Category archive: education

July 6, 2015

The Chosen One, Or The Results Of Andy Baio's Video Game Parenting Experiment

Last December Andy Baio wrote about an experiment he performed on his son: exposing him to the history of video games in chronological order, rather than just starting at the state of the art of today. Now the Gel...
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April 28, 2015

Saul Bellow, Dad

This seems like an important life skill, in its own way:When [Saul] Bellow's son Greg was 2, Mr. Leader writes, "Bellow taught him to point first to his ass, then to his elbow, declaring him 'Smarter than most Harvard graduates.'"As...
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October 20, 2014

'We Do Not Accept Immunized Children': @LosFelizDayCare

Tweeters who liked @HonestToddler and @JennyHolzerMom also liked @LosFelizDayCare: We always practice mindfulness, especially when some of the kids' Amazon pilots get picked up and others' don't.— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare) October 17, 2014 We NEVER overpraise. When our...
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July 25, 2014

Actually, I Want You To Freak Out About Racist Preschool Suspension Policies

Oh my gosh, how outrageous is this, the exact opposite of the buy-your-kid's-way-into-socialite-preschool story. Tunette Powell writes in the Washington Post about discovering that her sons were getting suspended from preschool like crazy, for what amounts to age-appropriate behavior, behavior...
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CNN Would Like To Freak You Out About Preschool Admissions

Here is a CNN story about the Preschool Admissions Diary, the NYT Motherlode blog series about Judy Batalion's account of applying for preschools in Manhattan. Amazingly, there's not even a link to the Times itself. The numbers don't lie: expensive,...
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July 24, 2014

Williamsburg Needs This Sleek Preschool

This gorgeous glass & wood preschool by Christoff : Finio is proposed for the corner of Driggs Ave & Fillmore Place, the only landmarked block in Williamsburg. Fortunately, the scale and design are nice, and the site is a...
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May 28, 2014

Kids Desk And Fractal Animals: Glashaus's Other Woodworking Projects

Craftsman Mochizuki Tsutomu has had some interesting projects even before he got involved in fabricating those limited edition sushi blocks from yesterday. Mochizuki's firm is called Ninomiya Glashaus, and it's in the Tokyo sprawl of Kanagawa-ken. Which is the...
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March 28, 2014

DT Friday Freakout: Graco Recall Edition

Here is a round-up of headlines to ruin your weekend all at once, instead of ruining your week one day at a time, the DT Friday Freakout: Because of volatile chlorination byproducts, do not pee in the pool. [amer. chem...
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March 7, 2014

DT Friday Freakout: White Noise Edition

Time was if you wanted white noise to put your kid to sleep, you had to run the vacuum cleaner, or the washing machine, or the dishwasher. Then some enterprising genius figured out how to make CD's of these same...
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March 5, 2014

Math Is Hard, Let's Go Shopping For Math Books

"5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus," says a math education researcher with a book out about teaching calculus to 5-year-olds. I'm all for it, and I'm quite ready to believe that the traditional way the math education system is set up,...
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February 17, 2014

Skip Ad

Mosaic/Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's been tweeting examples of Our Digital Native Generation's touchscreeny precociousness. They're inspiring, amazing--and occasionally downright depressing:@pmarca my 2 year old nieces first words she put together were 'skip ad', in reference to YouTube— nik cubrilovic (@nikcub)...
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January 29, 2014

A Children's Treasury Of The Holocaust

Bedrich Fritta was a Jewish Czech artist forced to produce construction plans and diagrams for the Nazis. His son Tomas was one when the family was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Bedrich made unauthorized drawings, too, documenting and criticizing...
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December 3, 2013

'Supermax Creche'

Life under capitalism is a supermax creche in which 'neither growing up nor working hard will do you any good'. Madame Tlank and Clinical Wasteman anatomise the dialectic of childhood and adulthood as one in which wise children of...
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October 28, 2013

Actually Baby DJ School IS As Ridiculous As It Sounds

But that shouldn't be a dealbreaker. If sample boards are what it takes to get a parent on the floor, making music with his kid, then so be it. And when he's not spinning in Baby DJ Class, your kid...
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September 27, 2013

Mormon Prune Crate Play Furniture Was A Communist Plot

We're making progress on the vintage Mormon Sunday School Nursery play furniture plans I posted a little while ago. I recently found an earlier edition of the teachers' manual, called Sunday Morning in the Nursery, that dated from 1949,...
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September 20, 2013

