Category archive: education

November 15, 2009

From LIFE: Junior NASA Astronaut

Just fantastic. Andy posted a couple of great b&w photos of this "Young Space Pioneer" taken by veteran photojournalist Arthur Rickerby in 1962 the same year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, but the entire...
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November 6, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Shocked, Shocked Edition

Calm, relaxing autumn weekend with the kid? Not if the publicizers of these stories from the worlds of science, medicine, education, safety, and parenting have anything to do with it: What better way to start the Friday Freakout than...
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October 27, 2009

What Was The Vienna Kindergarten At Expo67?

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Vienna Kindergarten, Expo 67, Montreal, originally uploaded by Iqbal Aalam. I'll take Impossibly Idyllic Children's...
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October 23, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Nuclear Edition

Here are some stories from the science, safety, and parenting worlds designed to help give your confidence a little extra push--over the cliff. Have a great weekend! Actually, these first two are just funny-sad: Do you remember going outside to...
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October 19, 2009

The Upper West Side School For Gifted And Talented TMBG Fans

So the NY Times has a writeup on the Speyer Legacy School, a new independent elementary school on the Upper West Side founded by "a group of high-powered mothers" who apparently wanted to take the whole Hollingworth Preschool@Columbia experience with...
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October 16, 2009

It's Just A Planet

He drives my actual astrophysicist wife crazy, and rightly so, but I still can't help but feel a little thrill that this Carl Sagan video, with special guest star Stephen Hawking, composed by John Boswell, is K2's very first...
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October 12, 2009

Tibor Gergely X Lucy Sprague Mitchell Throwback Colabos

The awesomely named Tibor Gergely fled the Nazis for New York, where he illustrated one million Golden Books, plus the two Important Wartime Lesson stories the AFISA-Hollywood Animation Archive recently posted. They're just a taste of what's to come;...
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October 8, 2009

Inflatable Solar System Just Like The White House

So for the last few months, the wife has been working on a big astronomy event at the White House, which just went down tonight. [High five, baby, you pulled it off!] She had 150 middle school kids, a...
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September 29, 2009

Sidewalk Grandma Has Several Pieces Of Advice, If You'd Just Put Down That iPhone For Two Seconds

Seriously, when she was a young parent did she ignore her kid all around town while chatting on her Blackberry or her iPod or her iPhone all day? She most certainly did not. And another thing--well, technically several:Count the...
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September 14, 2009

First Day Of School?

I'm feeling a first day of school photo contest coming on, but I can't tell if it's a "No way, check out this kid's awesome outfit!" contest or an "I was haunted all my life by the outfits my...
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September 8, 2009

The Triumph Of The Crayolatariat

On the Fourth of July, we took the kids to The Crayola Factory: A Hands-on Discovery Center in downtown Easton, Pennsylvania. Though it's impossible to say such crafty entertainment could not be found without three hours in the car, the...
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They Might Be Indoctrinatin'! Here Comes Here Comes Science

The official release date is today, but if you pre-ordered They Might Be Giants' new CD/DVD Here Comes Science from Amazon like you were supposed to, would already already be in your hot little hands. Of course, you could get...
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Holy Smokes, Taking The Kid To Her First Day Of Kindergarten

I sure hope she doesn't get indoctrinated into anything....
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September 4, 2009

It's Just A Brownie

At first I thought this findings published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report would go into the Friday Freakout, but I think it deserves its own post. Emphasis added for humorous/dramatic effect:On the morning of April 7, 2009,...
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September 2, 2009

Wednesday WTF: Don't Bring A Knife To A Homework Fight

After punching his 7-yo daughter a couple of times because she just started guessing the answers on her homework, a Delaware dad pressed one of his knives against her cheek to show that he was serious about the guessing. How...
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August 26, 2009

On Child-Onset Schizophrenia

And to think some of my worst days as a parent are when K2 pulls all her and her sister's clothes out of their dresser for the third time. After escalating fits of hallucinations, violence, and uncontrollable outbursts and behavior,...
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August 18, 2009

Alison Gopnik On How Babies' Brains Work And How They Learn

One of the forgotten pleasures of visiting the grandparents: reading the print edition of the newspaper. I just finished reading Alison Gopnik's editorial in the Sunday NY Times. Gopnik, a UC Berkeley child psychologist, has turned up on DT before,...
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July 17, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Neighborly Edition

The lead time on overexcited science study press releases must be around two weeks, and so the 4th of July gives us time to freak out over some other news this weekend: Lord knows I've seen a few, but Barack...
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May 4, 2009

Daddy Talks, Tues. @ Adult Ed: Children's Educational Television, An Illustrated History

This month, the topic for Adult Ed, the awesome, esoteric, funny, and useless lecture series--in fact, it's "Brooklyn's favorite useless lecture series"--is Ambivalent Parenting. I know, right? I feel so targeted, too. But I'm actually on the program. Here's the...
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May 2, 2009

DT Friday Freakout Followup

We had the in-laws in town for a 4-day playdate, so if the Freakout list is late and lazy, I hope you'll understand. Besides, isn't swine flu enough of a freakout this week already? Obligatory swine flu freakout: a charter...
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April 2, 2009

Space Songs Through The Ages

As the husband of a NASA astrophysicist and the father of a space-fascinated kid, and as a fan of obscure, vintage kid culture, I really want to like Space Songs. Space Songs was one of a 6-album set, "Ballads...
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March 29, 2009

LAT: Thanks To Half-Informed Hippies, The Best Schools Have The Worst Vaccination Rates

