We are delighted to share a Lower School Blog, intended to be a resource for parents, faculty, and staff -- including a variety of educational and parenting articles, book reviews and research, as well as some links to school-related and Lower School activities. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

"Opening the Doors to the Life of Pi; Museum of Mathematics st Madison Square Park"

Museum Review

Opening the Doors to the Life of Pi

Museum of Mathematics at Madison Square Park

Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Museum of Mathematics “Harmony of the Spheres,” one of the exhibits, being tested before opening day.
For those of us who have been intoxicated by the powers and possibilities of mathematics, the mystery isn’t why that fascination developed but why it isn’t universal. How can students not be entranced? So profound are the effects of math for those who have felt them, that you never really become a former mathematician (or ex-mathematics student) but one who has “lapsed,” as if it were an apostasy.

 
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
The “String Product,” an interactive calculator based on a paraboloid, fills the staircase at the new Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan.

So why, until now, has there apparently been no major museum of mathematics in the United States? Why, when so many identities and advocacies have representation in the museological pantheon, has math been so neglected? Here and there, perhaps, a hobbyist has displayed puzzles, and our gargantuan science centers occasionally deem it worth their while to descend into algebraic abstraction. But a museum devoted to math? You have to immerse yourself in the history of science museums in Europe — where math sits at the foundation of things — to get an inkling of what it might mean.

Or, for an entirely different experience, you can go to Madison Square Park in Manhattan to see the new Museum of Mathematics, which opens on Saturday. It refers to itself as MoMath (and since it is near MoSex — the Museum of Sex — that means we now have a museum district explicitly evoking the mind-body problem).

MoMath is not what you might expect. At first you might not even guess its subject. There are a few giveaways, particularly if you recognize the symbol for pi on the door or discover the pentagonal sinks in the bathrooms. But what is that cylinder constructed of plastic tubes stretching toward the ceiling with a seat inside (“Hyper Hyperboloid”)? Or that transparent wagon that slips along multicolored acorns in a trough (“Coaster Rollers”)? Or a tricycle with three square wheels, each of a different size, rolling along a bumpy circular track (“Square-Wheeled Trike”)?

And what is that screen on which you paint electronic designs with a brush (“Polypaint”)? The two adjustable sloping paths on which you race objects (“Tracks of Galileo”)? The pixelated illuminated floor that responds to your movements (“Math Square”)?

Read more ...

"25 Lessons About First Graders"

25 Lessons About First Graders
Among the many horrors associated with the killing of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., is that they were all first graders. On Sunday I spoke with Joanne Strongin, a longtime first-grade teacher at E.M. Baker Elementary School in Great Neck, N.Y. Together we put together a list of 25 things we have learned about first graders.
Multimedia
 

1. First graders like to say:
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“He told me to.”
“He did it too.”
“Stop cutting.”
2. First-grade teachers say, “If he jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, too?”
3. At the start of the school year, first graders are supposed to know 20 “sight words” (it, go, to, the, is) and by the year’s end 100 snap words — read in a snap — (play, they, went, want, today, mother, father.)
4. First graders love to tell visitors to their classroom that they do not take naps after lunch like little baby kindergartners.
5. First graders go to the bathroom three or four times a day.
6. Ms. Strongin’s first graders are supposed to keep washing their hands for as long as it takes them to sing “Happy Birthday” twice.
7. First-grade snack time is 11.
8. By the end of the year, several first graders have lost their two front teeth and a few can tie their shoes.
9. At recess, Baker Elementary first graders’ favorite game is “Fox Oh Fox.” (First-grade foxes race around trying to catch first-grade chickens.)
10. First-grade boys skip when they’re happy.
11. First graders’ favorite book to have Ms. Strongin read out loud is “Knuffle Bunny,” by Mo Willems.
12. First graders claim to hate tattle tales but tattle at every opportunity.
13. First graders are old enough to know the rules, and young enough to turn themselves in for breaking them.
14. First graders love blocks, Legos and marble mazes.
15. First graders love coming to school.
16. First graders fall out of their chairs.
17. To remember to cross their legs when sitting on the floor, first graders sing, “Crisscross apple sauce.”
18. When first graders are supposed to be paying attention, Ms. Strongin says, “Eyes Up,” and they say, “Hands empty.”
19. When it’s time for lunch, Ms. Strongin says “Line order,” and they say, “Straight and quiet.”
20. First graders are taught if they don’t have a tissue, to sneeze into their elbows.
21. Long ago, during a visit to a first-grade class in East Orange, N.J., I asked the Rogers twins, Kendall and Kenneth, to tell me the story of Martin Luther King Jr.
‘'This one time Rosa Parks was sitting in the front of the bus,'’ Kendall said, ‘'and this white lady said, ‘Get up,’ and that bus driver called the police.'’
‘'And,'’ said Kenneth, ‘'Rosa Parks called up Martin Luther King and said, ‘Get me out of jail, Martin.'”
22. I once visited a church school in Canton, Ohio, where the first graders were called Sparks (Sparks for Jesus) and each week earned bonus Sparky Bucks to be redeemed for toys at the church store.
23. Years ago, I was writing a heartwarming feature about a man who dressed up as Santa Claus and brought gifts to schoolchildren, when a first grader started yelling, “Not real, not real.”
24. When my daughter Annie was in first grade, her goal was to read the entire “Boxcar Children” series (79 books at the time).
25. First graders think their teachers know everything and love their parents unconditionally.

