dollar value of increased absenteeism resulting from obesity."

But is the federal government's endorsement of a device that essentially demonizes the 72 million Americans who fit the official definition of obese justified by the science? Dr. William Dietz, director of the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, defends the site as one weapon in the larger war on fat. "We see this epidemic as a serious threat to health and serious medical cost," Dietz says. "We didn't feel like we could wait for the best possible evidence, so we acted on the best available evidence.""

Los Angeles Times
August 28, 2009

"Schools have been busy preparing for possible outbreaks of the H1N1 flu, but any kids expecting the principal to give everyone a week off at the slightest hint of illness among students or staff should think again.

Government and school officials have had time to reflect on what happened last spring, when more than 700 schools closed in response to cases of the new strain of flu. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging a host of preventive measures for schools. But unless so many students and staff are ill that it's not possible to operate, its current guidance is for schools to carefully weigh potential negative consequences before shutting down - such as students being home alone or healthcare workers missing shifts because they have to watch their kids. (If guidance changes it will be updated here.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also announced guidelines and support this week to help schools offer online lessons or take-home packets for students who have to be out of school."

Double X
August 27, 2009

"In the six weeks since my baby was born, I seem to have lost all worldly ambition. I can think about September, when I am supposed to go back to work, only with dread. I have a class to teach. I have to start writing again. But the idea of talking about ideas in front of students or typing a coherent sentence (i.e., my normal life) seems totally implausible. Even now, the prospect of writing a few paragraphs about this problem seems almost out of reach. Taking care of the baby—physical, draining, exhilarating—is more like farming: following the rhythms of the earth, getting up at dawn, watching the corn flush in the sunrise. It is not at all like writing.

Some of my fear of returning to work may just be an accurate assessment of my capabilities. The other day it emerged that I lack the intellectual wherewithal to set a table: It was just a little too challenging to hold the number of people at dinner in my head on the walk from the kitchen to the deck. Some of this may be hormones; some is certainly sleep deprivation. I know from my days suffering from insomnia that sleep deprivation is tricky; it makes you sloppy, nervy, and fogged. But you also start to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in the jangly feeling of total exhaustion; you begin to thrive on the physical crisis, the special adrenaline of it."