Weekend not ruined yet? There's still time. The Los Angeles Times notes that the number of unvaccinated kids in California schools jumped 20% in the last year--from 8,300 to over 10,000--and has more than doubled since 1997. But the times...
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March 17, 2009

You've Come A Long Way, Baby Science

It's funny. At first, you see the title of the lone 1932 silent film, Comparative Tests On A Human And A Chimpanzee Infant Of Approximately The Same Age, Part 2, and it seems like too little. But by the...
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Pity Party Of One From Bloomfield Hills Public Schools, Your Table Is Ready

As I read the Wall Street Journal article bemoaning the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan school system's loss of 250 students over the last two years, which necessitated the recent unfortunate announcement that the district is planning to close two schools...
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March 6, 2009

The Lucha Library Poster: From La Atlantida To Zebra Kid

El Jefe Design created this sweet Lucha Library alphabet poster last fall, para los ninos, of course. Because times are changing, and a kid these days has to know more than just "Nachoooooo!" if he's gonna survive on the...
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January 9, 2009

DIY Pre-School & Playground, Topaz Internment Camp, Delta, Utah

The Central Utah Relocation Center near Delta was later renamed Topaz Camp, after Topaz Mountain, which loomed over it to the west. When it opened on Sept. 11, 1942, several rows of tarpaper barracks had been finished and outfitted...
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January 7, 2009

Research: Numbers Are Hardwired

It's interesting, but if you don't have time to read this entire Economist article, here is a quick summary: Newborn babies can tell the difference between 2 and 3. Apparently, numbers and counting are built into our brains. Even Aboriginal...
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December 17, 2008

Obama Loves The Little Children

Early education advocates are giddy as a bunch of preschoolgirls at Barack Obama's advocacy of expanded federal support for early education and preschool. From what I read in the New York Times, it seems every president since Nixon has hated...
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November 25, 2008

And Joan Ganz Cooney Said, 'Let There Be 'Street'

You probably already know that the Children's Educational Television Workshop was co-founded by Joan Ganz Cooney to create Sesame Street in order to help ghetto kids learn their ABC's and 123's as easily as they learned advertising jingles. In other...
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November 24, 2008

DT Freakout Monday? The New Yorker Looks At Overparenting

So you want to prep yourself for Thanksgiving table discussions of the Overparenting Crisis, but, what with the baby yoga and Mandarin playgroups, you don't have time? No problem. Joan Acocella has summed it all up for you in this...
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November 10, 2008

The School Search

Regular readers will have noticed a drop in posting volume recently. Myself, I have noticed a steady increase in the number of open browser tabs and flagged-yet-unread/unanswered emails with tips, questions, and press releases. I usually try to tee up...
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October 22, 2008

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Kristian Vedel

Sure, Kristian Vedel's molded plywood chair/desk is an elegant classic. But could your kid stand on it? Or ride it around the house? Gablenz is a German woodworking firm that makes traditional furniture, toys, those little whirligig things with...
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October 13, 2008

Wow, Did The Kid Love Digging Up This Fake Dinosaur Skeleton

Somewhere in the past few years, a farmer in the city my in-laws retired to, St. George, Utah, found a motherlode of super-detailed dinosaur tracks and fossils, and they built an entire museum around them. Just like that. So...
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September 29, 2008

Tessell: I, For One, Welcome Our Korean Tessellation Play Mat Overlords

OK, so in the US, we're making foam playmats with alphabets on them. And in Denmark, they're making Bobles, ride-on, climb-on animals made from computer-cut foam. All well and good. Until you find out that in Korea, they're making foam...
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September 27, 2008

Or Is It High-Margin Quackery 1st? "Safety 1st Babyplus Prenatal Education System"

If you will recall, after seeing one too many "Ooh, look! New gadget!" blog posts about the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System last year, I decided to investigate. At first, I was satisfied to find that not only was the...
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September 22, 2008

Kid O Toys Arrive, Are Awesome

You know, I was just wondering to myself the last few weeks, "Where are those Kid O toys I was promised would be hitting the market soon?" And here they are. Wow. Educational clarity and simplicity of design that...
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September 19, 2008

DT Friday Freakout: Coming Soon Edition

I'm sure this week's Freakout will involve the ever-expanding poisoned Chinese formula crisis; BPA--especially in liquid formula cans, not that you can realistically avoid it completely anyway--the asthma risk associated with kids taking paracetamol--fortunately, we use acetominophen in this country,...
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September 8, 2008

You've Come A Long Way, Retarded Baby

Was 1992 really so long, long ago? That's when Ellen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher of retarded special ed mentally disabled special needs kids wrote her PC heart-bearingly titled children's book, Somebody Called Me a Retard Today ... and My Heart Felt...
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September 2, 2008

Heh, West Xylophone

An awesome little alphabet song by They Might Be Giants [youtube via swiss-miss] Buy TMBG's Here Come The ABC's CD/DVD combo [amazon]...
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July 15, 2008

Whoops, Old School Sesame Street Not Graded For Spelling

Was just scrolling through the YouTube with the kid for a minute and found this. It looks like the work of Fred Calvert's studio, which also did the animation for Steve Zuckerman's "I in the Sky." Did I mention...
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June 6, 2008

Except There Are No Brooklyns

I know the big issue is really the pre-K admissions trauma, but still this is a useful snapshot of Williamsburg kid names circa 2004. Half the list could be from any yuppie enclave anywhere in the country:Ms. Yourke added: “I...
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June 2, 2008

On Waldkindergarten

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach... - Henry David Thoreau I'd say I must have...
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