Welcome 2010!

Happy New Year!

Sitting at home again, as we have done for many years... we'll make it to midnight only because we're waiting up for our youngest son!

I've often said that learning is important because the world is a fascinating place. As we hear over and over again about the 10 best this of the year and the ten worst that of the decade, NASA puts things in perspective.

The Hubble telescope provides us with this image of hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest globular clusters in the northern sky. It can be found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules, and can even be seen with the unaided eye under dark skies.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and is located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. In other words, the light in the picture left these stars in 22991 BCE! (For historical perspective, Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in around 1800 BCE. Where will you be in 22991 CE?)

These stars are packed closely together in a ball approximately 150 light-years across, and they spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster. Near the core, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun. These stars are so crowded that they can slam into each other and form a new star, called a "blue straggler." The brightest reddish stars in the cluster are ancient red giants. These aging stars have expanded to many times their original diameters and cooled. The blue-white stars are the hottest in the cluster.

M13 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters surrounding our Milky Way galaxy. Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. Scientists believe they formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy including our own sun.

This image is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: C. Bailyn (Yale University), W. Lewin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A. Sarajedini (University of Florida), and W. van Altena (Yale University)

Holiday Plagarism

or maybe not, as they cited their sources!

Happy Holidays

Only on the Internet, the most bizarre Nativity scenes... this egg timer is my favorite.

Hope you have a restful winter break... after digging out!

Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

On Friday, November 20 at the Learning and the Brain Conference, Mara and I heard from Gary Small, MD, author of iBrain, who spoke about Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

For years we’ve been hearing about the differences between Digital Natives (under 25), who have good tech skills, and Digital Immigrants (their parents), who have weaker tech skills. Small has studied the neural networks of the two groups, and finds that the Digital Natives have much less development in those that control social interaction.

He spoke of the Natives’ relationship to technology is personal, and had us do an experiment exchanging cell phones while we monitored our emotions. For those of us who only turn on our phones when making a call it wasn’t too exciting, but when I replicated the experiment at a faculty meeting, the younger faculty clearly felt the anxiety of disconnection and potential loss of privacy.

No real news here, our brains are changing moment to moment, with neural circuits strengthening with use and weakening with disuse. Giving teachers everywhere hope, Small told us that young brains are missing empathy not because kids are naturally rude, or that societal civility is on the decline, but because that part of their brains has not yet developed.

By adolescence, 60% of connections are pruned, and in a Darwinian twist, between the ages of 8 and 18 is tech time. Our kids have been born with access to limitless information, 24 hour news and entertainment, but with less time for face to face interactions and thus are slowed in their development of empathy and complex reasoning skills.

With social networking (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), they are aware all the time of what everyone is doing, which leaves little time for reflection. As they are constantly reacting to others, their individuality and creativity are stifled. One of my favorite phrases to hear at Nora from kids just sitting around is “I’m bored,” because it means they’re having to create something out of nothing, rather than thoughtlessly respond to external stimuli.

Technology develops the Dopamine pathways which are precursors to addiction. In a 2007 Harris poll, 8.5% of college students showed multiple signs of addiction, including escaping problems through playing games, lying about play length, sensitization to fighting stimuli. The inflamation of these neural pathways is a major reason for Alzheimer’s Disease.

In one of Dr. Small’s studies on these neural pathways, he studied the effect of gaming on face to face interactions. Digital immigrants were better able to rapidly identify emotions than digital natives, who were only able to identify happy faces faster than angry, unless the face displayed violent emotions.

The connection with ADHD is not certain. Does video gaming cause the brain to display symptoms of ADHD, or do people with ADHD gravitate to the fast-paced stimulation of video games? Studies are ongoing.

Next week's field trip to the Corcoran

Edward Burtynsky: Oil from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.

