People of a certain age group 🙂  get frustrated when we sometimes can’t remember a word or name or place when we know we know… So frustrating! It can feel like we are sitting in the Blackstone Chair and can’t remember the answer to the question we know we know! Indeed, research shows that cognitive function slows as people age. But, guess what? Speed isn’t everything. A recent study pointed out that older people have much more information in their brains than younger ones. Retrieving it takes longer. But while younger people are faster in tests of cognitive performance, older people show “greater sensitivity to fine grained differences” (Topics in…
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Skipping Middle School Taught Us…
It’s been six years since our family made the bold decision to “skip middle school” and home school Natalie during her 7th and 8th grade years. At the time, some people questioned our judgement. One mother asked, “What about high school? If you do this, won’t Natalie have a hard time getting into a good school?” Yet others expressed their envy and support. One man confided, “I’m still recovering from middle school. If only I could have skipped it.” Natalie and I took notes during our two years and then we wrote our story about the fears we faced and overcame, the trust (and schoolhouse) we built together, the “Professor-Daddy”…
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Are You Doing Too Much Homework?
 “Race to Nowhere” is a powerful documentary that has brought to light the negative and frightening consequences of high-pressure schools, where numerous hours of homework, stringent (and not necessarily illuminating) AP courses, and high GPAs are the ultimate goal. The film continues to be screened around the country stirring up conversation and awareness among students, parents, teachers, and some administrators who are beginning to realize the high cost of too much pressure on both physical and mental health. The film is emboldening individuals and communities to advocate for change. An announcement I received for upcoming screenings includes the story of Elle DelGrosso. Elle was a junior in high school…
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Laugh About Math
This is a picture of me in sixth grade. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table puzzling over the pre-algebra problems in my textbook, which was very good at asking ridiculous (but supposedly relevant) questions, but wasn’t ever able to answer my question “WHY?” WHY is a negative times a negative a positive? WHY is multiplying by a fraction’s reciprocal the same as dividing? WHY does cross-multiplying work? After half an hour of reading the same problem over and over all I could do was cry. My dad came to help me answer the questions and looking at the word problem, said, “Is Fred crazy? What’s he thinking cutting a…
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Deciphering Graphs
In fourth grade, Natalie sat down with her big box of color pencils and noticed that she used some pencils more often than others. She lined them up–shortest to longest–and then created this graph to show usage. During seventh grade, Natalie and I began taking a careful look at graphs in the New York Times, which frequently uses well-conceptualized, visually interesting graphs to impart information.  Our appreciation for information analysis (and semantics in the following example) deepened with the interesting illustration below of the ways in which one can get very different answers to a polling survey based on the phrasing of the question. Thus, ever since we sat next to…
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Find Your Own Story
There are times in one’s life when the story we’ve been living simply doesn’t feel like it fits anymore. Â It might even make us feel unwell or unhappy. Â It can be scary to step out of the old story and find a new story, but it’s worth it if you know that a healthier and happier future is a possibility. Â I think of it as embracing “uncertain happiness” vs. “certain unhappiness.” Â It’s ever so tempting to hang on to certainty even if it guarantees unhappiness, because it’s so darned familiar. For our family, we hit one of these forks in life’s road and we chose to find a new story…