"8 Ways to Unplug Your Holidays"

8 Ways to Unplug Your Holidays
Electronics gifts are big with kids this year, but with a little planning you can balance the screen time with a little face time.
What's topping your kids' holiday wish lists this year? Chances are it has a screen, Internet access, and games. And if they're lucky enough to unwrap a Nintendo Wii U or an iPad Mini, then it's up to you to figure out how to balance the fun with family time. (See our editors' picks for Wii U games and iPad apps.)
As much as we all love and depend on our high-tech toys, our reliance on them -- let's face it -- can get in the way of the warm and cozy family time we so carefully scheduled (probably on our electronic calendar!).
An outright ban on digital devices won't win your kids' respect -- or compliance. But with a little planning and intentional involvement, you can balance your family's tech activities with much-needed face time. Here's how:

1. Be jolly -- but firm. Explain to your kids that you want to downsize -- not demolish -- your family's reliance on technology over the holidays. Let them know that you'll be enforcing stricter time limits to create more quality family time. And tell them that the rules will apply to the grown-ups as well!

2. Make a list (and check it with your kids). Schedule some daily tech time for yourself and your kids. Get their input on which devices they absolutely can't live without, and allow some limited use.

3. Have a download derby. Browse the app store together. Look for games and activities that the whole family can enjoy, like our Multiplayer App recommendations.

4. Make setup fun, not frustrating. No matter how easy to use companies make new devices, there's always some (often frustrating) setup time. Truth be told, kids often figure out thorny tech glitches faster than parents, so involve your kids in the process. Use that time to discuss responsible use of the new device.

5. Try some tech togetherness. Unplugging for its own sake isn't the point. Family time is. Plan a night of video games, movies, or maybe preselected YouTube videos that you can all enjoy together.

6. Combine on- and offline activities. Many new devices offer cameras and video-capture cababilities. Have fun documenting your family memories and consider compiling them into journals, cards, and scrapbooks. This is a perfect time to share your own holiday memories with your kids.

7. If no creatures are stirring … don't check your email. Remember, your kids learn their media habits partly from you. Use quiet time to reflect on ways you can maximize the benefits of technology without letting it take over your family's life.

8. Have an old-fashioned holiday. Challenge your family to choose low- or no-tech versions of favorite activities. Generate fun on your own steam -- no WiFi, data, or plugs. When you balance these activities with your usual routine, it may actually make your kids more appreciative of what they have.

"Understanding How Children Develop Empathy"

Understanding How Children Develop Empathy

Joyce Hesselberth
18 and Under
18 and Under
Dr. Perri Klass on family health.
The mother was trying to hold the baby still, and I was pulling gently on the ear, angling for a better look at the infant’s eardrum. The wriggling baby didn’t like any of it, and her whimpering quickly turned to full-fledged wails.

Suddenly the baby’s 3-year-old brother, an innocent bystander in no danger of having his own ears examined, began to wail as well, creating the kind of harmonic cacophony that makes passers-by wince in recognition. And the poor mother, her hands full, could only look over and reassure him: Your sister is O.K., don’t worry, don’t feel bad.

But really, was that why the 3-year-old was crying? Was he tired and frustrated, scared by the noise, jealous of his mother’s attention? Or was he, in fact, upset because his sister was upset — an early step toward empathy, sympathy, kindness and charity?

The capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is called prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups or society as a whole. Psychologists, neurobiologists and even economists are increasingly interested in the overarching question of how and why we become our better selves.

How do children develop prosocial behavior, and is there in fact any way to encourage it? If you do, will you eventually get altruistic adults, the sort who buy shoes for a homeless man on a freezing night, or rush to lift a commuter pushed onto the subway tracks as the train nears?
Nancy Eisenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, is an expert on the development in children of prosocial behavior, “voluntary behavior intended to benefit another.” Such behavior is often examined through the child’s ability to perceive and react to someone else’s distress. Attempts at concern and reassurance can be seen in children as young as 1.

Dr. Eisenberg draws a distinction between empathy and sympathy: “Empathy, at least the way I break it out, is experiencing the same emotion or highly similar emotion to what the other person is feeling,” she said. “Sympathy is feeling concern or sorrow for the other person.” While that may be based in part on empathy, she said, or on memory, “it’s not feeling the same emotion.”

By itself, intense empathy — really feeling someone else’s pain — can backfire, causing so much personal distress that the end result is a desire to avoid the source of the pain, researchers have found. The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied.
They include the ability to perceive others’ distress, the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings, the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.

Twin studies have suggested that there is some genetic component to prosocial tendencies. When reacting to an adult who is pretending to be distressed, for example, identical twins behave more like each other than do fraternal twins. And as children grow up, these early manifestations of sympathy and empathy become part of complex decision-making and personal morality.
“There is some degree of heritability,” said Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a senior research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has done some of these twin studies. But she notes that the effect is small: “There is no gene for empathy, there is no gene for altruism. What’s heritable may be some personality characteristics.”