Learning and the Brain

Mara and I are just back (at 11 pm last night) from the Learning and the Brain Conference at MIT, where we spent three solid days in workshops. We not only learned about cognitive overload, we experienced it! As I unpack my notes I'll have more to say, but three big take-aways for our practice as teachers, students, parents, and humans, are:
-our brains need quiet time, away from the noise and stimulation of our culture, in order to solidify memory and learning,
-sleep is critical to our ongoing brain development,
-the neural structure of our brains is changed by our cultural stimulation, for which the best antidote is reading (books, not screens),

I'll have more, but right now I have to dig out from three days of missed emails! But later today I promise myself that I'll take a two-minute meditation break.

Schroedinger's Cameraman

From Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life."

If you can't see this, the direct link is here.

3 Bombs

A fascinating op-ed in yesterday's NY Times by Thomas Friedman about the differences between our lives and our children's lives. He compares the nuclear threat from the Soviets that shadowed our (boomer) childhoods with the three threats that he now sees challenging his children's lives: the nuclear threat from terrorists, the economic threat from a government deeply in debt, and the environmental threat from global warming. The element that creates the most anxiety is not knowing exactly when any of these "bombs" will go off, and the fact that only the nuclear threat is being seriously addressed. There are a couple of nice quotes in the article. From environmentalist Rob Watson: "Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics... Mother nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand." And from John Holdren: "We're driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don't know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes."

One of Tom's most thought-provoking columns.

Scream Trumpet

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's a video showing one person's ranking of the top 5 high-note movie trumpet solos. In a previous life, I had dreams of being the next Maynard Ferguson.

Whew! September's Over!

Over the past 19 years I've seen the first month of the school year become just as busy and hectic as the final month of the school year, and man, I'm sure glad it's over. We've had one all school hike, two class retreats (with another next week), an expulsion, the beginning of soccer season, assemblies on drugs, recycling, and community service, back-to-school night, an evening poetry reading, an evening college application workshop, and the blending of new students and teachers into a new community. All in all it's been great, quite positive (except for the expulsion), and the new folks are proving to be great additions to our community. Alas, it's still exhausting, in a way that seems more intense than it was in 1991. Perhaps it's having more students, or the general anxiety caused by (choose any 3) the economy, 9-11, health care, angry town halls, our children's future prospects, or any of the myriad of issues we carry with us each day. As the days turn cooler (how do you like living in San Francisco East) our pace will slow a bit, and hopefully allow us to become more reflective and think more deeply about how and why we go about the work we take on. Soon enough the pace will pick up, as we begin to budget and plan for the 2010-2011 school year!

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

One of the really good thinkers of the past couple of decades, his concept of "Flow" posits that people perform best when they have a high degree of skill and strong (but not unreasonable) challenges. Lots of implications for our teaching, and education in general.



If you're not familiar with the TED conferences, their videos and podcasts are well worth checking out at ted.com.

Convergence

What will the world be like in 20 years, when our students' children are starting school?

More Obama-this time, health care

I'm in a writing frenzy today! It usually takes me weeks to get worked up enough to write!

Lest the wingnuts drive us to think that healthcare is just fine in America, our small business is facing a 20% increase in premiums next year. Tuition went up 2%. You can do the math.

Our broker says that 20% is pretty good... one of our small school compatriots is seeing a 76% increase in their premiums.

Our faculty's average age did not change, nor did any of us have catastrophic illnesses.

My choices: increase the teacher's contribution, weaken the plan we offer, fire all the old teachers and replace them with young teachers.

And we're just one, small, business. Maybe that's why we get hit so hard, where are we going to go? Something needs to be done.

We Survived the Indoctrination!

I'm sure that all of our students' parents are pleased that, despite our president's attempts to indoctrinate us with his socialist message, the school is still standing. A few of my personal highlights are quoted below. My favorite quote with regard to the controversy came from the NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who called the protesters "stupid." Quite right!

"But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. "

"And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it."

"...at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying."

"...the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

"That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

"These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

"No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in."

The latest from the Fringe

How unbelieveable is this... parents don't want their kids to listen to the President of the United States talk about the importance of education because they think he's "trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas" according to the NY Times. I suppose it's no surprise in a country where 40% of the population believe in ghosts, and the value of science is undercut by the value placed on faith. (Personally, I'm comfortable with mystery, and the idea that while not everything can be explained, as time passes more and more can be.)