DT Friday Freakout: Future Edition

There's less science and safety this week, but that shouldn't keep this exclusive amalgamation of headlines from ruining your weekend. It's the DT Friday Freakout: A bunch of NYC independent schools--but not all!--are saying they'll drop the E.R.B. as part...
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August 16, 2013

Your Pronatalist Normativity Is Cramping My Einfühlung

Every parent becomes a philosopher, but as the empirically minded and exasperated Justin E.H. Smith argues, every philosopher does not need to become a parent:I hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I am concerned about the...
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August 8, 2013

'The Baby Genius Industry'

image: Steve Paine, via slashgear High five to Susan Linn and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for this quote: "The baby genius industry is notorious for marketing products as educational, when in fact there is no evidence that...
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June 21, 2013

DT Friday Freakout

The Daddy Types Friday Freakout is a carefully curated collection fo headlines from the worlds of science, health, parenting, etc., designed to freak you out all at once, instead of a little bit every day: "How Long Can You Wait...
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May 29, 2013

Tesla Holds Many Small Children

After the warm feeling in your heart that comes from thinking you're personally saving the planet, the most undersung feature about the Tesla S, aka the Palo Alto Camry, has been the jump seat, which is supposed to boost...
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May 28, 2013

Orbis Sensualium Pictus, The First Picture Book For Kids

Did you know that the first picture book designed for children was published in 1658? I did not. Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or The Visible World in Pictures, was published in Nuremburg by the Czech educator Comenius. Originally in German and...
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May 12, 2013

Max And Gaby's Alphabet, By Tony Fitzpatrick

Chicago artist/dj/dad Tony Fitzpatrick was quizzing his 4yo kid to come up with things that begin with each letter of the alphabet, and he decided to make an illustration project out of it. Two+ years later, in 2001, Max...
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May 3, 2013

The Avenues Parent

If the rest of the community is half as perceptive as this mom, Avenues will be the greatest school in the history of school:Or, as Ella Kim, mother of a 4-year old, explains, Avenues took the anxiety of a New...
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January 6, 2013

Resistance Is Futile: Circuit Playground Plush Toys Electronic Components

Maybe 2013 will be a good year after all. The super-friendly DIY electronics outfit adafruit has launched plushie plush toy1 versions of the little electronic component characters on Circuit Playground, their fun&easy electronics teaching app. Forget plush microbes and...
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December 12, 2012

Cat Power On A Good Day

Here is Cat Power fake-bumming some 2nd graders right the hell out--until someone mentions pudding, and then they're all, "YAY!" The tiny cloud has moved on from their lives! I don't know, I guess I expected Cat Power to be...
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October 15, 2012

I Count One Homeschooling Dad

There's a lot of Tiger Momming going on in this NY Magazine's profile of five NYC homeschooling families. Also a lot of momming in general. And one dad who taught one class once Antonin Dvorak. Also, parents saying things like...
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October 9, 2012

There Is No I In ADHD

Kids are taking ADHD drugs to offset the effects of underfunded schools: "If I don't take my medicine I'd be having attitudes. I'd be disrespecting my parents. I wouldn't be like this." Despite Quintn's experience with Adderall, the Rocaforts decided...
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September 21, 2012

The Little Boy With The Dragon Tattoo

Illustrator to the stars PJ McQuade drew this awesome marker tattoo on his nephew's arm before the kid's first day of kindergarten. I won't spoil the surprise by telling you how it turned out. The Little Boy With The...
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September 10, 2012

Avenues: The World School Is Open For Business

Sometimes I just look at the Corian counter in the kids' preschool kitchen, and I wonder how it all went so wrong so fast, and whether they'll ever forgive me for ruining their lives so completely and so young? How...
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September 7, 2012

And The Company That'll Bring It To You: AT&T

JJ Daddy-O had flagged the original story a few days ago of a junior high school in Texas putting RFID chips in student ID's to help bring in more headcount-based state funding. But Wired gets the award for the most...
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September 4, 2012

My Son, My Son, What Have I Done?

From Grand Island, Nebraska's Channel 10 11 News [1,011? 10&11? Do they have so many channels in Nebraska, or so few that they're combining them now?] comes a story of a 3yo boy who uses sign language and the...
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July 24, 2012

At Home With WHOA WTF!? Modernism

For someone who's been wading through the history of kids' design in the modern age for several years now, some of the stuff in MoMA's Century of the Child is immediately familiar. [Some of it is very familiar, but...
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July 6, 2012

The Tule Lake Collection

homemade scrapwood wagon at Tule Lake Relocation Center, img: Nat'l Archives rec. no 210-G-D32 07/01/1942, 70 years ago this week. That's when this photo was taken. I've been taking these things as I stumbled across them, one, two, or...
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June 27, 2012

'It Was The Life Of The Times'

Because it's blowing my dadmind right now, here is an expanded quote from William Duckworth's interview with pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley, who traded the VW Bus his young family was living in for a loft in SoHo:RILEY: [My] wife...
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June 21, 2012

Come On And Vogue, Kids!