Scott Huettel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, described two broad theories to explain prosocial behavior. One, he said, was essentially motivational: It feels good to help other people. Economists have also looked at the question of altruism, and have hypothesized about a “warm glow effect” to account for charitable giving.
Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.

“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”
The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition — the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.

But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.
Consider that in the United States, historically, blood donors could be paid, but not in Britain. And the British donated more blood. “When you give extrinsic motivations, they can supplant the intrinsic ones,” he said.

What would the experts say about fostering prosocial behavior in children, from kindness on to charity?
Parental modeling is important, of course; sympathy and compassion should be part of children’s experience long before they know the words.
“Explain how other people feel,” Dr. Eisenberg said. “Reflect the child’s feelings, but also point out, look, you hurt Johnny’s feelings.”

Don’t offer material rewards for prosocial behavior, but do offer opportunities to do good — opportunities that the child will see as voluntary. And help children see themselves and frame their own behavior as generous, kind, helpful, as the mother in my exam room did.

Working with a child’s temperament, taking advantage of an emerging sense of self and increasing cognitive understanding of the world and helped by the reward centers of the brain, parents can try to foster that warm glow and the worldview that goes with it. Empathy, sympathy, compassion, kindness and charity begin at home, and very early.

"Parenthood and the New York Times Notable Book List"

Parenthood and the New York Times Notable Books List

I possess three of the books on the list, in hard copy, with intent to read.1 Another I read excerpted in so many places that I didn’t feel as if I needed to read the actual book.2 One is on my Kindle app, but honesty requires that I admit that I am never, ever going to finish it.3 I’m partway through two more and uncertain if and when I will go on (which probably means I won’t).4 There are seven more on my to-read list.5 Another I bought, tried, then set aside after a few chapters.6
Which means that of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012, I have read, in their entirety, exactly zero.

I read a lot less since I had children. Or maybe since I grew up and found myself with a job and other obligations, or maybe since the advent of all the many, many distractions and must-reads available on my desktop, laptop and iPad.

Where once I gobbled a book nearly every day, reading while in line for concerts and college basketball games, reading and missing all the scenery on cross-country car and train trips, and taking every opportunity to pick up a book, now I read a little every night, a little some evenings in the intervals of helping children with homework and making dinner, a little when I can sit down on the weekend, and a lot on every plane ride or vacation — nearly the only moments when travel time isn’t also work time for me. All of which means I just don’t rack up the books the way I once did.


I miss the feeling of being “lost in a book,” and it’s harder to get it back with every passing year. I’m uncertain why that is  — am I out of practice? More critical of fiction, and so less able to be absorbed? More distracted in general, by both the swirling family life around me and life online? I read more when I had nursing infants, and less — much less — in their crazy toddler years. This year felt to me like a return to reading, of a sort — for the first time, it’s become possible to read, although usually not deeply when all four of my children (6, 7, 8 and 11 years old) are home and awake. My hope is that reading is returning to my life.

What books did I read, and love, this year? “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed. “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown. “Aftermath” by Rachel Cusk (although her voice is so strong, and her prose so packed, that I can’t read it before bed, and thus I haven’t finished yet). “Shadow of Night” by Deborah Harkness.

Two books by Motherlode contributors have stuck with me (there were many greats): Joel Yanofsky’s “Bad Animals” and Karen le Billon’s “French Kids Eat Everything.” I continue to read, reread and refer back to Madeline Levine’s “Teach Your Children Well.” And I was so disturbed and provoked by Augusten Burroughs’s “This is How: Help for the Self,” that I read bits aloud to my husband, who then took it and read parts of it himself, and some of it even back to me. That’s a first, which makes “This is How” a notable book in my mind, if not exactly a beloved one. (The only other book we both read this year, at least in part, was Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 — a list from which I, all good intentions aside, completely read exactly one book.7

What’s your NYT Notables score (and who are we kidding, some of us do keep score) in the “read it,” “want to read it” and “didn’t finish it” categories, and what other books did you love this year? How has becoming a parent left its mark on your reading time? And of all the to-read books on your list, where will you start? (Me? “Flight Behavior.”)

"Is Homework Too Hard for Today's Parents?"

  • December 4, 2012, 1:36 PM
  • Is Homework Too Hard For Today’s Parents? By Sue Shellenbarger

    Steve Hebert for The Wall Street Journal
    The ongoing debate over homework focuses mostly on kids’ mounting workloads , and some schools’ efforts to curtail them.

    A growing number of parents are struggling with another homework trend that threatens to sink their juggle – an increase in extremely complicated homework projects, from neighborhood field trips to do research, to expansive dioramas or multimedia presentations to report on what students have learned, according to parents I interviewed for last Wednesday’s “Work & Family” column on homework.

    Chris Jordan, a mother of seven children ages 7 through 18, has seen it all. Her kids have gotten assignments to make hand-crafted trading cards of endangered species; to embellish book reports with five-color hand-drawn sketches of the protagonist; to design a restaurant menu that might have been used in colonial Jamestown; to write a rap song about the elements of the periodic table; and to research, design and color a 30-square “poster quilt” about their family heritage. One of her friends, she says, had to drive her kid around town to be photographed in front of various businesses.