Oh well, we'll certainly allow our students to listen to the president during lunch on Tuesday, and hope that they take his message of hard work and accomplishment to heart. That, after all, is part of our mission as a school and as parents. And the further some folks move their kids to the fringe, the more room there is for our kids at the top!

We're Ready! Are You?

After a summer of painting and cleaning, and three full days of meetings, we're ready for the school year to finally begin! The place is just too quiet and empty without adolescent energy... remind me I said that come November!

Zero to One Hundred in one day

Well, maybe to 50 in one day... 100 will arrive with the students on the 31st!

After spending three weeks on Cape Cod with my 82 year old father, I'm back in the saddle here at The Nora School preparing for the new school year. Even after doing this for 18 years, I'm amazed at the amount of work that's needed to prepare the building, the faculty, and the families for the upcoming term.

Living life at the pace of an 82-year-old retiree on the Cape certainly is relaxing! Reading, an occasional trip to the beach or the golf course, having all afternoon to prepare dinner... life could hardly be more placid. Returning to school, needing to hire new teachers to manage our over enrollment, going to board meetings of other institutions, having the new bus painted and lettered, getting new lawn furniture, removing the rubble of summer cleanup, preparing for faculty in-service, and planning the creation of a new school community when students arrive, all takes a huge effort, and offers a stark contrast to reading Michael Connolly on the beach!

Perhaps this intensity is now compressed due to my desire to spend time free time with my father and give my sisters a break. Not having spent much time during the winter, spring, and summer breaks to manage the detritus of school life (such as digging out my office) means that when I am here the amount that needs to be done is fairly daunting.

Nonetheless, the world is an amazing place, full of surprises, and in a few days we'll again have the privilege of sharing all these wonders with young people. While my office will probably always be a bit of a mess, my hope is that it goes along with my curiosity and enthusiasm for learning and sharing.

Dad and his cousin Caroline at the Boston Pops concert in Hyannis.

Is planning overrated?

“In all the briefing papers prepared for the famous Clinton Little Rock [economic] summit in late 1992, the word Internet never appeared.”
– Daniel Gross, Newsweek

So, beyond our current recession, what disruptive force are we missing today?
(thanks to Daniel Pink for pointing out the quote)

For your summer reading enjoyment!

Happy Reading! The Nora 2009 Summer List.

For Parents sending kids off to college... The Myth of Maturity, by Terri Apter

By clicking on the links below you can order directly through the Nora Bookstore at Amazon.com.

Good for Everyone... Mindset, by Carol Dweck How intelligence is developed, and The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel, on developing resilience.

Summer Reading Book Groups, please choose ONE.

Dave’s Group: The Last Town on Earth, by Thomas Mullen

Lorraine’s Group: Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson

Hedy’s Group: Life Beyond Measure, by Sidney Pottier

Scott’s Group: The Way Home, by George Pelecanos

Chris’s Group: Gateway, by Frederik Pohl

Mara’s Group: Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sarah Houghteling

Patrick's Group: The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom

Nic’s Group: Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman

Janette's Group: Into the Blue, by Rebecca Gault

Anthony's Group: Red Sky at Morning, by Richard Bradford

Robert's Group: Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

Jay's Group: How Soccer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer

Enjoy!

Film in 5 years

Here's a time lapse video of Jill Enfield making a large format photograph using the wet collodian process, a process used for a period during the 19th century. I wonder if my videos on the Nora website on developing film will someday have historical value, or at least be fodder for the curious. If you're a fan of black and white photography, Jill's website is well worth checking out.

Sad News from Thornton Friends

Our friends at Thornton Friends School have decided that, due to low enrollment, they will be unable to continue in operation and are closing the school. This is a sad day for Nora, as the folks at Thornton have been long-time rivals as well as helpful colleagues over the past 30 years. Thornton and Nora (then WEHS), along with Parkmont, are about the only secondary schools left from the founding of the Washington Small Schools Association in 1988. Founded in 1973, Thornton is nine years younger than Nora, but during my early years had the more experienced leadership, a better building, more students, and set the standard that pushed us to always improve. They went out in style, defeating Nora 20-1 in what would be their final athletic contest on the softball field. It feels like a death in the family. We'll miss them.