Beauty's where you find it, Not just where you bump and grind it. Here is a kindergarten class performing Madonna's "Vogue." And here is a YouTube commenter commenting on it:Good to know there are people out there teaching their students...
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June 8, 2012

Remixster Rogers

Kudos to PBS Digital, whatever that is, for not trying it themselves, but instead getting the originator of the Profoundly Autotune The Childhood Icon genre, John D. Boswell of melodysheep, to remix Mister Rogers. Judging by the half million...
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June 4, 2012

Imagine There's No Dinero: Nuno Nono Preschool

Girod + Anton Arquitectos designed the Nuno Nono preschool in Valencia [2011] to be a blank slate that doesn't overwhelm children's innate power of imagination and creativity with the kind of representational fun/whimsical design that adults mistakenly think kids...
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April 30, 2012

Front Airbag Igniting, Very Very Frightening

Like you, I'm sure, my first reaction to seeing this dad leading his kids in a rousing rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the way to school in the morning was, "Screw the Disney-era Muppets, who needs'em?" And your second...
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March 21, 2012

America Needs Charter Schools Or Whatever

Homework? Traveling sports? College application padding? What the hell is up with American public schools? Because cartoonist d-bag and online crank Scott Adams has had enough:When I'm president, I will use the power of persuasion to encourage schools to adopt...
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March 13, 2012

RIP Blossom Dearie

Just a couple of minutes ago, I learned that jazz/cabaret singer Blossom Dearie passed away three years ago last week month--holy smokes, I can't believe it's March already. Also 2012-- at the age of 84. Not being much of...
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A Steady Diet Of John Cage

I was going to skip the NYT's story about the 22-year-old student at Brown who also happens to be an up&coming electronic musician, because, hello, it's Brown; throw a rock, and you're gonna hit a whatever-slash-electronic musician. But New Yorker...
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January 6, 2012

DT Friday Freakout: Boing Boing Edition

It's the weekend! Which will now be ruined by freaking out over these news stories from the worlds of parenting, health, science, and whatever: Fetal cells basically stay floating in the mother's bloodstream forever. It's called microchimerism. [boingboing, which, hmm,...
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January 2, 2012

Sixty Ten, Four Twenty? Qu'est Ce Que C'est Ça?

K2's sitting here counting on the floor, and obviously not getting the whole base ten concept yet, because she asks, "Daddy, what comes after 29?" "What comes after 39?" every time. And then suddenly, she doesn't mention 59, and she...
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December 19, 2011

There Are Underground Preschools On The East Coast, Too

I knew I should wait to post about this. There are now over 350 comments on Soni Sangha's NYT story of the stresses of operating an underground co-op nursery school in Brooklyn, so I'm pretty sure that everything that can...
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December 16, 2011

Lego Is For Girls. Now. Again. Whatever.

Our girls already play the hell out of their Legos, so on a purely personal level, I don't really feel too worked up about the new Lego Friends thing that supplants traditional minifigs with girlier "ladyfig" dolls and sets...
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December 9, 2011

Guess What I Think About Marcel The Shell With Shoes On?

It's adorable! How am I doing YouTube so wrong that I didn't find out about this until a year and 18 million views into its existence? Marcel was the offhand, one-week creation of Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp. Guess...
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December 6, 2011

Where In The World Is The Carmen Sandiego Generation?

Is it too early to see what happened to the overeager, overachieving yuppie children of the 90s, who were raised on Carmen Sandiego? They dorked out, cheated a little, really showed that private school jerk from Manhattan, and went on...
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December 2, 2011

DT Friday Freakout: Lead Juicebox Edition

Here to ruin your weekend, a healthy dose of freakout headlines from the worlds of parenting, science, health, education, and safety: Not to freak you out or anything, just that Consumer's Union really wants something to be done about all...
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November 28, 2011

'Block Consultants' Teach The Test

Oh, brother, what to make of the NY Times' "Back To Blocks" trend story that leads off with a "self-described 'block consultant'" leading a class for parents in block play?As in fashion, old things often come back in style...
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Scrapwood Playground At Tule Lake Internment Camp

In WWII, Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the west coast, stripped of basically everything they couldn't carry, and imprisoned in inland internment camps, rows of tarpaper barracks in the desert surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers....
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