Exercise the brain like a muscle or give kids time to work on the family farm? Educators have been debating the effectiveness of homework as a tool for learning for over a century. Support for and against homework has ebbed … Read More
Blog Archives
The Challenge for Parents: Letting Our Children Be Children
Childhood should be a time of awe and wonder; an opportunity to play, explore, create and to learn in a fashion that promotes healthy living and optimism. Then why do so many children suffer from anxiety and depression, and why … Read More
Grades Fail Students
High school students, vying to get into college, know that the application process is a game with its own set of rules: Get good grades, get enough tutoring to ace the ACT or SAT, and make sure you have lots … Read More
What Matters Most (Hint, It’s Not an Elite College)
New research shared at a recent meeting of the Conference of Pediatric Academic Societies shows that the percentage of young children and teens hospitalized for suicidal thoughts or actions has nearly doubled in the past decade. The numbers do not … Read More
What Children Need – A Wake Up Call for Our Nation’s Schools
Childhood should be a time of awe and wonder; an opportunity to play, explore, create and to learn in a fashion that promotes healthy living and optimism. Then why do so many children suffer from anxiety and depression, and why … Read More
The Problem With Conventional Wisdom
Conventional wisdom is the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. Here is some of the conventional wisdom regarding education over the past century: Education is primarily about delivering … Read More
The Homework Question Revisited
Nothing much has changed since the last time I wrote about homework, in 2010. The most recent research supports earlier data that shows little to no correlation between homework and achievement in the elementary grades, with one caveat: there is … Read More