Lest there be any concern about Nora, we are fully enrolled and staffed for next year, own our building, and have a strong (and conservatively invested) endowment. Now in our 45th year, we fully expect to be around for the next 45.

Congratulations Josh Blinder!

Josh, Class of '7?, won a Webby Award for "Best Online Video Documentary Series" for his series about African American and Jewish athletes in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. You can see the series here. Josh received the award in New York City on June 8, and was back at work in the Holocaust Museum when the guard was shot.

New Photo Exhibit

Another photo blog... it must be summer! There's a new exhibit down at National Geographic (between 16th & 17th Streets/L & M Streets, Farragut North Metro) on tourism photography in Europe using the lovely, soon-to-be defunct, Kodachrome film. While you're there, see the other very cool exhibit on lions and leopards! This is the time of year to get to these exhibits, as we can sometimes come to work late, or leave a bit early, or take a long lunch, or have a weekend "staycation" while seeing the world. And best of all, most of what we can see in DC is free (although it would be nice to actually be on this beach in Spain)!

Vantage Point

For photographers, being in the right place at the right time can be a matter of luck. Knowing what to do with the time and place is a different matter. Congrats to the space station astronauts who took this shot of Sarychev Peak on Matua Island in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Japan. This shot shows the shockwave of the eruption blowing a hole in the atmospheric clouds.
Credit: NASA/ISS/Earth Observatory

Get Up And Dance

Remember what I said at graduation? Let me add, be first!

More summer reading enjoyment

This time it's photo stuff, a blog and a magazine.

http://2waylens.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-friedman.html
http://www.fractionmag.com/currentissue.htm

The Class of 2009

Congratulations to Dee, Liz, Tessa, Blair, Zomora, Collin, Mary, Christian, Kendall, Cat, Sarah, Bethany, and Anna, on your graduation. Your new adventures at the University of Richmond, Mt. Holyoke, Florida Central, Hood, Delaware Tech, MC, Johnson & Wales, and Curry should be great! We've enjoyed getting to know you, and hope that you keep in touch with us as the years go by. You will be missed.

Sign of the impending apocalypse

And they say it's kosher! Check out their website to see the various flavors, including hickory and peppered. And if you're really into punishing your blood vessels, check out their Baconaisse!

What have you learned since you've been here?

This was the interesting question posed to me yesterday by Ethna Hopper of the School Counseling Group. I've known Ethna for the past 18 years, since I became the Head of what was then WEHS. She was visiting Nora to see what we've been up to recently, and this question came up in the course of our conversation.

My immediate thought was on the work I've done over the past several years in Bowen Family Systems Theory as applied to organizations, and the need of the leader to be a "non-anxious presence" in the organism that is the emotional life of any organization. Certainly this work has made a big difference in my thinking about dealing with teachers, students, and parents, and has been particularly helpful as we become a society increasingly addicted to drama. (Witness the breathless TV coverage of 8 sick teens in New York City, and the lack of coverage of the 820 people who've died nationwide from the "boring" variants of the flu this year.)

