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."