Cancer Survivor, writing about Health and Fitness as you age

I have posted before about the education system and how I felt about public vs private school. After having my son in private school for 3 years, he is now back in public school. See my prior posts here: Path to Private School and My Education Rant. Was it worth it to have him in private school? Now there's a question. I think he would have done well in public school although there is no doubt he did get challenged in private school. It would seem that the question isn't so much public vs private, but more, who is the teacher? I've also taken a step back in my expectations and how I view education. I have always compared the kind of schoolwork that my son does with what I did when I was growing up. I came from a different education system, where we would spend hours doing homework and revision for tests and extra lessons was normal. My son? He is in middle school and does his homework in school and spends no more than 30 minutes at home doing work. If I don'...

The elusive textbook. Lucas comes home with various worksheets to do as homework, and as I look at the work, I can get an idea of what they are doing in school, but it is not the same as having the textbook at home with me to look at the ideas, presentation, examples, etc. contained in the books. Right now, I can help him with his homework, but even so, I find that I am very cautious when clarifing a point to him because I don't want to get him confused.  What if I am telling him something different than what he learnt in school? How do I know the "right", "better" or "current" approach to the topic?  This school system where the kids have textbooks in school, but do not own them or don't bring them home with them, makes me very uncomfortable because I'm not confident that I know what they are covering in class or how.  I was thinking about this because of recent confusion in the schools (in Texas) about history texts and what they inclu...

Just headlining it so you can ignore this post as you like. I've explained my difficulties with the public school system back in 2008 , but I figured since Lucas has now completed one year in private school, I've earned the right to another post.  So, what have I learnt over this past year? Broad spectrum Yes, rather self-evident, but there is a broad spectrum of how parents feel about education and parents may make choices that appear conflicting. For example, I have had one mother tell me that they believe in a public school education for their children. But then in the other breath, tells me that her son is doing Kumon Math after school, and extra Math over the holidays and extra reading to get his reading up 2-grade levels (ahead of where he's supposed to be). We, on the other hand, believe that except for homework and supplemental projects that Lucas might be interested in, school is for school and home is for play. I had extra lessons when I was in primary (ele...

I came across this article online at the American Physical Society that I found thoroughly fascinating and it seemed to reflect an experience I'd had early on in my (Information Technology) career - but I'll get back to that. If you have school-age children, the full article is worth a read. A Math Paradox: The Widening Gap Between High School and College Math written by Joseph Ganem.  In it, he describes a finding where despite getting more challenging work in high school and being tested more, kids are getting to college with gaps in their Mathematics understanding. In his opinion, Mr. Ganem saw three problems (and here I am paraphrasing my perspective on the explanations): "Confusing difficulty with rigor" .   Harder problems do not necessarily help with understanding - you have to use concepts children understand to help them develop their own reasoning abilities but the problems must not be so difficult that they always have to ask for help . "Mistakin...

One of the main reasons I stayed home (besides getting our sick baby out of daycare), was so that I could spend more time with our older child and pay closer attention to his schoolwork. To provide some background, neither my husband nor I grew up in the US, and each of us is from a different country, so we have differing perspectives on education. Our older child is now in Grade 1 and one month into it, I am a little disturbed by some of what I see. He doesn't remember what work he did during the day- I understand that to mean he is not interested enough in what is going on. He says that he is still doing revision of Kindergarten work - ahhh...that could explain it, because he did Kinder in daycare and then again when we moved him to public school. One time he was not clear on what his homework was - I understand that to mean that the teacher didn't explain it fully or he was distracted. Usually if it is something new, Lucas is all over it. The first book he brought home t...