The question stuck with me for a bit, because it's not one I've really pondered. Various thoughts percolated as I thought about the past 18 years, and some of the other things I've learned.
-The answers are less important than the questions. And how the questions are asked is often more important than their content.
-You never know what goes on behind closed doors. No matter how much we think we know about a student and a family, it's really very little.
-There's nothing new under the sun. Students are doing today what we were doing 30 years ago and their grandparents were doing 60 years ago. The medium may be somewhat different, and our anxiety about the stakes may be higher, but adolescent energy, curiosity, risk-taking, and hormones are quite the same.
-There is no magic bullet. No one solution or method will work for every child, teacher, parent, administrator. Human nature is enormously complicated, and when you mix them all together in a real community the complexity is staggering. Solutions are always a work in progress.
-Math is beautiful. See above. Math has solutions. Little else in life is so neat.
-The journey is the reward. I always sort-of knew this, but as my own journey has lasted longer I have a greater appreciation of it.
-Patience, which does not come naturally to me, is invaluable. 80% of the problems will fall by the wayside before they reach you. Time and people can solve many issues without the direct involvement of the Head of School. The other 20% can be tough.
-ADD is a great gift. It allows many of us to succeed in professions that require big picture thinking, endless curiosity, and restless energy. It doesn't keep the desk neat, however, and unfortunately for many of our kids, it's not such a gift when you have to sit in class all day!
-It's good to have a hobby. Working with families and institutions can easily become all-consuming, which is not healthy for the Head or the families and institutions.
-A supportive Board of Directors is critical to an institution's success. Our small board has always put the future of the school as the primary measuring stick for all decisions. Over 18 years I've heard countless horror stories, and seen many schools close, because of poor governance.
-It's important to keep learning. The world is an endlessly fascinating place, and what's there to be learned is (to me) so much more interesting than what I've already learned (which is why I hadn't pondered this question very much). A quote I saw today captures it nicely for me:

"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer

-Keeping up with a blog takes time and effort.

And last (but not least)...
-I'm still a work in progress.

Wordplay from the Washington Post's

Style invitational today, you can see more here, or at the originators site MoreNewMath.com

Report From Week 807 in which we asked for some original insights expressed as equations, a la those on MoreNewMath.com, written by Craig Damrauer: Craig himself weighed in on the choices for the top winners, proving himself a pretty good sport given that we ripped off his entire concept.

The Winner of the Inker: Ennui = Boredom + thesaurus (Phyllis Reinhard, East Fallowfield, Pa.)

the winner of the Guest-B-Gone Emergency Kit:

Subpoena = Invitation -- RSVP (Robert Gallagher, Falls Church)

Surrealism + bowling = Anchor -- chicken (John Glenn, Tyler, Tex.)

Entitlement -- experience = Teenager (Lawrence McGuire, Waldorf)

A sad anniversary

On tomorrow's date in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I was 11, living in the Boston suburbs, and had little sense of the historical significance at the time. Reading the Taylor Branch biographies has given me tremendous respect not only for King's heroism, but also his humanity. Despite our tendency to deify, and thereby neuter, our national heroes, they are men and women just like us, with the same hopes and fears but also with the capacity to act and persevere in the face of sometimes enormous obstacles. Some fascinating photographs taken by Life magazine photographer Henry Groskinsky in the immediate aftermath of King's assassination have just been released and are available on the new Life.com website. How our world would have been different had he lived!

New tech help for ADD'ers

In today's New York Times, David Pogue has a column about a new service with which you can send yourself reminders about all kinds of things! You'll have to read the article to understand all the cool features that are particularly useful to our kids, who have their phones on all the time, but it's definitely a step up in sophistication from my Datalink watch which beeps me with up to 50 reminders a day. For folks with Executive Functioning issues, this Reqall service would seem to hold great promise... certainly worth trying out the free version for a while.

Letter to the Editor (not published)

