Creating Community

Another school year brings with it the creation of an entirely new school community, containing the remnants of those gone by along with new DNA brought in by our newcomers. This is my 21st go-round at a new community at Nora, and my (gulp) 33rd as an educator... how time flies! It's always amazing how in ways both intentional and random our community comes together. With a first week hike along the Billy Goat Trail, a Senior Retreat, a trip to the new Martin Luther King Memorial, or just hanging out at lunchtime, our new students and teachers both affect and are affected by the Nora community. While some may think that "community" means that we all just get along, that's not what a real community is like. In fact, it's in working through conflict and difficulties, both stylistic and profound, that we become one community. While we might like to think it's already happened, that would be magical thinking. Communities evolve and change, for the better if we do our jobs well, and the Nora community next May will be different in many ways than the group of folks we are today. So I hope that everyone enjoys the journey, understanding that it will be more like the Billy Goat Trail than like the towpath, and that straight lines, in life as in hiking, are usually not all that interesting.

Mr. Happy

No, not about the election, but about all the kids who made the honor roll this quarter. (I think I'll be focusing closer to home over the next two years.) Almost half our students had all A's and B's, and four of these had all A's. Running an analysis of homework completion vs. GPA for the first quarter, it's notable that of those who completed 90% of their homework (averaged across all classes) all had a GPA above 3.0. Of these, 17 of the 21 had GPA's above 3.5. Conversely, of those who did less than 80% of their homework, all had a GPA lower than 2.5. We're having nice lunches at Vicino Ristourante next door with the honor rollees and their advisors, all of whom worked very hard over the past two months to reach this academic accomplishment.

Why Nora will always remain a non-profit school.

Only one motive... meeting the needs of the student. Does having investors and shareholders, expecting a return, skew things? Watch the video and decide for yourself!

When Ideas Have Sex

The payoff really comes at the end, when IQ comes up... some real food for thought as we think about educating those who'll be paying our Social Security in 2040!

Does the Internet make us stoopid?

Or do we accomplish this all by ourselves?

Eighteen-percent of our fellow Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim according to a report from the Pew Research Center. Not that there would be anything wrong with a Muslim (or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or an atheist) being president, but Obama has publicly proclaimed his Christian faith repeatedly over the past several years. This 18% represents an increase in that belief over the past two years. We also know from the report that beliefs about Obama's religion track people's political assessment of him: 2/3 who think he's a Muslim disapprove of his presidency.

Lest we think stupidity is related to one's political beliefs or the crazy web sites one reads, the Gallup organization polled Americans and came up with the following:
-24% of Americans do not know the country from which America gained independence in 1776;
-18% believe that the sun revolves around the earth (maybe the same 18%?).

Ahhh, this is why we still need schools, with actual sane, smart adults talking with children about history, science, philosophy, thinking, and the evaluation of all the sources of our knowledge.

And why we need small schools in particular, where we have time to talk about these things without worrying about Annual Yearly Progress.

Good news for those of us 'approaching' middle age...

A new book by science writer Barbara Strauch examines a number of studies that show our brains reaching their peak between our 40's and 60's. In The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain, Strauch looks at the Seattle Longitudinal Study, among others, which followed 6,000 people since 1956 and tested them every 7 years. It found that the study participants did better on a variety of cognitive tasks in middle age than they did in their 20's, particularly in vocabulary, spatial skills, verbal memory, and solving problems. Alas, we did less well with math and perceptual reflexes.

Strauch is the health and medical science editor and a deputy science editor at The New York Times. She previously wrote about teenage brains in The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids, another good read for parents.