    “One of the biggest challenges for me is not to be exasperated by some of the assignments,” says Jordan, a writer for AlphaMom. She sometimes yearns for simpler times, when parents drilled their kids on the multiplication tables or lists of spelling words.

    Another mother said she feels like “a funding source” for her two high-schoolers’ elaborate projects, including purchasing posterboard and other materials recently to create a large diorama on the expansion of the American West.

    Other projects demand speedy, ad hoc training in tech skills. One of my high-schoolers was required to research, produce and present a video on a favorite sports star or public figure. The assignment got done, but I’m afraid I learned more about using iMovie than my teen.

    Teachers deserve credit for trying to design creative assignments that appeal to kids with varying abilities, including those who love art, crafts or music. And these challenging assignments may be great preparation for the jobs of tomorrow, when workers will need to integrate diverse skills to solve problems.
    But they can be murder for the busy families of today.

    "Apps Give Preschoolers a First Look at TV Shows"

    Apps Give Preschoolers a First Look at TV Shows
    Susanna Martin/Nickelodeon
    Eliya Gyob-Serrette playing with Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, an educational mobile app from Nickelodeon.
    In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

    But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

    Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.
    According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.

    Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)

    “On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.
    Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.

    The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.
    “Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”
    Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

    While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.
    Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

    Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

    “We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.
    Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.

    The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.
    A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

    The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.
    It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.
    Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

    Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

    The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.
    Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”

    "Gifts That Change Lives"

    Gifts That Change Lives

    By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
    Published: December 5, 2012 93 Comments
    Looking for an unusual holiday gift? How about a $60 trio of rabbits to a family in Haiti in the name of someone special? Bunnies raise a farming family’s income because they, well, reproduce like rabbits — six litters a year! Heifer International arranges the gift on its Web site (heifer.org). Nicholas D. Kristof

    Or for $52 you can buy your uncle something more meaningful than a necktie: send an Afghan girl to school for a year in his name, through the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org).
    Yes, it’s time for my annual holiday-giving guide. The question I most often get from readers is “what can I do?” This column is an answer. As in past years, I’m highlighting small organizations because you’re less likely to know about them.
    Shining Hope for Communities (shininghopeforcommunities.org) was started by Kennedy Odede, a slum-dweller in Nairobi, Kenya, who taught himself to read. A visiting American gave him a book on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and it inspired Odede to organize local residents to fight against social injustice — particularly sexual violence, because his 16-year-old sister had just been raped.
    Odede now runs an outstanding girls’ school in the heart of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, along with a clinic, a water and sanitation program, and job training classes. That slum school is one of the most hopeful places I’ve ever visited.
    After I wrote about Shining Hope in 2011, Times readers contributed $180,000, leading to a huge expansion so that Shining Hope (mostly through the clinic) now serves some 36,000 people. Another nearby slum, Mathare, has invited Odede to start a girls’ school there if he can find the resources.
    Dr. Hawa Abdi (vitalvoices.org/hawafund) runs a hospital, school and refugee camp in war-torn Somalia. She became an obstetrician-gynecologist partly because her mother had died in childbirth, and she has focused on helping rural Somali women.
    The land around her 400-bed hospital, outside of Mogadishu, has become an encampment serving up to 90,000 people made homeless by war. Hawa has provided water, health care and education, and when students transfer to Mogadishu they are up to three grades ahead of children there. Hawa also is battling female genital mutilation, and she runs a jail for men who beat their wives.
    An extremist Muslim militia with 750 soldiers attacked the hospital two years ago, saying that it was against religion for a woman to run anything substantial. Hawa stood up to the attackers and — because ordinary Somalis sided with her — she was able to force the militia to back down. Then she made the militia write her an apology!
    Yet Hawa’s hospital and school are struggling financially. Vital Voices, a Washington organization supporting women’s rights, has set up a tax-deductible mechanism to keep Hawa’s work going.
    Polaris Project (polarisproject.org) is a leader in the fight against human trafficking in the United States. One of its most important projects is a nationwide hot line, with interpreters on standby for 176 languages, for anyone who sees people who may be trafficked. It’s (888) 373-7888. This year alone, Polaris says, it has helped more than 3,200 victims get services through the hot line.
    Polaris, based in Washington, has also been a powerful advocate for tougher laws around the country — those that target pimps rather than just the girls who are their victims. Polaris says that this year alone it has helped 17 states pass laws on human trafficking. And Polaris has supported nearly 500 trafficking survivors as they start new lives.
    Fair Girls (fairgirls.org) is also based in Washington and fights sex trafficking at home and abroad. Its founder, Andrea Powell, braves dangerous streets and disgusting Web sites for hours in search of girls enslaved in the sex trade, and she is fearless about confronting pimps and prying girls from their grasp.
    Earlier this year, I wrote about one of the trafficking survivors Fair Girls has helped: Alissa, the street name of a Boston girl whose cheek is scarred where a pimp gouged her with a potato peeler as a warning not to run away. Alissa ultimately testified against her pimps and sent them to prison. Now, with Powell’s mentoring, she is helping other girls escape that life as well.
    Fair Girls also trains trafficking survivors to make jewelry, which makes nice gifts and is available on the group’s Web site.

