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Posts

  1. Per Pupil Expenditures is a Broken Metric
  2. Matching Coat and Shoes FTW
  3. Technology and Child Development
  4. Hothousing
  5. Teaching Writing to a Kid that Hated Writing
  6. If You Sew...
  7. Qualifications. I guess.
  8. Stand and Deliver
  9. Learning the Times Tables
  10. Factoring, Prime Factoring and Finding the Least Common Multiple
  11. Concrete Math
  12. Michele's Made-Up Math Grammar
  13. Credentials versus Education
  14. Old School Cool
  15. Math Juggling
  16. Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail.
  17. Testing, Assessment and Education
  18. Education Quotes
  19. Free Latin
  20. The Art of Not Passing Baggage onto the Kids
  21. What Are You Actually Teaching the Kids?
  22. Social Stuff and Difficult Kids
  23. For Love of Math
  24. Kids with very challenging traits
  25. Words
  26. Clear Communication
  27. IQ Tests
  28. Facepalming and Eye Rolling
  29. Dinosaurs and Prehistory
  30. Understanding Physical Scale
  31. Letting Him Shine
  32. Santa, The Stork and Other Delusions
  33. The Truth
  34. Face Blindness AKA Prosopagnosia
  35. Curls Without Tears
  36. One Wonders What Might Constitute "Altruistic Reasons" to Have a Child
  37. When Earth-Bound Human Kids Get Rich and Famous
  38. Best Birthday Present Ever

  39. Games
  40. Adolescence
  41. Honestly
  42. Why?
  43. Jump, Jive an' Wail
  44. Massage
  45. Bathroom Policy
  46. Sleep and Respiratory Issues in Infants
  47. Taking care of "mom"
  48. Some Baby Basics
  49. Tigger, The Great Hotdog Hunter
  50. The Invisible Majority
  51. Third Culture Kids
  52. Playing Fair
  53. Social and Emotional Issues in Gifted Youth
  54. Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome (TM)
  55. Motherly Love
  56. Feeding the Need
  57. Genes
  58. Home Training
  59. The Pink Panther Bathroom
  60. Wired for Science
  61. The Ladder
  62. Elevation
  63. Tie a knot in it
  64. Memory Lane
  65. On: Labels
  66. Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood
  67. I think the kids are mostly alright. It's the world that changed.
  68. Grocery Shopping in Quarters in Germany
  69. The Hand Licking Incident
  70. The Dripping Sarcasm Voice
    71.
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Popular posts from this blog

The Hand Licking Incident

When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his hands. He soon was doing so all day, every day. His teacher wanted it to stop. So did his dad, my husband. I was a young homemaker, financially dependent on my husband, and I was feeling enormously pressured by both of these people. I also felt they both had real careers and didn't genuinely respect me. They both felt it was my job and mine alone to somehow make my son stop licking his hands entirely. I caved to the pressure. I tried telling my child to stop. I tried spanking him. I tried putting unpleasant spices on his hands to deter him. I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing. None of it made any difference whatsoever. He continued to lick his hands all day, every day. He just tried to hide it a little better. Meanwhile, our rela...
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Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...
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Letting him shine

Clip:  Save the Last Dance, audition scene I kind of hate the above scene. It's sort of cringe and probably highly unrealistic but movies do a lot of things to try to communicate plot points to the audience that a more realistic scene wouldn't communicate. The backstory is her mother died in a car wreck while she was at an audition if I recall correctly and she ends up moving in with her loser father, going from a big house in a very White suburb to a cramped inner city apartment and predominantly Black high school. She stops dancing, feeling like it's her fault her mother died. She gets involved with the boy in the above scene and on the phone a friend from the old neighborhood expresses surprise that there are any White boys to date at her new school and classmates give her a hard time about "a white girl taking one of the few good men we got." So there's a lot of social baggage here and he encourages her to resume dancing, helps her learn new moves from his...
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