No Holding Back! The Argument for Sending Four Year Olds to Kindergarten (a.k.a. No “Red-Shirting”)
After reading this article in Sunday’s New York Times the other day, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, about “redshirting” kindergarteners (that is, keeping them back a year if their birth date falls near the cut-off date, leaving them “young” for their class), I did one of those silent victory-arm-pump things in my kitchen: I had been right! Okay, well, at the very least, my own decision to send my sons to kindergarten at 4-and-three-quarters was validated: Manipulating school start dates may seem on the face of it to be yet another attempt to give your child an edge — …Keep Reading
Plain Vanilla, Please: No “Schweddy Balls” in Our Ice Cream!
And now for something a little lighter: ice cream. Specifically, how a new flavor of ice cream is creating a bit of a firestorm among the sort of moms who would like to keep their (and, presumably, our) children’s worlds completely free of anything offensive (their definition of, I guess), immoral (ditto), scary (says who?) and … whatever. Fill in the blank. The world our children live in should be BPA-free plastic bubbles surrounded by rainbows and, I don’t know, Bible verses (the non-violent ones. Presumably). Ben & Jerry, those godless liberal Vermonters (need I say more?) unveiled a …Keep Reading
9/11, Remembered, Explained
A couple of weeks ago, I took my boys to a local park in our town — it’s a big park, with a handsome art museum on the grounds, a couple of nice playgrounds, tennis courts, duck ponds (populated by geese mostly — which means much of our time spent there is punctuated by me shouting: “Watch out for the goose poop!”) and so on. They’d taken their scooters and I was ambling along while they scooted on the paths, until we reached the museum, in front of which is a memorial to those from our town who died on …Keep Reading
