The Toronto Homework Policy
This review of the 2008 TDSB homework policy was written last spring as a guest post for Sara Bennett's StopHomework site. (Sara Bennett, along with Nancy Kalish, is the author of The Case Against...
View ArticleElections and Kids: Desperate Times
The first election I remember clearly was the federal election of 1972, in which Robert Stanfield ran as leader of the Progressive Conservatives against Pierre Trudeau. The reason I remember that...
View ArticleThe New F Word and Kids
Recently, I watched an episode of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin on my computer. The episode was called "The New 'F' Word," and I had missed it when it first aired in January 2011, despite the fact...
View ArticleIs It A Boy or a Girl?
Today's guest blogger, Prabhakar Ragde, is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In the 1990s, he and his wife, quietly and without fanfare, made the decision not to...
View ArticleBy Our Fruits Our Children Shall Know Us
A slightly different version of this piece was published in the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago. I was reminded of it recently when I bit into a sour, over-sized strawberry.One thing has always...
View ArticleSmells Like School Spirit
What the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant...
View ArticleReal-Life Problems and How to Solve Them: Grad
Recently my daughter, J, has taken to writing an advice column—she calls it Real-life Problems and How to Solve Them—modelled on those she has seen in kids' magazines. She writes both questions and...
View ArticleA Grade 6 Graduation Ceremony: Awkward
It's mid-summer, we've been to the cottage and back, and my daughters have put Grade 6 graduation behind them. I, too, have tried to forget about it—unsuccessfully. I've been brooding about the...
View ArticleSummertime, and the reading is easy...
When I was a child I had a reputation as a bookworm. I wore the label proudly, since at the time I was unaware of its negative connotations. I remember reading book after book around the pool during...
View ArticleA Grade 7 Math Question
The other day my daughters were assigned a perplexing math question for homework. It was a question straight out of their Grade 7 math textbook, which is the French (immersion) version of Math Makes...
View ArticleLife in 21st-Century Classrooms: the Agenda
I recently read a remarkable book entitledLife in Classrooms, first published in 1968, and reissued by Teachers College Press in 1990. Its author, Philip Jackson, was one of the first educational...
View ArticleLet the Kids be Glad to Be Gay
In a recent article in the Toronto Star, I came across this breathtaking statement: But there is a time and place for everything, said Rondo Thomas, of the Toronto-based Evangelical Association, but...
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Reading for Pleasure: Losing Sight of the Forest for the Trees?
Over at the People for Education website, there is an interesting post about kids and pleasure reading. Both the post—sparked by this People for Education report, which documents a decline in reading...
View ArticleHell Yes, We'll Write Chants: Social Justice in Schools
Recently an article appeared in the National Post giving voice to the complaints of a couple of parents whose kids attend Glenview Senior Public School, a middle school located in an area of North...
View ArticleThat's So Racist: Irony, Kids and Racism in a (non-)Post-Racial Society
"That's so racist," I heard a friend of my tween daughters say not long ago. She was talking about another girl's preference for white over dark chocolate. Apparently these types of "jokes" are quite...
View Article"The Conflict" (from a 12-year-old's perspective in the form of a Mother's...
J's Mother's Day card, with this poem hand-written inside, was waiting for me when I woke up this morning:Why We Have Mother's DayHave you ever wished to beAnywhere except with me?Do you wish you'd...
View ArticleThe Conflict Revisited (via Alain de Botton)
Today, Alain de Botton, a writer and public intellectual whom I follow on Twitter, tweeted the following: Being a house husband is usually only as attractive to men as it is to the women whose respect...
View ArticleMiddle School, Mid-Way
After the first day of middle school last September, E came home, flung herself on her bed and wept. When I asked her what was wrong, she was uncharacteristically inarticulate. "I hate school," she...
View ArticleTerms of Parent (Dis-)Engagement (or Happy Back to School!)
Parent engagement matters. Study after study has shown us that student achievement improves when parents play an active role in their children's education. — Ontario Ministry of Education websiteAs I...
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