The story on the front page of today's Washington Post has me quite worried about the message that parents will take away. The major headline indicates that long-term use of ADHD medications has deleterious effects, and that these medicines only provide short term improvements. As a person who would today have this diagnosis (inattentive type, called "daydreaming" in the '60's and 70's), and as a parent of an ADHD (inattentive type) child, I have some problems with this reporting and the study:
1) The report and study look at broad groups, not at individual students who may or may not benefit from medication. It's not until paragraph 18 at the bottom of page A7 that psychiatrists are quoted having "emphasized the importance of individualizing treatment" which is, after all, the point of having treatment.
2) The "short term" improvements to which the study and reporting refer is two years, which is 25% of the life of an 8-year-old third grader. For a kid who can't sit still and focus in class, what are the implications of having two years of being able to do so? For the 14-year-old 9th-grader, what does it mean to be able to be intellectually present in class for half of high school? Two years of learning to cope and manage oneself in school is a large percentage of a child's life. It's not until the end of the story that it's noted that medication has "a valuable role: they buy parents and clinicians time to teach youngsters behavioral strategies to combat inattention and hyperactivity."
3) A psychologist is quoted as saying "If you want something for tomorrow, medication is the best, but if you want something three years from now, it does not matter." This is not a person who sees kids who can't otherwise manage themselves in a school setting, a student for whom getting through "tomorrow" successfully may be a huge triumph. Without those series of triumphant tomorrows where is that student in three years? Not terribly engaged in school is my guess.
Having taught for 30 years now, I know that medicine is not right for every child with a diagnosis of ADHD, but I've known too many students who would never have gotten through school without medicine. At The Nora School, every child is a study of "one," a study for which there is no broad brush. Some of our students have tried medication and have seen no benefit, others could not be in the classroom without it. The key is to know your child, be sensitive to their physical and emotional development, be willing to try a variety of strategies, and be conscious that no strategy will likely last forever. In our ADD society's never-ending quest for the black and white answer to cure whatever ails us, we once again are told a story where the shades of grey are between the lines.

So what to do?

Realizing that my last two posts are pretty depressing, I feel compelled to offer a thought or two about what can be done. I believe that the most important thing we must do is educate both our young women and our young men so that injustice can be challenged whenever and wherever they see it. Unless our young women are unwilling to settle and our young men are willing to support them, the world their grandaughters will grow up in is likely to continue to be unequal, though in ways we can't imagine. Since my daughter has so many more opportunities than my mother had, from going to college to playing sports to choosing a career, I am somewhat optimistic that cultural and societal improvement will continue and spread beyond our borders. Yet I'm also concerned that as a society we're reaping the benefits of the hard work done in the '50's and '60's, and that we take our progress for granted. Without attention and continued efforts by our generation we could too easily lose the gains made.

Girls, redux

The Mommy Blogger has some great articles, including one posted March 8 for International Women's Day. You can read the full blog here, but here are ten sobering facts about how far women have to go:

1. United States: Clearly, Not Ready For A Female President As soon as Hilary Clinton announced she was running for the United States Presidency in 2008, misogyny raised its very ugly head.

2. Western World: Women In Ads Are Still Heavily Objectified Sex sells, and in ads, women are almost always the ones to provide the sexual pleasure.

3. United States: The Scary Statistics Of Rape One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police. Less than half of those arrested for rape are convicted. 21% of convicted rapists are never sentenced to jail or prison time, and 24% spend an average of less than 11 months behind bars.

4. Africa: Three Quarters Of Young Africans Who Are HIV-Positive Are Women Three-quarters of Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 who are HIV-positive are women.

5. United States: Income Gap Won’t Budge According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women make only 75.5 cents for every dollar men earn, even accounting for factors such as occupation, industry, race, marital status and job tenure.

6. Pakistan (and other places): No End In Sight To “Honor” Killings Every day, at least three Pakistani women are murdered by their families in the name of family “honor.” Honor killings are perpetrated for a wide range of offenses. Reported cases include marital infidelity, premarital sex, flirting, seeking a divorce, refusing an arranged marriage, and even failing to serve a meal on time. Being a rape victim can also lead to an honor killing.

7. United States: Women Are Paying More For The Same Health Care Coverage Women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage.

8. Kenya (and other places): Female Genital Mutilation Female Genital Mutilation is the removal of part, or all, of the female genitalia. It is practiced throughout the world... Female Genital Mutilation is done to control female sexuality. By reducing sexual desire through making the act painful or removing pleasure, society ensures that its women remain faithful to their partners.

9. United States: Women Athletes Are Ignored Unless They Are Used As Sex Objects Women athletes are underrepresented in all forms of media coverage of sports. Women athletes are presented by the media not as athletes, but as objects of heterosexual desire. The most blatant examples are the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue and the media coverage of women’s beach volleyball.

