American Girl Games

My daughters have been loving the games at the American Girl website. The games are sweet, feminine themed but still rely on lots of similar mouse-control, hand-eye coordination skills.

And of course, the American Girl concept uses a feminine mode of friendship to introduce girls to history through the biography of fictional character dolls.

foldschool

If this is not the coolest thing on the planet, I don’t know what is.

www.foldschool.com gives you plans and instructions to build simple cardboard furniture for kids. Wait till they start doing adult-sized furnture! Bye bye, Ikea!

Reflecting on Changes in US Education since 1954

If school desegregation policies are on your mind, you might be interested in the book All Deliberate Speed by Charles Ogletree, or the Freely-Available Article This Week, described in the following quote from Teachers College Record newsletter:

Black, White, and Brown: The Transformation of Public Education in America
by Charles Vert Willie & Sarah Susannah Willie
This article reflects upon changes in U.S. education since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The authors reject both the naively hopeful and the bitterly cynical interpretations of the efficacy of Brown in favor of a more moderate assessment: Brown has had many positive effects, they argue, but it has been slow going and there is much work yet to be done. Drawing on their research in primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational settings, the authors argue that the concept of justice is a negotiated concept that depends on the “representative viewpoints”; they examine the obstacles that have impeded the full implementation of Brown; they note a few school systems that have achieved more just and equitable school systems; they consult census data that reveal increasing equity between Blacks and Whites when it comes to educational achievement; and finally, they examine the legacy of the Brown decision for other gro ups of children. Referring to Brown as a “work in progress,” the authors argue that group-specific remedies are not only legally defensible, but also crucial in achieving greater educational equity and student diversity.

Talking about Bullying

As promised, here is a slightly modified version of the Book Corner column I wrote for the parent newslettter of my daughters’ school program. Please share in the comments how your school or community is working to create a violence-free and violence-proof community for (y)our children. Public discourse around this issue is vital!

Bullying is a complex problem; its solution requires changes in many aspects of a community or society’s culture. It is also, as Barbara Coloroso puts it, is a matter of life and death. She cites numerous examples of suicides and school shootings by children who were bullied as well as some bullying incidents that culminated in the target’s death. Coloroso takes the productive stance that the terms in her book’s title, The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander, are roles children play rather than their identities. She focuses on how parents and teachers can prevent children from becoming typecast. Instead of punishment that helps children learn not to get caught, she emphasizes discipline that helps children understand the impact of their actions, or in the case of bystanders, inaction. Her book describes ways to recognize when children are involved in bullying (a chapter called “Is there a bully in the house?”) or being bullied (they’re not likely to come right out and tell) as well as a discussion of the reasons and excuses bystanders give for their varying levels of complicity. She describes the parenting styles more likely to produce bullying behavior as well as the style that tends to yield empathic, considerate behavior in children. When bullying does happen–and she asserts that surveys of a school’s students will show more bullying than any adults expect–her advice focuses on restorative justice so that all involved may take on a new role in the school community. Given the sheer number of bystanders it seems useful to start with her chapter teaching bystanders to take on a witness role, including how they can help and how the school and community need to protect them from retaliation.

Too often peers avoid or shun a child who is bullied. In Schools Where Everyone Belongs, Stan Davis says the overwhelming majority of bullied children say what would help them the most is the friendship of peers. Bystanders who ignore a targeted child compound the pain and reinforce the bullied child’s impression that something is wrong with him/her. I found much of Davis’s advice in line with Coloroso’s (both draw from Dan Olweus’s research), though he focuses somewhat more on the school staff than on parents. Still, using different terms, he agrees with Coloroso that authoritarian/”brick wall” parenting and permissive/”jellyfish” parenting more likely produce children who bully than does authoritative/”backbone” parenting. Both also claim that adults often want the victims to solve the problem alone, which simply does not work. Because Davis finds that bullies seldom recognize that anti-bully presentations are about their own behavior, and their parents are often similar, again I felt that the most hope for change lies in the plurality of bystanders.

I also looked at The Bully-free Classroom by Allan L. Beane and Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons as these titles had come up in workshops at our school four years ago. I didn’t love the first, though it contained some potentially useful surveys. Despite its lip service that targeted children never deserve bullying, it still asserted that some children don’t help themselves fit in. This was a real red flag for me, given the laundry list of excuses bullies have for picking their targets. Coloroso’s statement that some children could use help in friend-making skills is as far as I can go down the what’s-wrong-with-the-target-child path. I did love Odd Girl Out for its seminal exposition of the anguish of social exclusion most often perpetrated by girls, but prefer to recommend the first two books due to their solutions orientation.

Pi Across America

It’s Pi Day, 3.14. In fact some folks start the celebration at 1:59, given that pi equals 3.14159….and then some. Last year all I did was serve my family round food, but my friend Maureen Gilardi, a retired math teacher in Connecticut, offers more intellectual information. She points to an activity called “Round about Pi” about halfway down this page. Maureen also writes, “I recently saw a 27 year-old man from England featured on 60 Minutes. He is a functioning person with [Aspberger’s Syndrome] and has a remarkable facility for numbers. He once recited pi to 20,000 digits without a mistake. His name is Daniel Tammet and he wrote a book Born on a Blue Day.”

P.S. In the 60 Minutes segment, Daniel mentions being bullied for his differences. I recently reviewed some books on bullying for a parent newsletter, and I will post those thoughts later this week.

International Women’s Day

In many parts of the world, women still do disproportionate amounts of everyday work, receive disproportionately little income, and have fewer opportunities for schooling compared to men. And yet, the quality of children’s lives is profoundly affected by the quality of their mothers’ lives. Drilling down through the Do History post yields links to women’s history resources and we have also offered information about Title IX and New Moon. For anything further, I could Google International Women’s Day, but if you do it, you can better determine what aspects of women’s predicaments and women’s initiatives for hope and change are appropriate for your family.

Honor the women in your life!

The Newseum

The Newseum is an interactive news museum that is opening in Washington D.C. this fall. Go to www.newseum.org to learn more about the project.

The best part of the site is Today’s Front Pages, the section of the site that features the front pages of roughly 500 newspapers from around the world, updated daily. It’s a fascinating opportunity to read the front pages of newspapers from every U.S. state and hndreds of countries.

Teachers will also be interested in the lesson plan for Today’s Front Pages, designed to teach students about the creation, layout, and mission of the newspaper.

National School Breakfast Week

March 5-9, 2007, is National School Breakfast Week. You might be interested in other research and initiatives presented at the School Nutrition Association’s homepage.