Category archive: education

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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November 22, 2011

The Boomer Over-Parenting Paradigm Is Failing Before Our Eyes

I was really not too motivated to read the NY Times' report on analysts being demoralized after getting laid off from investment banks--haven't these people ever heard of going to business school? But then Choire Sicha reminded me why I...
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November 20, 2011

DT Friday Freakout: Selfish Edition

Oh there is so much to freak out over already, I'm not sure ruining one weekend will be enough: Day care in the US runs from awful-to-deadly, those are your only choices. [tnr] Which is too bad, because there's no...
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November 11, 2011

How'd That Work Out?

Beyond the headline, I love the NY Times Magazine's entire concept of following up with the kids of one of the pioneering advocates of what we now know as homeschooling. In 1975, Patricia Heidenry wrote about wandering the globe, teaching...
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November 1, 2011

Holy Crap, It's Contagion-Meets-12-Monkeys In Waldorf Schools

I'm no wingnut, and I don't like to be put in a position of agreeing with one, but day-um, Bay Area Waldorf people! Look me straight in the eye and expl--well, never mind. Just why the hell are 77%...
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October 28, 2011

Small Criminals Among Us

The opening horror story vignettes may be overflowing with obvious, overlooked developmental and parental red flags, but even if it's not enough to be the best parenting advice book written by a juvenile detention psychologist, Gad Czudner's Small Criminals...
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October 27, 2011

More Of The 99 Percent Are Kids

The New York Times has a nice article on the increasing numbers of kids visiting and participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Its presence in the Fashion & Style section, however, means this is just a trend story, and...
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October 17, 2011

OG Sesame Street Signing Alphabet By Joan La Barbara

Once again, mid-70s Sesame Street quietly blows my mind. This time it's an animated sign language alphabet sequence with beep bop boop vocal and electronic music soundtrack by avant-garde icon Joan La Barbara. K2 is picking up a lot...
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September 26, 2011

Think Of The Children: Ku Klux Kiddies On Parade

If I were to make a list of the most unexpected things to discover while searching through a tumblr of letterhead designs, the existence of a junior auxiliary for the Ku Klux Klan would be at the top. But...
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July 15, 2011

Harvard Study Shows You Can Be Too Smart For Your Own, Country's Good

Oh, where to start? How about right where we're supposed to, with the headline: Harvard Says July 4th Parades Make Kids Republicans Which, LOLOL, is this the most ridiculous example ever of the media sensationalistically misrepresenting the findings of an...
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June 30, 2011

Bjork Is The New Piano Lessons

Bjork's next album, Biophilia is also going to be a suite of iPad apps that serve as control panels for remixing and altering the songs, for playing musical instruments she created, and for learning and composing music using databases...
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April 28, 2011

Anthroposophical Kids Furniture, Also Coniferous

It really is the little differences. The Vienna auction house Dorotheum is selling this c.1930 Erwin Behr kids furniture made from "oiled coniferous wood" as an "anthroposophical child's chair and table," because similar styles were knocked together in the...
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April 19, 2011

Life Imitates The Onion Replaced By Life Imitates Wonkette

Basically, I don't have anything to add to Wonkette's coverage except the word Texas:The great thing about writing over-the-top joke exaggerations about America is that often they come true! For example, just this morning we were sarcastically criticizing Jan Brewer...
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April 13, 2011

Today In Kids And Food News

Maybe this should be a Wednesday WTF? I don't know, but I seem to have accumulated a lot of WTF-grade stories about food in my browser tabs: I am still trying to figure out what actually happened in the Detroit...
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April 12, 2011

Brought To You By The Letters O And G: Roosevelt Franklin

Funky Frolic's excellent Sesame Beat playlist contains some groovy classics from the 'Street itself, with a few covers and remixes thrown in for flava. And once again, it's probably only news to me, but hey-ho, Roosevelt Franklin had an...
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April 8, 2011

Happy To Find Happy To Be Nappy And Other bell hooks Books

So what else is in the beautiful TV mosaic of HBO Family's children's programming schedule? Because basically, it looks like an idyllic, multi-cultural paradise. It's Zion from The Matrix minus all the Matrix part. And the role of The...
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April 3, 2011

No Preschool Child Left Behind

UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik has a great article on Slate about how--well, it's probably about how preschool education is going to hell in a handbasket because of misunderstandings about how kids learn and about what toddlers should be learning...
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March 31, 2011

DT Mommy Mailbag: State School Edition

I know it's not Monday, but this just dropped into the DT Mommy Mailbag. Plus, it's good advice for all the Moms whose kids just bombed the ERB and are going to end up putting in an extra year at...
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March 24, 2011

Sounds Like Fun Times In The Playgroup

Sometimes, blog posts are like a half-drunk sippy cup of milk. Sure, you could finish them right away, but if you tuck them away in the folds of your stroller canopy and just let them sit for a couple of...
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March 15, 2011

Hahaha, They Put 'The Ivy League' In Quotes

Holy Moses, I've been writing this blog post a thousand times in my head since yesterday. From the NY Daily News comes news that an Over-Upper East Side mother is suing the ["$19,000-a-year"] York Avenue Preschool for "damaging [her] 4-year-old...
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March 3, 2011

Spectacular Ed.

This incredible 4x9-ft yarn art panel was apparently a gift to the Kansas City Public School System in the 1970s. It was made by special education students to celebrate mainstreaming. And now that the public school system is being...
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February 6, 2011

My Baby Can Tweet

I smell a DVDportunity! via @HawthornLAT [twitter]...
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