10. Worldwide: The Feminization Of Poverty Despite the efforts of feminist movements, women still suffer disproportionately, including in Western countries, leading to what sociologist refer to as the “feminization of poverty,” where two out of every three poor adults are women.

Sorry Christina, we'll try to do better. Read the full MomGrind article here.

Girls

In the "Counting Your Blessings" department, I came across this video on girls' education in Taliban controlled Pakistan. In the Swat Valley, an 11-year-old girl is profiled on the last day before the Taliban closed down her school.

Juxtaposed with this sad and disturbing video is another one from the New York Times showing the use of Photoshop in retouching ads and editorial content. What does it mean for our students' self-images when even the models don't look like models?

I'm not sure exactly why I posted these two videos together, except, perhaps, to question whether we're all really living on the same planet. Tough world for women, rich or poor (but tougher if you're poor).

Interesting Articles from the Post

Interesting article in the Post yesterday about the stress on parents from having a child with ADHD. With the headline, however, I though the article would be about my long-suffering wife!

Married, With ADHD
Relationships Suffer Under Stress of Raising Child With Disorder, Study Finds

By Shankar Vedantam

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 3, 2009; Page HE01

For many years, scientists have explored how parental conflicts and other marital problems can affect the well-being of children. Far less attention has been paid to the opposite question: How do children, especially difficult children, influence the quality of married life?

Then there's the article about marriage after the kids are gone (yes, parents, this day WILL come). Some fascinating statistics: in 1880, researchers estimate that 75 percent of couples in the United States had children at home; in 1960 it was around 60 percent; today it's around 46 percent. It was a little sad to read about the 90 year old man who was divorcing his 89 year old wife of 19 years (second marriage for both) because he couldn't see spending the rest of his life with her. The good news is that few women now die in childbirth and few men head off to sea at age 25!

Random nonsense from the web

Optical illusions for a snowy Sunday afternoon.


No, they're not really moving!

AARP at 50

So what will life be like for today's student's when they're eligible to join AARP?
Neat video here with one person's idea.

Tougher College Admissions

From the Baltimore Sun: "Applications to some state universities are rising as budget-conscious families take a second look at public education. The effect is being seen in the acceptances and rejections: Schools are likely to turn away some students who might have qualified for admission when the economy was healthier.

Salisbury University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County are reporting increases in freshman applications of 5 percent or more.

At Towson University, in-state applications are up 3 percent while out-of-state applications are down, indicating that families are leaning toward their home-state universities to get in-state tuition breaks.

"Some folks who might otherwise be looking at higher-priced private colleges are saying, 'That looks out of our league. Let's look at some public options and see if it's a good fit,'" said Aaron Basko, admissions director at Salisbury, where the average score for the math and verbal portions of the SAT was 1,120 last year."

Best lines

On Keith Olberman tonight

"There's a word for people who only teach
their children about abstinence,
they're called 'grandparents'".

Bristol Palin: "Talking to mother about being pregnant was more painful than childbirth."

More (and hopefully the last) on bad uses of photography

I spent the Heads' Holiday/Presidents Day weekend on Cape Cod with my dad, and the big news in New England was the "sexting" that happened at a local middle school. Subsequent stories about other incidents in the New York Times and the Boston Globe have created the latest furor over "today's youth", but what's really different is the use of technology. It's not that boys and girls weren't curious about sex thirty (or three hundred) years ago, but now that moment of exploration can be spread around the school (and the world) in seconds. And the image may live in cyberspace forever (like when you apply for a job). Child-porn charges are pending against six Falmouth 12 year olds. Boys and girls together, it's a new world indeed!

Michael Phelps

There's been a great deal of commentary about the photo of Michael Phelps smoking pot, and while I think that 23 is a bit old for youthful indiscretion, I'm more interested in what I haven't read about... the photographer.

It's 2009, and nothing any of us do is private. We already know that everything we do online is tracked somewhere, and will only appear with our nomination at Secretary of State. Now, with the prevalence of phones that capture photos and videos, any of us at any moment can find ourselves in our least attractive moments entertaining the world on YouTube. Our permission is not needed, if, indeed, we could even identify the person who shot the unflattering picture or video. Teachers in the classroom, students at parties, parents attempting to get the bedrooms picked up, friends in their cars, there is no place that we can assume privacy.