    "Children's Apps that Inject a Little Learning into Vacation"

    Children’s Apps That Inject a Little Learning Into Vacation


     
    Dealing with some antsy kids? One solution is quality children’s apps. Not only are they perfect for rainy day fun, but they can extend your school’s curriculum into the vacation, a point you might not want to mention to your child. They are listed here by age, from young to old.
     
    ABC ZooBorns, $2.99, is packed with crystal-clear photos and YouTube videos that feature baby zoo animals as a way to give meaning to letters and words. Best for ages 2 to 8.

    Lego 4+ lets you mix and match virtual Lego blocks to build a vehicle, which you can then drive through a side-scrolling maze. The app features the same vehicles used in various Lego kits, which is why it is free. Best for ages 3 to 9.

    Little Fox Music Box, $2.99, is akin to stepping inside a well-made cuckoo clock. The touch-and-discover format is full of surprises, which keeps things interesting. Best for ages 4 and up.

    Bugs and Bubbles, $2.99, is one of my favorite apps to come along so far this year. Besides featuring real-looking bugs and shimmering bubbles, the 18 math and logic games become harder as you play, so there is always a challenge. Best for ages 3 to 8.

    LetterSchool, $2.99, is a case study in how to enhance an age-old schoolhouse subject (handwriting) with the latest technology. Each upper or lower letter or numeral is presented in a choice of common penmanship styles, in follow-along fashion. Best for ages 3 and up.

    Monster’s Socks, $2.99, is one of many excellent children’s e-books you can find in the app store this summer. Beautifully illustrated and not too scary, the story has a theme similar to “Where the Wild Things Are.” Best for ages 3 and up.

    Nick Jr. Draw and Play, $6.99, turns an iPad into an easel, stocked with many shades of fine-lined colored pencils, crayons, markers and charcoal. Best for ages 3 to 8.

    The Great Cookie Thief, $3.99,  effectively brings the old West to your iPad. Besides the interactive antics of Cookie Monster, you can use the iPad’s camera to create your own “wanted” poster, of your dog. Best for ages 3 and up.

    Motion Math: Wings Pro, $6.99,  turns a school worksheet into addicting fun, as you lean left or right to steer a bird toward an island. To do so, however, you must quickly calculate greater quantities, using sets or, later, fractions. A free version with in-app sales is available. Best for ages 4 and up.

    Math Doodles, $2.99, lets children explore the sheer joy of mathematical relationships in different languages and forms, including Spanish, binary or Braille. Best for ages 5 and up.

    Monster Physics, 99 cents, contains a ready supply of blocks of ice, bowling balls or rubber bands, which can be used to get your pet monster through a maze. Fifty puzzles keep things interesting. Best for ages 7 and up.

    The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, $13.99,  is a celebration of the spoken word, using 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each read by famous actors like Fiona Shaw (“Harry Potter”) or David Tennant (“Doctor Who”). Best for ages 12 and up.

    "Today's Assignment"

    Today’s Assignment

    by December 17, 2012



    Here is something you probably didn’t know about France: its President has the power to abolish homework. In a recent speech at the Sorbonne, François Hollande announced his intention to do this for all primary- and middle-school students. He wants to reform French education in other ways, too: by shortening the school day and diverting more resources to schools in disadvantaged areas. France ranked twenty-fifth in a new evaluation of educational systems by the Economist Intelligence Unit (part of the company that publishes The Economist). To give you an idea how bad that is, the United States, whose citizens are accustomed to being told how poorly educated they are, ranked seventeenth.

    The French President’s emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well—the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it—more educated and affluent parents, presumably—an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.
    Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it.

    Grading homework is teachers’ never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.

    Does this mean that we would be better off getting rid of it? Two counts in the standard argument against homework don’t appear to stand up. The first is that homework is busywork, with no effect on academic achievement. According to the leading authority in the field, Harris Cooper, of Duke University, homework correlates positively—although the effect is not large—with success in school. Professor Cooper says that this is more true in middle school and high school than in primary school, since younger children get distracted more easily. He also thinks that there is such a thing as homework overload—he recommends no more than ten minutes per grade a night. But his conclusion that homework matters is based on a synthesis of forty years’ worth of research.

    The other unsubstantiated complaint about homework is that it is increasing. In 2003, Brian Gill (then at RAND) and Steven Schlossman (Carnegie Mellon) showed that, except for a post-Sputnik spike in the early nineteen-sixties and a small increase for the youngest kids in the mid-nineteen-eighties, after the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” by the Department of Education, which prescribed more homework, the amount of time American students spend on homework has not changed since the nineteen-forties. And that amount isn’t much. A majority of students, including high-school seniors, spend less than an hour a day during the five-day school week doing homework. Recent data confirm that this is still the case. Homework is not what most kids are doing when they’re not in school.