The person who took the photo of Michael Phelps assualted him as surely as if he (or she) had taken a swing at him. The hit to his reputation will never be entirely recovered. This, alas, is now true of all of us. We're all public figures today.

Being a White House Photographer

Thanks to the NY Times there's a pretty interesting video clip here... 8 hours of sitting around for 30 seconds of shooting!

Snow Days

So, what does the school principal do on a snow day? Puts out his back! I imagine this is different in a large school, as my friend Norman is finding out. I don't think that this is how Bruce Stewart spent his day. Back in the WEHS days, when we rented, it was someone else's responsibility to clear the walkways, and when I had several teenagers under my roof I could always count on cheap labor. But no longer, though I shouldn't complain, as the extra hours of sleep were welcome. Though sometimes it would be nice to spend the whole day on the sofa reading!

What a country!

Has there ever in history been a country capable of self-correction like America? Last Tuesday's inauguration was truly an amazing experience, one I thought I'd never see. True, it took a disastrous eight years to open the more conservative parts of the country to see the value of having a smart capable leader (that's the cynic in me), but nonetheless America has a black president. How remarkable!

The day was inspiring as well, despite the hassles of getting through security to get to the mall. Metro did a fantastic job getting the four of us (including my wife, my son, and his friend who's a girl, but not a girlfriend), along with a million others, into and out of the city with relatively little difficulty. The less said about the ridiculous level of security fences and barriers the better... no reason to spoil a nice memory, but I sure am glad we didn't take the whole school!

Now, of course, the hard work starts. It's good to see Obama treating our current crisis for the opportunity it is. We have the chance to create some long overdue changes amidst the crisis, and I think our president has the vision and discipline to do it. Will our attention challenged culture allow the necessary time for change to take place? Stay tuned.

Photo essays

There's a nice new photo essay series beginning in the NY Times today (page A21) which can be seen at nytimes.com/onein8. Also a nice "portrait a day" series about the people of Hamilton Ontario at hamilton365.com.

Life goes on

Our second First Friday Reunion was, as it was last year, a delightful evening for me. It's great to see old, er, former students who've gone on to create interesting lives for themselves. Keith and Johanna, both WEHS alums from the late '90's, returned married and with a brand new baby! To my knowledge this is a first (though Eberhard folks may wish to correct me). One of our former students has even started a Facebook group of former WEHS students, with 22 new members in the first day. Thanks Alexis!

Happy New Year?

Well, it's got to be better than the old year for some of us. Between our personal retirement losses and the at-large economic anxiety, 2008 is best left behind. The new year promises great opportunity with what promises to be an historic presidency and a renewed emphasis on timeless virtues. Whether our attention deficit society can sustain living within our means and without high drama is a question for another day.

The new years traditionally brings with it a renewed attention to personal growth in the form of the ubiquitous "New Years' Resolutions"... and as always, I'm game. Once again I'll try to lose the 50 pounds I've put on since my headship began and my marathoning career ended (not coincidentally at the same time). As with so many things, self-discipline is the key. I've begun a personal photo-a-day project which will hopefully appear from time to time here, another exercise in self-discipline. Is there a theme here?

My first photo of the year is posted here. It captures for me the essence of 2008 for my family, the loss of my mother to a heart attack and my daughter to college. This was taken New Year's Day evening, after we took Christina back to Dickinson, where the women's basketball team was beginning practice again. We checked in with her later that night via Skype, which allows us to videoconference with her from her dorm room. Here, my father, alone for his first holiday season in 52 years, is chatting with her from our family room. What a world we live in! Like fish surrounded by water, we are largely oblivious to the change we are living through. Dad's father was born 24 years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. What will world be like when Christina is 82 and tells her grandchildren that her father was born 12 years after World War II? Will it seem like as much of a throwback? And by what means will she tell them?