    Like a lot of debates about education, what Cooper calls “the battle over homework” is not really about how to make schools better. It’s about what people want schools to do. The country with the most successful educational system, according to the Economist study, is Finland. Students there are assigned virtually no homework; they don’t start school until age seven; and the school day is short. It is estimated that Italian children spend a total of three more years in school than Finns do (and Italy ranked twenty-fourth).

    The No. 2 country in the world, on the other hand, is South Korea, whose schools are notorious for their backbreaking rigidity. Ninety per cent of primary-school students in South Korea study with private tutors after school, and South Korean teen-agers are reported to be the unhappiest in the developed world. Competition is so fierce that the government has cracked down on what are called private “crammer” schools, making it illegal for them to stay open after 10 P.M. (though some attempt to get around this by disguising themselves as libraries).

    Yet both systems are successful, and the reason is that Finnish schools are doing what Finns want them to do, which is to bring everyone up to the same level and instill a commitment to equality, and South Korean schools are doing what South Koreans want, which is to enable hard workers to get ahead. When President Hollande promises to end homework, make the school day shorter, and devote more teachers to disadvantaged areas, he is saying that he wants France to be more like Finland. His reforms will work only if that is, in fact, what the French want.

    What do Americans want? Not to be like Finland is a safe guess. Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else. By and large, for most people school is the mechanism for achieving this. Still, Hollande has a point. The dirty little secret of education reform is that one of the greatest predictors of academic success is household income. Even the standardized tests used for college admissions, like the S.A.T.s, are essentially proxies for income: students from better-off backgrounds get higher scores. The educational system is supposed to be an engine of opportunity and social readjustment, but in some ways it operates as a perpetuator of the status quo.
    Is homework one of the bad guys? Supporters of homework say that it’s a way of getting parents involved in their children’s education by bringing school into the home, and that has to be a good thing. But it’s also likely (contrary to President Hollande’s assumption) that the people most hostile to homework are affluent parents who want their children to spend their after-school time taking violin lessons and going to Tae Kwon Do classes—activities that are more enriching and (often) more fun than conjugating irregular verbs. Less affluent parents are likely to prefer more homework as a way of keeping their kids off the streets. If we provided after-school music lessons, museum trips, and cool sports programs to poor children, we could abolish homework in a French minute. No one would miss it. 


    Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/12/17/121217taco_talk_menand?printable=true#ixzz2ErOjw3I2

    "STEM Students Must be Taught to Fail"

    STEM Students Must Be Taught to Fail

    Failure will teach students to take the risks necessary for innovation

    November 23, 2012 RSS Feed Print
    Coteaching can help educators address a variety of learning levels in one high school classroom.
    Elizabeth Gerber is a public voices fellow with the OpEd Project and the Breed junior chair of design in the McCormick School of Engineering and School of Communication at Northwestern University. She is the founder of Design for America.
    Within minutes of losing the presidential election, the Republican party was back on its feet, and preparing for the 2014 election cycle. In that way they were like most competitors. Star running backs, for instance, are tackled a dozen times in an ordinary 60 minute football game. Because falling is part of any competitive game, coaches teach their athletes how to fall in ways that prevent permanent injury and make it easier to get up and back into the game.

    As a mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University, I believe that that's precisely what we should be teaching our students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects: how to fail. Right now, we do not explicitly teach our students how to fail so that they can get right back up. That's in direct conflict with our goal: to prepare students to play competitively upon graduation. If our students are going to stop deadly pandemics, solve the energy crisis, and cure world hunger and poverty, they will have to be prepared to fail, over and over—and more important, they will need to know how to learn from those failures. STEM innovator Albert Einstein recognized that falling is an inevitable part of innovation; he's quoted as having said, "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." Another STEM innovator, Marie Curie attributed her success the fact that, as she put it, "I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy."


    But STEM educators are teaching our students the opposite. We give them well-defined problems that we know they can solve. When we hand-deliver "neatly structured problems on platters," as one of my students puts it, we deprive them of the experience of dealing with the messiness of authentic, real world problems. As a result, they gain false confidence in their ability to play the game. But none of them will graduate into perfectly packaged problems and painlessly derived solutions.

    Here's one of the critical reasons STEM educators don't teach falling: because we ourselves are out of practice. To gain admission or be hired at top-tier universities, we have been on a winning streak, earning awards and top grades with ease. We follow the rules to get ahead. We have often forgotten how to fall, much less how to teach others to fall. If we do fall, we carefully hide those failures from students and colleagues to preserve our reputations. As classroom experts, we rarely venture afield to remember what learning by trial and error feels like. Too often, we don't take on research projects that would put our prestigious positions at risk. We take on neatly scoped projects that we know can be done and published. Much of the time we have become entranced with being experts rather than learners—and thus have distanced ourselves from the students we hope to teach.


    Of course, the football metaphor fails at a certain point. The injuries that come from falling in the sciences are psychological rather than physical. But they may be still more insidious for precisely that reason. When a first year student fails her first quiz in her first semester engineering class, the damage could drive a talented student out of the field. She may just stop showing up for a class. Another student's confidence may crumble slowly, pushing him from that topic for the rest of his life. Some might suggest that such failures are an essential part of how we select professionals who can succeed in the STEM fields. But do we truly want to lose good students, meanwhile alienating citizens, consumers, and future taxpayers who will need to appreciate the urgency of STEM pursuits?

    So what shall we do?

    As STEM professors, let's get back into the game and learn to fall again. Let's start class with stories of the epic failures that led to great successes in our field. Let's invite our students into our labs to tackle problems that we don't know can be solved and to share our successes and our failures. By doing so, we may not only gain empathy for our students and be better teachers, but we may also take more of the risks necessary to really innovate in the field.

    "School Mishaps"

    Children's Books

    School Mishaps

    ‘Kate and Nate Are Running Late!’ and ‘Lester’s Dreadful Sweaters’

    From “Lester’s Dreadful Sweaters”
    Getting to school should be a relatively straightforward process: get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, out the door. It is rarely that simple.

    KATE AND NATE ARE RUNNING LATE!

    By Kate Egan
    Illustrated by Dan Yaccarino
    36 pp. Feiwel & Friends. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 6)

    LESTER’S DREADFUL SWEATERS

    Written and illustrated by K.G. Campbell
    32 pp. Kids Can Press. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 5 to 9)
     
    From “Kate and Nate Are Running Late!”
    Some of the unfortunate complexities are dealt with in two new books. “Kate and Nate Are Running Late!,” a first picture book by Kate Egan, opens with an all-too-real scene. Mom is sleeping blissfully when she’s woken up, cannonball-style, by a small child on her bed. The cat lying there is understandably annoyed. 
    But look at the clock! Nate, his older sister, Maddie, and their mother will have to rush. And we just as quickly learn that this is not a unique scenario:
    “It’s getting late,” announces Nate.
    Kate rolls over, rubs her eyes.
    She sits up straight. “Oh, that’s just great.
    Not again!” Nate’s mother sighs.
    Egan’s rhyming tale has some nice touches: rare is the picture book that features a single, working mother without making the story all about her. The mother is also recognizably and understandably imperfect. She sighs and becomes impatient. At one point, she’s “too tense to talk.” And all this is nothing compared to the colossal parental error that serves as the book’s surprise twist at the end (parents will no doubt see it coming).
    How refreshing to find a story in which a parent makes a mistake without being turned into a goonish caricature. Children need to know grown-ups make mistakes too; it helps validate their own trial-and-error trajectory. And Egan makes this point felt in an organic way, without pointing it out didactically.
    Yaccarino’s retro illustrations are charming and full of kick. They bear a welcome resemblance to the simple dot-eyed figures of Roy McKie and P.D. Eastman’s “Snow.” If only the weather here stayed consistent. In an early scene, the harried mother pours coffee and cat food in front of a door window revealing a sunny green setting outside. But the family is soon bundled up in winter gear and headed into a snowy landscape. Later, Nate runs through a mud puddle that feels rather like May, but when he lands it’s on a hard patch of ice. Granted, running late to school is a year-round occurrence, but the sequence here defies all possible metaphor.
    Most children won’t notice as they nod along in amused recognition. And as unpleasant as the situation is, there are no tantrums or foot dragging. (If only that part were true to life too.)
    “Lester’s Dreadful Sweaters” is another debut, written and illustrated by K.G. Campbell, with a dark little nod to Lemony Snicket, Sophie Blackall and Edward Gorey. Like “The Doubtful Guest,” the story kicks into gear when a guest shows up, if not uninvited then certainly unwelcome. It is little Lester’s Cousin Clara, and she likes to knit – specifically, sweaters for Lester. When he sees the fruits of her labor, his dismay is warranted:
    “It was shriveled yet saggy. It had holes where it shouldn’t and none where it should. It was a less-than-pleasant yellow and smothered with purple pom poms. It was Dreadful.” 
    Then come the awful words from his father: “He’ll wear it to school.”
    Campbell’s witty and wordy text occasionally goes over the top, as do his renditions of Clara’s knitwear. More than anything else, “Lester’s Dreadful Sweaters” plays out every child’s nightmare fantasy of showing up at school in The Wrong Thing. Here, the situation spins completely out of control, as Cousin Clara’s needles furiously click away no matter how Lester tries to get rid of her creations. At one point he effectively murders a sweater. For a certain kind of child, the tortured expressions on Lester’s face may simply prove too much.
    There is no real lesson to be learned, though Lester eventually takes control of his situation and disposes of the despised Clara and her knitting basket. “I’m not sure if we’re even related,” Clara says upon her departure. Don’t many children feel that way about their presumed loved ones?

    "A New Wildlife Magazine Aimed at the Very Young"

    A New Wildlife Magazine Aimed at the Very Young
    After 50 years of guiding children through wildlife and ecology on his own, Ranger Rick is getting a helping hand in the form of a younger sibling.

    National Wildlife Federation, via PR Newswire
    Ranger Rick Jr. magazine features photos of wildlife.
     
    National Wildlife Federation, via PR Newswire
    Ranger Rick Jr. Appventures is a storybook app for the iPad.

    The National Wildlife Federation, the publisher of the Ranger Rick magazine, which is intended for children ages 7 to 12, is starting a counterpart for younger readers. The new magazine, called Ranger Rick Jr., will feature Ricky Raccoon, who will serve as a mascot for children ages 4 to 7.

    As interest in ecology has grown, the editors at the wildlife federation said now was a good time to engage beginning readers who are curious about animals.

    “We are reaching out to them with content they want to know,” said Lori Collins, the editor of Ranger Rick Jr. “It’s not like this is an easier version of the content. It’s totally different content.”

    The magazine will feature age-appropriate facts and photography about wildlife around the world and include activities intended to inspire children to explore wildlife in their own neighborhoods.

    Unlike Ranger Rick, who serves as an educator, Ricky is more eager and curious, Ms. Collins said. “Ricky is just as amazed and awed by these animals as our readers are,” she said.

    The first issue of Ranger Rick Jr. came out Nov. 15. As with its sister publication, it will be published 10 times a year and will be free of advertising. Newsstand price is $3.99, and annual subscriptions are $19.95.

    Circulation for Ranger Rick is about 400,000, said Mary Dalheim, editorial director for children’s publications at the National Wildlife Federation, and she expects a similar circulation for Ranger Rick Jr.

    Of course, children have grown smarter about technology, and Ranger Rick has kept pace. His publication, already available in digital form, has been repurposed as an iPad magazine app that takes children on an interactive tour of his virtual treehouse.

    “We tested this magazine with kids, and they loved the idea of exploring these rooms,” Ms. Dalheim said. “This delighted them to wonder what’s behind the doors and exploring new content.”

    The magazine app will include stories, activities and videos curated by the magazine editors and produced by FableVision Studios. Starting with the first issue on Wednesday, it will be published five times a year for $4.99 each or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

    Younger readers will get their own iPad app called Ranger Rick Jr. Appventures. To emphasize the difference, Ms. Collins said, Appventures will be a digital storybook that will focus on a single animal each time. The first one, which was released in November, visits lions in the grasslands of Africa. The app takes advantage of the iPad’s technology by using the internal gyroscope, for instance, to offer panoramic views of the African plains.

    The app, which costs $4.99, was developed in partnership with Moonbot Studios, the studio behind the animated short “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” which won an Academy Award this year.

    "Teaching Your Child Charity"

    Teaching Your Child Charity

    Helping kids share their good fortune with others may be the most important money lesson of all
    By Diane Harris
     
    charity-jar-money
    © Shutterstock
    All kids are born with an innate sense of charity and compassion. Sure, it's easy to lose sight of that fact as we listen to our little ones clamor for the hottest toys, tastiest treats, and trendiest clothes. But if we look closely, the signs are everywhere. Watch your 2-year-old stop to offer a wailing baby a comforting toy. Catch your 5-year-old consoling a pal who has just been walloped by a playground bully.

    "Children naturally look for ways to make a contribution and help others," says Deborah Spaide, founder of Kids Care Clubs, a national organization based in New Canaan, CT, that provides information on community-service projects for youngsters. "But just as we give our children opportunities to use their legs when they're learning to walk, we need to give them opportunities to exercise their charitable muscles so they become really good at giving too."

    The benefits of actively fostering children's charitable impulses are enormous. Besides helping counter the overdeveloped "gimme" impulse, it gives kids a powerful boost in self-esteem to realize they can make a difference in someone's life. "And as corny as it sounds," says Patricia Schiff Estess, a New York City writer and the author of Kids, Money & Values, "when you help a child help others, you are helping to create a better world." Here are the best ways to go about it.

    Read more ...

    "In the Book Bag, More Garden Tools"

    In the Book Bag, More Garden Tools
    Ángel Franco/The New York Times
    Children at the 2,400-square-foot Fifth Street Farm, a garden atop three East Village schools.
    In the East Village, children planted garlic bulbs and harvested Swiss chard before Thanksgiving. On the other side of town, in Greenwich Village, they learned about storm water runoff, solar energy and wind turbines. And in Queens, students and teachers cultivated flowers that attract butterflies and pollinators.

    Across New York City, gardens and miniature farms — whether on rooftops or at ground level — are joining smart boards and digital darkrooms as must-have teaching tools. They are being used in subjects as varied as science, art, mathematics and social studies. In the past two years, the number of school-based gardens registered with the city jumped to 232, from 40, according to GreenThumb, a division of the parks department that provides schools with technical support.

    But few of them come with the credential of the 2,400-square-foot garden at Avenue B and Fifth Street in the East Village, on top of a red-brick building that houses three public schools: the Earth School, Public School 64 and Tompkins Square Middle School. Michael Arad, the architect who designed the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, was a driving force behind the garden, called the Fifth Street Farm.

    The idea took shape four years ago among parents and teachers, when Mr. Arad’s son was still a student at the Earth School. The family has since moved from the neighborhood to Queens, but Mr. Arad, president of a nonprofit corporation that oversaw the garden, stayed on. The farm, with dozens of plants ranging from leeks to lemon balm, opened Oct. 19. Already, students have learned about bulbs and tubers, soil science and nutrition, while the cafeteria has cooked up fresh kale and spinach for lunch.